I think that the people writing these things only have a very slim grasp of gaming, but they know it would be a good market to capture
The reason it seems like they didn't describe the "actual game" is that there is no actual "gameplay". You just pay to collect cats.
You can trade the cat tokens with other people, try to sell them on the marketplace, pay to generate semi randomized new cat tokens via "breeding", and... just have them under your wallet / name. There is no action, no RPG, no platforming, no game board... basically nothing besides collecting and swapping tokens. They actually do show the entire "gameplay loop" in this image from the article: https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/a-flow-chart-with-ar...
They encourage you to collect more with timed events, where you "win" a bonus for having collected a certain type of cat token, but that's about it.
If you're of a certain generation, you might remember a craze of kids collecting and trading Pokemon cards, and never really playing the game. It's basically like that except there is no underlying game to play, all you have are the tradable cards.
I started playing it and I am having fun, unfortunately I'm not good enough to beat any real players though.
They already do this sort of thing with MtG Online, I think you can purchase and trade cards in-game. They also let you send them physical cards, and they will give you the in-game card in your account in return. Not sure if they go the other way around.
From WoTC's perspective, one of the downsides of a "public" blockchain would be that they don't get a cut of any transaction beyond the first one.
Exactly. They can track all this stuff in their own database. WotC doesn't stand to benefit from putting anything on a blockchain.
Except the people making money by running or grifting off a blockchain.
And if others are allowed to create their own servers so that the game can live outside of WotC's auspices, that would also undermine the value of the NFT cards, since anyone who is able to create their own implementation of the game could just as easily start creating non-NFT versions of the cards that people can use.
Even if WotC's servers go down, you could use the blockchain to prove ownership of a card for use in a live tournament. It's also possible for a third party to create their own server to implement the game, and then refer back to the blockchain for ownership.
As for non-official cards, I mean, yeah? That's the case with physical Magic cards too. Not even actual counterfeits have held the MTG secondary market back from astounding prices. Meanwhile non-NFT cards would be the equivalent of proxy cards - cards that aren't X, but both players agree to treat as X - which haven't been any more successful than counterfeits in holding Magic prices down.
I'm not claiming there would be greater faith in a blockchain than WotC, I'm just saying I see it as possible.
No, it wouldn't be possible because the concept of IP and copyright exists regardless of blockchains.
Even if all the WotC IP ends up with the most determined patent troll ever, the game itself could still be implemented.
As for the card art... who knows what the legal situation would end up being. But even if it's totally legally off limits, the ability to load custom art would render it practically moot anyway.
Furthermore, if said community creates tournaments and online services that require official WotC NFT to participate, that will further cement their value.
That you can create your own NFTs and your own tournaments isn't going to be of much use when the rest of the players only plays with the official NFTs and won't accept yours.
You say they will see benefit.
Yet all you mention is how the blockchain might usurp the faith wotc relies on.
Why would wotc ever fund their potential demise or depend on people that never had faith on their product in the first place?
By throwing it on the blockchain, WotC could market it as the digital card being basically as safe from vanishing as a physical card. "Even if we go bust in 50 years, your digital cards will all still be yours! You'll still be able to prove ownership of all your cards, and will still be free as ever to trade coughsell for incredible profitcough them!"
I have no idea if the market as a whole would bite, or how deeply. But there is a not-insignificant number of people who count on Magic cards gaining significant amounts of value over time. Some use it as a way to justify the purchases, while others have turned it into an outright investment strategy.
I can only imagine that digital cards reliant on WotC's active involvement to exist would suffer significant discounts.
But maybe being digital is such a huge hit in the first place that it doesn't ultimately matter. I have no idea. Hence, why I said it seems possible.
Ah, wild short term speculators while depending on another foreign caretaker with no interest in your products?
No thanks. Enough with the stupid ideas.
I never said anything about new customers, nor even old customers.
I've also been very explicit that I'm just talking about seeing a plausible possibility, and not made any claims about it's probability. Nor said I think any person or entity - WotC included - should actually do anything or not.
And I've absolutely not made any particular judgements on the intrinsic value of NFTs.
I get you don't like the whole crypto thing, but this reaction is way beyond the point of reason.
I'm really not much of a fan either, honestly. That doesn't mean we should demonize our own thoughts if they point towards a hypothetical possibility that some other people might find value in it.
Unless it's hosted on some WotC server where only the NFT owner can access it. But that also undermines its value, since then you don't really own it any more than someone "owns" a Kindle book: barring breaking DRM, as soon as Amazon decides to shut the Kindle service down, its either gone now, or its days are numbered.
>>With the way NFTs work, the blockchain version of one would be an infinitely copyable file that just happens to have a scoreboard somewhere that says that only one person can "own" it in some very specific sense.
