Cryptogames, where is your revolution? (Still dreaming of one!)
Computergames are the next hype in crypto: The use-case that will finally drive blockchain technology home, literally. What are the big ideas? Where are we with them? How can crypto disrupt and take off?
Summary
- Crypto at the moment is mostly a small-stakes game. For mass adoption we need a disruption.
- Freedom of movement is one: Players take their in-game characters and items, their game assets, from one game to another. It would change how we design and play games.
- Blockchain can serve—by providing trustless consensus between developers that don’t know each other.
- The key is to build worlds on the blockchain — the games will follow.
Why games, why crypto?
There are so many ideas for crypto. Why games? First, the game entertainment market is huge, so even a small chunk would propel crypto to the next level in terms of public awareness and cash. Second, games are also increasingly market places, with game assets being traded in high volume and at considerable prices — that feels like a fit. And, as we’ll see, blockchain can actually be useful.
That’s the practical side. On the ideological side, the perception seems to be that the game industry is full of closed ecosystems, created by big publishers. And while there is a considerable indie scene, those developers seem to be very reliant on a few big distributors. Time for a healthy dose of blockchain powered decentralization, no? Maybe. Let’s dig in.
Promises of disruption
What can we use crypto in games for? There are lots of ideas. We can discard most of them using our dear cryptobreaker question — Does this need a blockchain?— because most things really don’t. Here are ideas that I think have some merit.
fairness
Ever had that feeling that the game is favoring your opponent, that random doesn’t quite seem random? Did I really get a 50/50 chance? How do you know? How can you make sure that you’re treated fairly? In traditional games? You can’t.
But in cryptogames, you can. Smart contracts on the blockchain are powering the game logic — and you and anyone else can read those smart contracts. And verify that they do what they’re supposed to. Cheating is possible, but chances are the lie will be uncovered eventually. By and large, smart-contract based games will be fair.
ownership
Game assets are precious — you spend your time and often your money to get the best weapons, trinkets, skins. But that ownership is a blip in the game database. A bug in the game software, a secret hack of the database, an unfair ruling by the game’s arbiters, and all your assets are gone.
But in cryptogames, they’re not. Games assets are on the blockchain. In particular, your assets are part of your wallet. They’re not going anywhere, unless you allow it. Even if they wanted, the game developer couldn’t do crap about it.
longevity
Victory! Finally you’ve collected all twelve gems for the Darthmore Battleaxe. You lean back and sip a well-deserved hot chocolate, and then you sleep for the first time in two days. When you wake up the publisher announces that the game servers are going to be retired in two months, thankyouverymuch. Kiss your battle axe goodbye.
But in cryptogames, your axe lives on. The axe, as any other game asset, is stored in the blockchain. As long as the blockchain exists, the assets survive. You’ll be able to show your battle axe to your grandchildren, and they’ll admire you for getting all twelve gems, of course they will.
scarce and non-fungible
The Darthmore Battleaxe, how many are there of those again? They promised 100 only, I think, but then released some more for Christmas … and which one do I have again? #5? #73? Questions, questions. Maybe you can tell, maybe you can’t.
But in cryptogames, you can. Limited and identifiable, game assets have an identity of their own, can be tracked and scarce. Together with ownership, game assets can be worth something.
freedom of movement
We all have our favorite characters in a game, we spend hours modding them when we can. Let’s say you have this nostalgia about Yoshi from Mario Kart 64 — how about taking Yoshi for a spin through GTA’s San Andreas? Yeah, dream on. Can’t. How about at least taking that battle axe with you to the next fantasy game? Nope.
But you just might in cryptogames. Game assets are on the blockchain — anyone can access them, and that means any game can access them. There’s no fundamental reason, with game assets on the blockchain, that you can’t buy a car in one game and drive it in the next. This is huge.
reality check
Let’s wipe away some of the hype from our eyes.
Fairness? Yeah, you can read the contracts, but you won’t. You’ve no time and are probably not a Solidity developer. You’ll have to trust someone to verify it, to be competent and not lie to you. Or you trust the developers. Same old. It doesn’t change how we play.
Ownership. Awesome that you can prove those assets are yours. If the game developer bans your assets from participating in the game it’s like owning a car without license plates: Ownership isn’t usefulness, and it doesn’t change how we play games either.
Longevity. Your assets are going to be around in a meaningful way only as long as the blockchain lives, and blockchains will die or become comatose. Your grandchildren? Probably not that impressed. Longevity, also not disrupting anything.
