World of Glitch

The genesis of the world of Glitch is described in the official Glitch Alpha trailer [1]:

For a really long time

11 giants walked around.
They thought of funny things
until their thinking came alive.
And that's what this game is
you're inside their thoughts.
Go and make them bigger
and we'll play a long while.
And we call the giants by their names:
There's Humbaba and Friendly, Alph, Tii, Zille and Lem
Grendaline and Spriggan
Cosma, Pot and Maaaaaaaab...

And that's what this game is
you're inside their thoughts
go and make them bigger

and we'll play a long while.

Ur

The game world is often referred to in-game as Ur. For example, street addresses are given in a format like "3229 Estevan Meadows Quarter, Groddle Meadow, Ur." Ur was the name of an ancient Sumerian city mentioned several times in the Bible. It's also used a generic term for the origin point, as in "Ur-source."

Mote

In a Glitch forum discussion on the world of Glitch [2], Stewart Butterfield wrote, "In our terminology, Ur is a 'mote' — more like a planet than anything. But the mote -> hub -> street distinction is a from a very old (18 months+) way of thinking about how we were going to create the world and probably doesn't apply any more. (It was about whole worlds on specks of dust, swirling around each other in the gentle convection of a ray of sunlight … and that was 9 backstory versions ago ;)"