There are already NFTs worth tens and in some cases hundreds of thousands of dollars of ETH (see CryptoPunks NFTs) so we know people are willing to pay for something where the image is copyable, but the original can still be authenticated.
In the case of the physical copies, people can easily photocopy them or share their images digitally, yet the verifiable original still retains its value. I don't believe inability to copy the image associated with a physical or digital collectible is what imparts the collectible with value.
There is no difference in a digital Magic card and a physical one in terms of motivations to pay for one.
The anti-decentralization camp used CO2 emissions as their excuse for their wholesale condemnation of NFTs before. But now that that's gone, there doesn't seem to be anything of substance to support their blanket condemnation of them.
That you're anti-decentralization is just speculation on my part, as I can't think of any other plausible motivation for you inexplicably singling out NFTs as worthy of derision, and not centralized digital collectibles or physical collectibles.
And this is one of the big things with many of the apps crypto promoters wave around that are about big incumbents adopting crypto: they implicitlt require those incumbents being motivated to create value that people invested in crypto infrastructure (the exact for depending on the particular cryptocurrency model) can capture rather than seeking to capture created value themselves.
Whether post-issuance value capture is sufficiently increased by controlling the platform to compensate for the lower market value those assets can command can be argued of course, but I intuit it is not.
As it is WotC captures almost no value from secondary market exchanges of its physical collectibles. I don't see why the prospect of creating a valuable secondary market for its digital collectibles, where it is the sole seller in the primary market, wouldn't be a more attractive prospect for it than trying to create a digital walled garden where there would be significant OPEX costs and no assurance of market demand.
Obviously, but equally obviously we aren't talking about a situation where ceteris paribus even approximately holds.
Do you think anyone paying >1k for a Pokémon or Magic card is actually using them to play?! That shit is in a sealed case and only sees daylight to impress people or to resell it. I've met collectors who use home printed cards because they are too scared to damage even 10$ cards.
over time, you may not even need the actual cards anymore and just have the vouchers.
From the docs, lots of talk about value. Not much reason why. It reminds me of the Beanie Babies Valuation books. Made everyone scream over a $7 plushie.
but something we do allow is for players to create characters on the main waifulabs site[1], and then share QR import codes of that custom characters with friends.
At the time a lot of people in there were cracking Yahoo rares. Names that you can't make as username anymore.
Most coveted were ones with capitals, special characters, underscores at the beginning. People bought and sold those for thousands of dollars.
That made more sense to me than these crypto games. Those were at least something scarce and not manufactured. They had intrinsic value, especially for the cracker because they had to come up with name lists, and brute force the passwords, and use potentially trojan ridden hacking tools from shady phpnuke sites.
The usernames were pretty cool in contrast with the new username rules Yahoo had. Card trading just seems boring AF.
So yes, crypto is the focus and yes, gameplay is lacking (for those who seek different kinds of games). But those are separate issues rather than related.
In other words, CryptoKitties innovation was never going to be gameplay, because it is explicitly a clone of pet collecting games of yore with the spin being different underlying infrastructure & payments technology.
Except it's you getting fucked in crypto.
(Fate somehow has exactly the same magic system as White Wolf Mage even though it's too old to have copied it. Not sure how that happened.)
Unless there’s a different Fate that also started of as eroge and spawned a massive franchise, it was first released in 2006, 13 years after White Wolf first released Mage: The Ascension, and so was very much not too early to have copied from Mage.
Also the other half of the setting is all about vampires, and it's definitely kind of like White Wolf Vampire, but not close enough to look intentional.
If they did that it’d restrict the story too much - Nasu loves setting rules about how the magic stuff works, but he only does it so he can break them later to make someone look cool. That’s why he’s the world’s best fantasy writer.
Still three years after Mage was published.
The all-ages versions of Fate also remove all of the sex with minimal effect on the story.
It's depressing to think about it.
And yes people who made gold in wow were also not gaming but working. It wasn't cool, fun or whatever 10 years ago
Books have nothing in common with gambling except for the books about gambling.
When I buy a book, I usually don't know its contents beforehand (the exceptions are I had copied it somehow in my earlier years, and now I want to buy it to come clean, or it is a classic I just never bought yet).
Most of the time, I rely on a friends reference, or a review online, or maybe I just buy by chance. And in either of these cases, there is a less than 50% chance I perceive the book as good. Which, to me, is a gamble. So I suppose there is an edge I don't get?
Gambling is I give you $X I have a,b,c % chance of getting A,B,C. Usually I get nothing. Nothing I can do can effect the outcome.
Colloquially, you might say "I don't like this author, but the reviews say blah was a blah, so I took a gamble". But that is clearly not the same as pure chance gambling.
