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.