Scarce and non-fungible. The game asset market is big (though it’s hard to say how big). Being able to truly limit the supply of items and making them not interchangeable solves a problem for that market. So does the ability to track ownership and providing a trustless marketplace. All those positive effects stay limited to the game asset market though — they don’t change how we play. We’ll see if the value that blockchain provides here is enough of an incentive, or if current solutions are “good enough”, which is often just that.
Freedom of movement. Ah! That’s where we hit gold. That’s where something new might be born.
Where are we with the cryptorevolution?
We’re not there yet. So, where are we? What progress has been made in cryptogames?
gambling
With big money involved in gambling, players have every reason to mistrust the game developer and the other players. No wonder smart contract based gambling is popular: it seems to fill a need.
cryptokitties
A collectible “game” where you breed this:
Isn’t it cute?
The hype thought so, too. And then it died. (The hype, not the kitty. The kitty is fine.)
Cryptokitties are still one of the more active game projects; it’s just not much of a game.
collectibles with some game logic
After the initial success of cryptokitties, clones have flooded the market, most of them useless. A few exceptions are emerging that go beyond in order to actually make a game. There are virtual card games such as My Crypto Heroes or digital pet games such as Blockchain Cuties or Axie Infinity (I’m playing that one, read more here). Those games can use a blockchain; not convinced they need it.
real estate
Then there’s the idea of virtual real estate. It’s a bit like buying land on the moon; you hope it will at some point in the future be useful. In ETH.town you can buy floors of a tower. In Decentraland you can buy parcels of a 2D map.
By itself, this seems a solution without a problem. It can work for a while, as the 1 million dollar homepage did: because it’s a novelty. Like with that historic precursor, the novelty will wear off: it’s not a sustainable model. Nevertheless, the real estate genre is onto something. There’s a gem buried there and we’ll get to it in a second.
childhood sicknesses
Currently those games see a couple of hundred daily users, if at all. If it’s such a hype, why is no one playing? Because it’s painful. You can’t immerse yourself in a game world, if you’re constantly confirming blockchain transactions. It’s all great for crypto nerds and masochist early adaptors; not so fun for the casual gamer who just wants to play a game.
And there isn’t much of a gameworld to immerse yourself in. We’re seeing mostly collectibles and marketplaces worlds filled with mini games. Where are the car races, the shooters? Confirmation times measured in minutes. Expensive gas. There is your answer. If you think scaling problems don’t hurt crypto, try to build a game with it.
Where we are headed
Are we actually making progress in terms of disrupting games? Is anyone changing how we play games? Sort of. At the very least, some experiments are being made.
Game collaboration
We’re seeing first signs of freedom of movement. Axies have been sighted in Decentraland. They join your Chibi Fighters. Those are ultimately technical prototypes, and they already demonstrate two bigger issues.
First, moving assets from one game to another requires a developer to do the necessary integration work. This doesn’t scale, and it allows only for what the developers allow. That’s not freedom for the player — and that must be the goal, because it’s the only thing that requires blockchain technology! (More on that below.)
The second issue is admitted straight out by the Chibi Fighters blog post:
The summoned Axie is just a pet in Chibi Fighters, which means that there are no benefits of using it in the fight.
So, the Axies are just there. It’s not like they make sense there. This is a nice proof of concept of a single integration, but without a purpose those kinds of integrations die with their novelty.
All in all, freedom of movement and true entertainment are still lost in the fog of future.
World building
Then there is world building. World building is great because it’s fun, it’s creative, and incidentally because I think it’s a prerequisite for freedom of movement.
The main contestant here is Decentraland: A bunch of virtual land parcels makes up the world, and owners of a parcel can offer games, open a shop, run an expo or whatever else they please. Unfortunately, Decentraland is like a traditional mall: You can’t choose an ice cream at one parlor, pay at the other. On your parcel you can host a fairy tale game — but visitors can’t ride a pony into the shop next door, buy the pony some cereals, and ride back. No freedom of movement. What we need is more like a department store, where brands maybe have staff to pitch to you but where the shopping experience is seamless.
There is hope though, because Decentraland made a first step on the right road. Now we need to run a mile.
Dreaming of a World in the Blockchain
I believe world building is key to the success of cryptogames, because here blockchain technology can add value. We can start doing something that could not be done before: freedom for game assets to move between games.
World building to create ecosystems has worked many times, and it may just work for the cryptogame revolution. Here are some examples:
- Star Wars. 8 main movies to date. They were the breeding ground for hundreds of official short stories, books and comic books by all kinds of authors. You can spend a lifetime reading Star Wars fiction from fans all around the world.