If you enjoy the book, your payout is those feeling of enjoyment. If you lose, the price is the cost of the book and the time you wasted reading it - but you have the paltry consolation prize of a now-second-hand book that you can sell at a loss to a used book shop.
And you can affect your odds of winning or losing, by going with a genre or author that you already have an affinity to (or not!)
I could be said to be gambling that my comment will be read. I am also gambling that someone will not disagree with me. I am gambling that by writing this comment I'm not wasting time that could have been better spent in other endeavors. I am gambling that I will not die of a stroke just after writing my comment, making my final conscious act a pointless one.
If it sounds absurd, that's because it is. Of course it's not gambling, and neither is reading a book.
I think cryptokitties is somewhere between Poker and Slot machines.
D3 got much better when the real money auction house closed.
My favorite AH score was a max stat level 3 chest piece that I sold for $25.
That piece was good for 5 or maybe 10 minutes of gameplay at the start of the game.
I knew it was a premium piece for that level and type. I knew they didn’t stay on AH long. That said, I didn’t want to compete with all of the lower price point folks, so i set the price to something absurd just to see what happened.
I have no idea why they bought it.
I had much better late game stuff for sale for much cheaper that never sold. It was a strange market — I’m glad it is gone.
I spent probably half my time playing that game just doing arbitrage trading. For example a sorceress or necromancer would always give you 4-5 Perfect Skulls for a Stone of Jordan (SOJ) ring, and you could pretty easily buy an SOJ from a barbarian or amazon for 3-4 Perfect Skulls. Through nothing but these trades I was able to go from a couple SOJ (the most valuable 1x1 item in the game) to about 40 or 50 over the course of a few months.
D3 RMAH was bad because D3 was bad. At that time there was basically no itemisation, everything gear was basically dps/main stat/trifecta. D3 was so bad that the fix was to remove trading completely and never been brought back.
People traded D2 items for gear, runes and/or real money for decades, there is no problem and the game is alive for well.
Playing a little bit with game economics is fun to a certain point.
But let me clarify: I lived the wow time.
It destroyed 3 relationships from friends I know, it broke carrier chances for 2.
Yes there is a difference between grinding a little bit of gold vs playing it all day, not doing anything else anymore for your life and bragging about being able to buy a month abo with in-game gold
I totally get the appeal of challenges in well running raids but there was always the one person who made the game the only life content.
And yes there are still people being hardcore addicted to games like shooter. Depressed friends risking everything worthwhile for it.
Understithe appeal doesn't invalidate my comment.
Vitalik famously was first inspired to build Ethereum when Blizzard nerfed a sword he had in World of Warcraft.
You couldn't have a blockchain equivalent of World-of-Warcraft. You have no meaningful way to testify that you recieve an item from killing a boss, for example.
The only thing you can really implement with cryptocurrency is a market game, gambling on the outcome of a game, or crypto-tokenized items/stats. These have their own problems as well, mostly being that their development structure is usually not decentralized enough to warrant the use of cryptocurrency.
Surely you could have a smart contract that implements that (and, in the extreme case, I guess you submit the random seed for this boss fight and a hash of the button inputs you used or something - of course there's no way to stop you using a bot to automate pressing the buttons at the right time, but that applies to real WoW too).
To the extent that it is broken in world-of-warcraft, it will be more broken here because there will be fees associated with playing, so players will be incentivised to make the most of their money by cheating and trying to optimize the smallest possible "proof".
Eventually, so many people will cheat that the actual game is considered to be a minor nusance. It's like TF2 idle servers. You incentivise players to not play the game.
Ultimately on a technical level it's just another form of proof of work - the boss issues a challenge and the player has to figure out a response that meets that challenge - but if you can make it a kind of "work" that's easier for a human player than a bot, then you get a game that works. As far as I know, even though there are gold farmers etc. in WoW they haven't found it worthwhile to script the raids / boss fights, so it seems like games designers are still able to stay ahead of the automation at the moment, and while the financial incentive would be stronger for a blockchain game it seems like a difference of degree rather than a really radical change.
In this blockchain scenario, couldn't you run millions of different simulations of the boss fight on your own computer and publish the one in which you get the most loot, take the least damage, produce the most compact proof, or whatever?
In any case, the "proof-of-victory" as I'll call it is a useful technique for a provably-fair gambling system. For example, you could have players gamble over the outcome of some turn-based game (with provably-fair randomness) like poker, or nethack. If you can implement a time limit, it would also work for something like chess.
Sure, if your computer is up to running the boss fight that many times over. I assume the game would only let you run each "challenge" once (and I guess might charge you a tiny fee to enter the boss fight) and most random inputs would lose; in that case they just have to make it more expensive to do that than to make currency by mining.
