How Figma Draws Inspiration From the Gaming World | Figma Blog (opens in new tab)

Figma’s technology shares more with a game engine than a traditional web application. Like games, it combines graphics rendering, interaction, multiplayer, animation, and other systems to create a responsive digital world. This architecture, along with close collaboration across engineering, design, product, and research, enables Figma and FigJam to support complex creative work in real time.

Engineers as Digital World-Builders

• Game engines combine foundational systems such as:
  • Graphics and rendering
  • User controls
  • Multiplayer
  • Physics and collisions
  • Animation
  • Artificial intelligence
  • Combat or other specialized mechanics
• Figma similarly builds a 2D graphics and rendering system for the web.
• Engineers ensure that text, shapes, and lines appear correctly while users pan and zoom across a canvas.
• Collaboration is central to Figma, so its real-time collaboration engine is called “multiplayer,” inspired by cooperative games.
• Figma and FigJam are built from many interacting “systems,” including:
  • Multiplayer editing
  • Spring animations
  • Audio and cursor chat
  • Component Variants
  • Plugins and widgets
• Because these systems must run efficiently in browsers and mobile apps, Figma uses a game-engine-like stack rather than a conventional web stack.
• The canvas is written in C++ and compiled to WebAssembly, helping address memory and performance constraints.

Creativity Requires Systems-Level Collaboration

• Game developers work closely with artists and designers to refine both technical behavior and user experience.
• Figma follows a similar model, with engineers collaborating across product management, design, data science, and research.
• Interdependent systems create emergent behavior: changing one system can affect many others.
• The article compares this to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, where fire can provide warmth and food, cause damage, or help defeat enemies.
• Figma’s complexity produces comparable interactions, where an apparent problem in one feature may actually result from behavior elsewhere in the system.
• This systems-level collaboration helps teams investigate unexpected failures and improve the overall product rather than treating each feature in isolation.

Figma’s game-inspired approach is both architectural and cultural: build modular, interacting systems, optimize for real-time performance, and involve diverse disciplines in solving problems. Teams building similarly complex collaborative tools can benefit from treating the product as a living digital world rather than as a collection of disconnected web features.