The status quo in gaming today is that people work thousands, or 10s of thousands of hours building, collecting, exploring, etc, and it's all owned by some emotionless gaming company that might just decide to delete all your stuff, or just disappear all together, without notice. 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.
Vitalik famously was first inspired to build Ethereum when Blizzard nerfed a sword he had in World of Warcraft.
> it's all owned by some emotionless gaming company that might just decide to delete all your stuff, or just disappear all together, without notice. Giving players control of the things they worked hard to get just seems like the natural progression
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).
Yeah I guess, but grinding/mining is not sybil proof. So the only thing that cryptocurrency improves is replacing that with buying and trading items with actual money, or mining stuff with PoW.
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.
Having a regular commercial centralized game with decentralized NFT items is an awkward halfway point that doesn't get you the full benefits of decentralization.
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.
> You have no meaningful way to testify that you recieve an item from killing a boss, for example.
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).
A hash of the inputs can't be used to replay the game and thus verify what happened. You'd need the full input list, including mouse movement. In my experience FPS games send around 200MB/h in networking, so assuming only a 1000th of that is needed to store the inputs that comes out to ~5600USD/h. Even if it took just a kB that's still ~30USD just to play the game for an hour. (This of course ignores actually running the game inside a smart contract, which would also take an obscene amount of gas)
I have considered this already. That does not solve anything here, for the reasons you have mentioned yourself.
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.
> 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".
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.
With a normal bot, you can only run one boss-fight at a time and you are subject to network latency and imprecision of your actions.
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.
> 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?
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.
> Sure, if your computer is up to running the boss fight that many times over.
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.
> 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.
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.
Alright, care to enlighten us then? How would you go about implementing such a thing?
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"
The idea makes no sense unfortunately. If the game dies so does the meaning of the NFTs. It's even more pointless in the context of Vitalik's WoW example because the NFT has no relationship to the game mechanics, the creators of the game could trivially nerf, alter, or remove previously minted NFTs at their own discretion.
> people work thousands, or 10s of thousands of hours building, collecting, exploring, etc
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.
Vitalik famously was first inspired to build Ethereum when Blizzard nerfed a sword he had in World of Warcraft.