The boss fights have to be very CPU and bandwidth-efficient because every other computer on the network will have to verify many of them. One exception could be that if the probability of winning is low enough with most seeds, you could just make it so that you don't need to broadcast your game (you only broadcast your "proof-of-victory" claim the reward, so if you get a losing seed you just have to broadcast a transaction that pays for your "entry ticket"). That way you could make it difficult to simulate many games while keeping the network performant.
Actually, maybe that's not right because you might be able to make a program that checks to see if you got a lucky seed, so it will just effectively add an annoying roulette-style gambling element of getting good RNG. I don't know.
Anyways, I think a somewhat-fun single-player game may work if it's something like this:
(1) You pay a fee to play a provably-fair deterministic dungeon-crawler type game like nethack.
(2) When you die, you get an NFT for every item you earn. There are massive network fees that prevent you from easily trading the NFT on an open market. So it's preferable to get them through the singleplayer game.
(3) The NFT is used in some hearthstone-like multiplayer card game that encourages you to collect a variety of cards. The "rarer" NFTs are not explicitly better than the common NFTs, they just allow for more exotic gameplay situations so they will simply be more desirable because they are more fun. This encourages you to play the single-player game many times to collect a wide variety of items.
(4) Optional: implement competitive (tournament pool) gambling on top of the card game.
Making a bot to do the singleplayer game would be difficult/undesirable here because:
- you would have to program it to understand the user's different tradeoffs between going to different parts of the dungeons and getting different types of loot, which is sort of subjective decision making.
- trading rewards between players is infeasible due to fees, and there's no trustworthy way to "buy an account" off of a botter.
- the reward is mostly cosmetic and has sentimental value: you can just fork the card game to play it without the NFTs, even to gamble.
- the singleplayer game is somewhat fun in itself, and has a skill cap to prevent bots from stomping actual players (Sort of like TF2's MvM)
I think a crypto game like this could work if it was open source, 100% of fees go to miners, and the development is funded-by-donation. But many crypto games are pretty scammy so they don't pan out.
If the game itself is decentralized too, that changes things, but it's unclear if it's possible to make a game like WoW like that.
Anywhere else and I would assume you were joking. This being HN, I have to assume you're being serious. So, at the risk of stating the obvious, that's the point of the blockchain. That you can provide verifiable proof for things like this.
The two methods mentioned here are quite flawed:
Kerbonut mentions the use of the signature of a gameserver to verify the loot. This obviously is not decentralized, and is essentially the same thing as having a centralized itemserver. This is part of what I mean when I said that "their development structure is not decentralized enough to warrant the use of cryptocurrency"
lmm mentions the use of a "proof-of-victory" given a random in-game challenge produced with a provably-fair RNG seed. Not only would this require a ton of bandwidth and CPU to store and verify these proofs (unless it's a turn-based game like chess or nethack I suppose), but it is not really sybil-proof. In other words, it puts people who play the game at a significant disadvantage to those who just bot. It incentivizes not actually playing the game.
Edit: note that this Decentralized-WoW thought experiment is fundamentally different from axie infinity. The case of axie infinity is a two-player game where they essentially gamble using the depreciation cost of their pokemon. It falls under the category I described as "gambling on the outcome of a game"
This makes no sense to me.
You are always at the mercy of the gaming company. "Stuff" in games has no meaning outside games. If you assign it meaning, you don't need an NFT or whatever: it's in your mind.
Vitalik could have drawn a picture of his magic sword, or simply relive his fond memories of it.
If Blizzard or whatever company takes the game down, the "stuff" becomes meaningless. Existing in blockchain is meaningless. Outside the game engine, it means nothing.
I've also heard "but other companies could take your NFT and...". Well, I'm skeptical. It's still the case that your stuff had its meaning attached to a game or account that no longer exists; whatever other companies do with it cannot replicate the original experience that gave it meaning, I.e. the game.
It's also unclear why Blizzard (or whatever company) would cooperate with making the ingame "stuff" remain outside their control.
Finally, if another company could build an enticing experience rivaling the original game, it's unclear why they would artificially tie it to a competitor (even risking lawsuits if they mentioned trademarks).
It's only work when that is not inherently fun - and if it isn't you don't solve that by letting people pay others to do the work so you get the results directly. If anything, putting monetary value on in-game achivements devalues the experience of getting them yourself and provides perverse incentives for the developers to make getting them without payment less fun.
> and it's all owned by some emotionless gaming company that might just decide to delete all your stuff, or just disappear all together
For centralized MMO games maybe. For single-player games or games that support self-hosting (or really, any third-party hosting independent of the original developer) this is not a problem. And if the developer is unwilling to allow third-party hosting then why do you think they will support a blockchain they can't control in some way?
> Giving players control of the things they worked hard to get just seems like the natural progression as we assign more and more value to the lives we live in virtual spaces.
