Why Multiplayer Games Are Just Distributed Systems | Ellyse Cedeno on BEAM & the Actor Model

Every player is a process. Every monster is a process. Every zone is a process. Sound familiar?

In this episode, Allen Wyma and Francesco Cesarini sit down with Ellyse Cedeno - technology and product leader with 25+ years across online games, distributed systems, and real-time platforms - to explore why the BEAM and the actor model are a natural fit for multiplayer game servers, and why the games industry keeps learning this the hard way.

Topics include:

• why MMORPGs and telecom systems have more in common than most people realize

• the N-squared problem: why high player density is so expensive and how classic games solved it

• why Java threads and deadlocks were the original game server nightmare

• how the actor model eliminates lock management - and what that means for mob AI

• event-sourced vs tick-based architecture and when each makes sense

• zones, sharding, and the air traffic control analogy for seamless server handoffs

• building a NetHack-style multiplayer game in LiveView - and what the DOM diffing taught her about game state

• why the games industry is dominated by C++ and Unreal, and what it would take to change that

• using player behavior analytics to catch bugs before ops teams or server logs do

• the production horror story of someone pulling the live database drive mid-operation

Plus: why Ellyse wants to publish a 100% Elixir game on Steam, and what the open source game_server project on Codeberg is trying to do.

Recorded May 25, 2026.