- Dungeons and Dragons. This tabletop role-playing game is a big bunch of rules. From those rules, from pre-made stories, from traditions and their own imagination Dungeon Masters craft an adventure of their own and guide their party through it.
- Mods. Counter Strike started as a mod of Half life. Valve created a modable engine, and somebody else created a game with it.
- Open source software. For techies, the Linux kernel is an example. Drivers allow a Linux system to connect to all kinds of hardware.
So how does this work, what’s the approach? The basic idea is to separate world building from game building. Some people focus on the items, mechanics, overall looks and rules of the world — the framework — while other people tell stories within that world. Who are those others? Who is supposed to tell stories, who is allowed to?
Anyone. Everyone. Not just the AAA game studio that buys a Star Wars license. Whoever wishes should be able to tell a story within that world.
And imagine the possibilities! Every house in GTA’s San Andreas could be owned by a different developer, big or small, and the start of a completely different stories. Want to create a scavenger hunt through the city? Sure! Buy a couple of properties around town and there you go. And there is no technical reason, you’d have to limit it to a city — build a car world, containing cars from beetle to monster truck, and games from track races to police hunts to practice driving.
The most exciting thing though is how freedom of movement affects storytelling. Here’s how I imagine it. Over the weekend you finally manage to free the tribe of Awkward Ants and because you’re so amazing, the chief gives you as a reward: the sacred Hive Hammer. You think it’s awesome, forget about it, but the blockchain doesn’t, so next year you decide to take that hammer as a weapon into a game from a new studio. Those gals loved the Awkwards Ants, so when you arrive in the Maniac Mansion, the butler recognizes the Hive Hammer, and eyes popping out begs you to go on this particular Ant side quest, which results in you getting the Hive Hammock. Half a year later, some Filipinos release the indie hit Isotonic Island and if you are span that hammock between two palm trees at the beach of the island, you’ll get a lifetime supply of buko juice delivered to your hammock. Just because. And that’s just me making it up on the fly! Imagine what professional story tellers could procure.
Game-spanning sagas could thrive over decades.
That is changing how we play games.
We need a blockchain for this
And to pull off this level of integration, such a world needs to be on the blockchain. We actually need a blockchain.
Why? Because your suspect neighbor is going to write a game for this world. So is some 15 year old Bolivian kid and a digital nomad in Chiang Mai. If you want all those people to tell stories within a single world, then you need consensus how that world looks like, how it behaves. If everyone just writes literature, a wiki or a first novel as consensus is fine: even if someone writes a doomsday novel that ends the world, it doesn’t actually destroy it for all others. It’s different for computer games because there is something “live”, something that is shared between all games: the in-game characters with their attributes, where they are, what level they achieved, what they learnt already, what items they currently own. One game developer introducing a bug could actually end the world. How can you trust every single developer to be both competent and well-intentioned? You can’t. And you don’t need to. Hello blockchain.
As a game developer on the other hand you ultimately need to trust that the world you’re developing a game for doesn’t disappear or change fundamentally over night. Blockchain allows for almost trustless game development: As long as the world-building community doesn’t set out to destroy the world for everyone, your investment into building games for that world, and telling stories within it, is protected.
A world on the blockchain
What parts of the world need to be on the blockchain? That is a design decision for each world steward, because it’s a balancing act: the more you standardize, the less freedom for storytelling everyone has. The more freedom you give each game developer, the less coherent the world becomes overall. As a minimum, those things probably should be on the blockchain:
- Heroes and all other characters. What attributes they have, what assets. Experience won, battles fought. Who owns them.
- Character classes. Rules for how characters evolve, level and gain skills. How they can die.
- Asset classes. What you can do with a certain kind of asset. Games might create their own skins and even individual items, but a sword must behave like all other swords no matter how it looks.
And that’s where Decentraland didn’t go far enough: It allows anyone to acquire “a space” where they can tell a story — but there is no framework for a shared rules. A pony in one parcel may just be computer garbage in the next.
The road ahead
Building such a world won’t be easy. Just thinking about the trademark and legal implications of a shared world gives me headaches. Figuring out stewardship of the world will be a series of experiments, with mistakes and abject failures along the road. And of course trust in the stewardship of such a world determines how comfortable developers feel investing in it. Technical problems such as building consensus of where a player is in the world, and updating that, will be hard (fun) to figure out. Some restrictions, such as “instances”, might be required. But it’s all doable.
Ownership of game assets and the freedom to move them to any game connected to the world — it would change how games can be designed, how you play them. This might just be the thing crypto needs.