Giving players control of virtual items means letting them copy and modify the bits. That's a great goal. Let's reform copyright so that you can freely modify software in a reasonable amount of time (much less than an average lifetime!) and require escrow of source data including reuitred server components to get copyright in the first place so that it is available once copyright expires - then Vitalik can have his own WoW version with the balance he likes (in theory at least).
It does not mean trying to further monetize what should be entertainment.
Anyway, the game is very simple and it actually makes much more sense than the recent NFT fud. Essentially you combine characters to create new characters that have some of the traits of the parent characters. It's a breeding game.
I kind of see how it can be valuable to own an NFT character with certain traits that can be used to create other NFT characters. Unlike the recent NFT stuff, it makes sense within its universe. The NFT market on the other hand is just a hot patato game where you speculate that there exist a greater fool in a rigged marketplace.
It's also not helping that so many of these games are just card collecting games, because there was a need to integrate NFTs somehow (that's where profit is for the developers) so collectibles was the easy answer... and then they have pasted some lousy "gameplay" on top of it.
Also there is a whole exploitative side to certain of these games which setup a deliberately very high cost of entry, incentivizing a rent-seeking market where rich owners borrow their entry ticket and let poorer people work to earn the daily rewards available in game for them (because at this point it isn't really playing anymore).
I know of one notable exception, Cypto Royale [0], it's definitely a simple appearing game, basically multiplayer rock/paper/scissor mechanics, but if you do play it you can notice few more layers in gameplay (placement, size/hp management, wall physics)... so there is a bit of strategy and skill involved. Unlike so many other cyptogames they also don't require you to own or even know about crypto to play (it is free to play, it doesn't even require an account). Their approach, even for a simple looking game, seems way closer to actual gaming as a way to potentially get players accustomed to crypto.
But there are also more turn-based games which really are about the mechanics of which items/stats/buildings/lands you have, what their effects are, how to level up etc which all could be encoded in the chain. Its not a mainstream gaming format but thats where crypto ‘gaming’ could provide a new kind of experience. Although I would say the term on-chain game is more specific. The “game” could become as much about finding tools that give you an edge in accessing and navigating the on-chain data from yourself and other ‘players’. The genre is then competitive turn-based strategy with a turn timer (block time). I would compare it to playing competitive Civilisation with full map vision and real cash rewards. Which isn’t really mainstream gaming atm although I’m sure there is a minor audience for it, but for now I expect real on-chain gaming to stay pretty niche.
Considering blockchains survive for 40 years which is not a given.
[1] https://nerdist.com/article/dungeons-and-dragons-neverending...
Became so obsessed that I ended up hired by Dapper Labs and working on the CryptoKitties team, later helped design and launch NBA Top Shot on Flow. Now that we have (the markedly cheaper and easier) Flow and lots and lots of lessons learned from building NFT products, I'm excited for us to bring the next generation of CryptoKitties to life.
If you want to check out a fun crypto game that just recently launched from another developer, I urge you to check out dimensionxnft.com with an open mind.
It looks like a pet breeding game. You "own" cartoon cats - visual representations of distinctive bundles of characteristics contained in a NFT. You generate more NFTs by "breeding" two existing cats (executing the smart contract), which results in random combinations of their characteristics in offspring.
What to do with them? Speculate on their value, same as any NFT.
As a "game" this sounds incredibly unsophisticated compared to normal video games - something that might have passed during the flash era of gaming, or maybe today on itch.io as a weekend project. The only "hook" outside of this is the speculation / potential to earn (and I imagine if you're in on the scam, earning is a lot of fun).
I called it more of a sandbox than a game, but there are also Fancy Chases, events where a specific limited-time breeding goal is introduced and it's a race to be among the first to achieve this goal and breed a Fancy Kitty.
Not saying it's for everyone, but it's definitely something that thousands of people found and find pretty darn fun (again: if expensive).
He ended up declaring bankruptcy
Congratulations on also doing limited time events, welcome to the year 2000 of online gaming!
But do they? They could just as easily be compulsively chasing some chance to cash out big.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pikpok.wtd...
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/clusterduck/id1531250914
You basically don't do anything except watch what weird mutations come out from the breeding. In Clusterduck, you can only have up to 30 ducks, so once you hit the limit, you have to throw a duck into the pit to sacrifice it. Sometimes when sacrificing a duck, a large monster spawns from the pit, and if you tap it enough times, it'll spawn a duck with a "cursed" trait of some sort.
From my point of view so far, even the best crypto game out there would have been better if it wasn't for the crypto aspect of it.
If this ecosystem is to provide value beyond the potential for making money, then what is it? It's hard to be excited about something that only has downsides.
Just to clarify: someone who owns a CryptoKitty decides to send it to the HyperDragons smart contract that handles the absorption. It's not about stealing anything. You use your assets in CryptoKitties to boost your dragon in HyperDragons.
The mechanisms to transfer a Kitty to the HyperDragons lie within the CryptoKitty Smart Contract. This is not particularly different than a regular API, where the available operations have been chosen, specified, and made available to the public at large by the developers.
The only real difference with a public-facing documented traditional API is that said API will outlive the original product. But that doesn't make CryptoKitties a better game, since Cripto Kitties won't be a thing anymore when that comes into play.
It basically is. This is impossible on Eve, if you don't have permission from the people who make Eve.
But, with something on the blockchain, you don't need permission from the person who made the original asset, on the blockchain.
The asset is on the blockchain, and it is much more difficult to stop me from using that asset, compared to a centralized Eve database.
1) The reason it can't be done with EVE is not because EVE is not on the blockchain. It just happens to not be possible because the devs didn't make it so. They could have, but they chose not to.
2) Something being on the blockchain does not make it automatically permission-less. It depends on how the smart contracts involved are coded.
I think point 2) is something that a lot of people don't realise wrt/ NFTs. The NFTs are transferable without the author being involved because the Smart Contract that drives them has a function (aka an API endpoint) that provides that feature. It is not a property of the blockchain itself. It is a property of an arbitrary piece of code that happens to reside on the blockchain. A property that any web service is capable of providing without the blockchain having to be involved.
And then they could change it at any time, as they would be the central authority. There would be not way to stop them from changing it.
Well, thats not true technically. I guess one way that they could implement it, such that they cannot change their mind in the future, would be if the game was run on some sort of decentralized public ledger, with a consensus mechanism.... oh wait, what does that sound like? Oh yeah, we have a word for that. Its called a blockchain.
> Something being on the blockchain does not make it automatically permission-less.
If I read the code, and the code makes it permissionless, the author can't change it later, if the code was written in a way that I can verify that.
Thats the point. Yes, someone can always say "yep, I totally pretty please promise that I won't change anything! Just trust me!"
And it is quite another thing for it to be a smart contract, that verifiably cannot be changed by the original author. Thats the difference.
> (aka an API endpoint) that provides that feature.
> A property that any web service is capable of providing
Oh? A feature, such as a public, immutable ledger, that is decentralized in such a way, using a consensus algorithm (such as PoW or PoS), such that there is no central authority that can change it unilaterally?
That feature? The feature that is, by definition, a blockchain?
Yes, it is true that if you add all the features that a blockchain has, to your software, then by definition it has all the features of the blockchain.
But that makes it a blockchain. You just re-invented the blockchain.
If a game company wanted to provide the same properties without a blockchain they could do so in other ways. A more extreme example is they could provide you with an actual legal certificate of ownership and transfer all rights to the digital property in that certificate. A deed of sorts. It could include a full description of the item and the available operations on it. You could host your own API to allow interactions. You could even host it on the blockchain if you wanted.
In the case of many of these digital game assets out there you have a record of ownership but the actual asset itself is hosted by the company of origin. Which means that if they go down you have proof of ownership but no still have no recourse when the asset in practice goes poof. The more required it is for the game company to provide api's for the asset the less actual gameplay is possible. smart contracts are pretty limited and the more operations they allow the more expensive it is to actually play the game which creates a market pressure for the game to trivial as regards the gameplay on the chain itself. Because of this market pressure what happens is a boom/bust cycle for the game.
The only way out is to host more of the gameplay elements off chain which defeats the purpose.
Does the blockchain make interoperability easier? yes but so does any interoperability standard. Do the cryptographic guarantees of the ledger make it easier to prove ownership? yes but that doesn't address the issues with gameplay being both trivial and expensive because of the market forces you inserted into the game.
But you agree that there is some set of features that are only available on a Blockchain, right?
Well whatever that set of features is, that is the features that I am attempting to refer to.
So yes, if you agree that there are features that are only possible on a Blockchain, then I am correct that this set of features is only possible on a Blockchain and that is what I am talking about.
> If a game company wanted to provide the same properties
Not if I am talking about a feature that is only possible on the blockchain. So whatever featureset that you agree is only available on a blockchain that is what I am talking about.
Do you agree that there are any features at all, ever, that are only on a Blockchain?
If so, then whatever features that you think are only available on a Blockchain is what I am talking about.
Like, you think there are equally good ways to solve the double spend problem, on a public ledger, in a decentralized manner, with no central authority, without a blockchain, and the various consensus algorithms involved in that?
If you've got this magic solution, you could make so much money doing the same thing that blockchains and consensus algorithms do, in a better way.
The money is yours for the taking! Or maybe you could win a turning award! Go for it!
Go release a research paper, with your better than blockchain solution, and get a PhD from it, or computer science award, or billions of dollars in funding.
I look forward to you releasing your groundbreaking research paper, and upending the entire industry.
1. An API to transfer ownership, updating the owner_id field in the database for the spaceship.
2. Legal obligations preventing EVE from reversing the transaction or tampering with your "wallet".
3. Legal documents making you the owner of said spaceship where you and only you can administer it in the future, forever.
4. A full and open audit log of every API call to said API endpoint.
5. Legal assurance 1 and 4 are true and transparent.
6. Measures taken to assure that the API and database will stay online and legal obligations enforced forever.
Even with all these fulfilled a rogue actor could wreck havoc since it would still be centralized, while in a smart contract these things are enforced in code. For me, that difference alone is so big that I can't even compare them.
In all honesty, it feels the only reason we don't just say "wow, it's cool that we have a technology that intrinsically supports this" is because it's a cryptocurrency.
No, then you run into the Byzantine generals problem, which is the specific problem solved by blockchains.
So maybe the problem is you still don't understand what a blockchain is.
Whatever the database says is authoritative.
All I'm saying is, if Nintendo made a Pokemon NFT, another company such as Ubisoft would not be able to add Pikachu to their blockchain based game without an intellectual property license by Nintendo. This would seemingly make a Pokemon NFT rather pointless.
1. The global worldwide market place. While this introduces commerce/real money, which come with very real downsides, it also makes the game high stakes (meaning most people play to the best of their ability). WoW and other games showed how much a vibrant marketplace can add to a game experience for some players, and having everything trading for essentially real money doesn't change that underlying level of engagement.
2. Permissionless development. While there are many examples of attempts at building on top of CryptoKitties fizzling out, there are also success stories, especially around "WCK"—a fungible token created by an unaffiliated third party developer that essentially created a worldwide "Give a Kitty, Take a Kitty" pool that let you send away any cat you didn't want and get back one that you preferred. And because it's on the blockchain and uses blockchain standards, it can also be used as liquidity and barter, both of which add to the experience. I don't believe I've ever seen something like this built on top of a non-blockchain game... certainly it wouldn't be quite as easy as this was to build! Some examples of other third party creations include an auto-breeding platform, a Kitty racing game, a Kitty battling game, Kitty cosmetics (your cat NFT can own its own hat NFT!), and a trustless Kitty bounty smart contract.
3. Almost unparalleled transparency. This has all kinds of fun side effects from allowing the community to fully "check the work" of the developer to what amounts to an open-to-everyone API. And what's more, this is a standardized API so that someone who builds tools for CryptoKitties would be able to also use those tools for Cheeze Wizards. Again, there are amazing third party tools built on the backs of APIs of online games all the time, but it's actually cool how much you get "for free" by being on the blockchain. The verified fairness is pretty cool IMO.
4. Immortal assets. I poured a lot into City of Heroes back in the day, and then one day the devs shut down the server, and took all my heroes with it. This is a very common refrain. As long as there are nodes out there running Ethereum, anyone can breed their Kitty NFTs. That's not nothing. (There's a lot of nuance here about art assets, IP rights, user interface, etc., and it's messy and still very much being figured out, but that's how the world works—you build it, then you improve it!)
5. Value capture. Yes, this almost always has evolved into speculation and nonsense valuations and irrational behavior. But still: when you buy a Kitty, you have the right to sell that Kitty. When you breed a new Kitty, you have the right to sell that Kitty. This is enabled by blockchain almost for free! Note this is distinct and different from point 1. WoW has a marketplace, but when you earn a legendary BoP sword, you cannot then capture that value by selling it if that's what you want to do. This point is as often riddled with downsides as it brings upsides, but the unique and novel truth of it makes it better than a non-blockchain game for some people.
Again, this comes from years of being in the space, playing with these toys, building these systems, being a part of these communities. For some of us, this has been incredibly exciting, and fun, because we chose to explore and figure out for ourselves what upsides this new frontier might hold for us.
People have always been insanely competitive, without bringing in a token in the middle. All you're doing is making it impossible to play (or not lose money) if you're not trying your hardest, all the time.
2/ You're really going to pretend you've never seen communities make their own services on top of a game? The only real difference is that it is fully automated in this case, but service markets have existed forever. Path of Exile has a whole discord with tens of thousands of users just to exchange things.
3/ Only if Cheese Wizards is a carbon copy of CryptoKitties, just changing names. Otherwise, data structures are different behaviours are different, and your work just has to be redone. Like in the current world. But it's true, at least it's open.
4/ You gotta really fucking love your game if you're willing to keep minting (and therefore paying) for NFTs that are worthless and unusable anywhere else
5/ This is an absolute cancer that has made every single game that added real money trading objectively worse. It makes every interaction with your game make you take into account the potential money loss. Like making your kitties spin? Too bad sucker, that's not the optimal money making strat, enjoy feeling ever so slightly bad every time.
The only useful point is the openness of the API. Everything else are things we already do in games (good and bad), but worse. Anyone in this industry not seeing this has either zero experience with games, or destructive tendencies just to make a bit of cash on misery.
I can only see the "open API" benefit for free open source games. So it wouldn't have helped Vitalik and his famed WoW sword.
Then again, making fun games is hard, and there's no escaping it. So maybe it wouldn't help free games either.
1) "having everything trading for essentially real money doesn't change that underlying level of engagement." It has been long established that this is absolutely the case. A classic example of this would be Diablo 3's RMAH effectively destroying the game by having the entire economy be driven by real-world profit-seeking grind
2) I consider this to be very misleading. All of these intra-game features are not made available by the blockchain itself, but by the details of the various Smart Contracts involved. In that sense, the set of instructions available to would-be developers to interact with a game is going to be limited by the operations (and the various rules governing them) that are present in the smart contracts. If a game features permission-less development like this, it's because its developers have decided to make the requisite operations available and documented. This is no different than a regular documented public API.
3) I see nothing preventing this from being done without the blockchain.
4) This is the one potentially interesting wrinkle, but I find it to have marginal interest at best. Assets are inherently immortal unless explicit steps are taken by developers to prevent them to be. What is actually at play here is Immortal Entity Ownership, aka Immortal Scarcity. That's very interesting from a revenue-making potential, but not really much more than that.
5) That does not make the game itself better though.
MOST games I've seen don't provide a public API for players to interact with, and even when players do reverse engineer them, they get accused of cheating, hacking, whatever, and often get their accounts banned.
In the world of blockchain gaming, it's trivial to build tools and meta-games around anything, and there's basically nothing that the original developers can do to stop it. I can host a small bit of static HTML that gives users the ability to battle cryptokitties with each other, and capture each other's kitties. Then at the end of the day, the winner can go back to the main cryptokitties site, and breed their new kitties like normal. I don't need to ask anyone's permission, and all I need is a stable place to land some HTML, and maybe deploy some contracts depending on the level of integrations I want to build. I don't need to apply for an API key, or start up an email conversation with anyone at Dapper Labs. I can just build it, and anyone with a web3 capable browser can play along.
This is the magic of "permissionless" systems, and it's the standard across the blockchain gaming ecosystem.
It's fun to take something someone else built, and do something new and not planned by the origional devs with it. That's it, it's just not necessary to assume bad faith.
It's not bad faith. It's reality. It's also spotting logical and technological holes the size of Jupiter in any of the proposals from clueless[1] crypto maximalists.
[1] Many of them are not clueless, just grifters
It's like Dunning-Kruger, except the bar for "doesn't know enough to know he doesn't know enough" is right at the ceiling
It's not trivial, because making fun metagames is hard, because game design is hard, and blockchain is not a shortcut to it.
> I can host a small bit of static HTML that gives users the ability to battle cryptokitties
This is backwards. A game about battling kitties must start with kitty battling gameplay that is fun. This is like discussing the programing language -- who cares? Tell me how your game is fun.
Blockchain won't help you at all there. Nothing about it makes anything "fun".
You are proving the other commenter's point: blockchain is not a special sauce for games. Whether a game is enjoyable or not has nothing to do with blockchain. In fact, it turns to be the opposite: if blockchain is involved, you can almost bet there's very little gameplay at all, because that's not what the developers care about.
It doesn't need to be "real" money, just something people value (even if its in-game assets). But having something at stake definitely does alter the gameplay
Try playing poker for "fun" (without real money), and then agin with money at stake. People play a lot more seriously, the psychology of the game changes.
Had City of Heroes implemented their heroes "on blockchain", this would have gotten you nowhere.
CoH's heroes would have been useless outside their servers, blockchain or not. They mean nothing if you don't have the game's engine to make then do fun things.
NFTs only work when they are the meaning in themselves, but this can only happen when the "game" is fundamentally trivial and uninteresting, like CryptoKitties. Real games require an engine to run them, and if the engine shuts down, your "assets" become meaningless.
Gameplay is what matters. Making a server open-source is more meaningful than running the assets on blockchain.
I can see the "end game" and it looks nice. But I don't know how to get there. I don't know if its even possible to get there given the hurdles involved - some of the required attributes from the involved actors feels contradictory.
If you check out the Arcade you'll see there are lots of fun games - my personal favorites are Twilight Struggle, Poker and Red Imperium. You can do things have encrypted peer-to-peer chat and video channels while gaming, and all gameplay is provably fair.
Agree there is a bias in media coverage, but it's not because there isn't fun stuff happening and is more because of selection-bias towards talking about speculative assets and token speculation. Also not a tremendous amount of overlap between people who actually play games and those pitching breathless articles to tech media.