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Bankless: Analysis of the prospects of blockchain games - what should the real architecture of Web3 games be?

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Web 2.5 games still have richer ownership rights than traditional games, but what makes them better than traditional games is also the gap between them and fully on-chain games.

Original Title: "The Promises of Blockchain Gaming"

Original Source: Bankless

Translated by: Kxp, BlockBeats

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Image source: Logan Craig

When Ethereum replaces the Federal Reserve as the mainstream in 2087, historians will trace the origin of Crypto back to the important moment in 2011 when Blizzard weakened Vitalik Buterin's "Life Drain" spell in World of Warcraft.

That incident showed 15-year-old Vitalik the "terrifying nature of centralized services," so he founded Ethereum, ultimately putting an end to the madness of centralized gaming.

Or, at least, this is our direction for the future.

Unfortunately, most existing blockchain games are still subject to censorship, despite their marketing pages being filled with slogans such as "permissionless interoperability" and "true ownership".

False promises of existing blockchain games

Let's first review the purpose of the establishment of blockchain: the role of blockchain is to facilitate consensus on a distributed database. However, it is obvious that people have not reached a consensus - that is why the entire crypto community is working tirelessly to split chains and re-adjust consensus through forks between irreconcilable differences.

So, why do we need to build games on the blockchain?

Just like how Vitalik disagreed with Blizzard's nerfing of his beloved Warlock, people also have their own different ideas when it comes to building gaming universes. Therefore, the true promise of blockchain gaming is to allow the fragmented gaming community to resolve their differences.

The problem is that most blockchain games have not reached this standard. Games like Axie Infinity or CryptoKitties are minimal on-chain games. Although their asset storage is on-chain data, the basic logic (game rules) and state (action history in the game) of the game are stored on centralized game servers outside the chain.

Of course, as long as you can protect your private key, your Axie NFT and Token can always be stored in an immutable smart contract. However, if the company behind Axie, Sky Mavis, closes down, your assets in Axie will also be lost. Ownership should not only protect the security of data in the wallet, but also have control and decision-making power over the environment where the data is located, namely the game rules.

The value of these assets depends entirely on the commercial operation of the Axie Infinity ecosystem by Sky Mavis. Although they claim to be a Web 3 game, they are actually more like Web 2.5 because players have little control over the basic rules of the game, which are often controlled by the game team.

Web 3 Game's Real Architecture

How can people establish a truly uncensored blockchain game? According to Gubsheep's article "The Strongest Crypto Gaming Thesis":

1. The logic and state of the game should be put on the chain: the rules of the game - the way players move, fight, harvest, and consume - should be embedded as rules in open-source chain smart contracts.

All game data is stored on the blockchain to ensure interoperability.

2. Game operation should be independent of the client: if the core developers disappear tomorrow, players do not have to rely on them to continue playing the game; people in the community can create their own clients to send player actions to the chain.

3. Only when the above conditions are met can the chain game be truly realized.

无需许可的创新

Permissionless Innovation

First of all, the game world has achieved permanence. When the game logic is stored on the chain, it will continue to exist even if the company goes bankrupt or abandons game development, similar to the way DeFi protocols can run permanently. As Ronan Sandford said, blockchain games can exist "independently of reality."

Secondly, there is a large stage for innovation without the need for permission. Any player can creatively "modify" the game in the form of smart contracts by introducing second-layer rules (Curio refers to it as user-generated logic) and "refer to" the basic game rules (i.e. "digital physics").

Perhaps this may sound confusing, but in fact it is not - this is just DeFi composability 101, which means that developers can build new protocols on top of existing protocol code in a permissionless manner.

As long as the second layer rules do not violate the basic rules, they are allowed. It is worth noting that the second layer rules are different from the additional components/modules in existing games, which only change your personal user interface and native experience; they are embedded in the on-chain smart contracts, affecting the virtual gaming experience shared by you and all other players.

For example, a pure on-chain chess game that is determined to preserve the classic moves of international chess will regard these moves as absolute and unchangeable rules in the core smart contract, such as the knight can only move in an L-shape and the bishop can only move diagonally.

However, anyone can create new second-layer rules on top of these immutable laws of physics. They can be a token, a guild system, a quest line similar to an RPG, but instead of capturing the opponent's king to win the game, you can win by moving your king to the other end of the board. You can introduce a trading system, buy back dead pieces with attached tokens, or exchange pieces with my opponent. You can design rules however you want as long as the logic of the basic rules allows it.

True Interoperability

In on-chain games, assets are not constrained by a strict game logic and can achieve maximum interoperability in the broadest sense. They often exist as just another token in the expanding game universe, much like the thousands of tokens in DeFi that compete with each other based on their own rule sets and token economic models.

Compared to others, Epic may allow Fortnite game assets to achieve "interoperability" in its game library, but they can only be interoperable if developers allow it - this is also the case in other Web 2.5 blockchain games.

Efficient Incentive Measures

For many years, Microsoft has allowed Minecraft users to modify and create content under intellectual property law, but prohibits them from selling official authorized code for profit, effectively maintaining a gray economy composed of passionate fans and serving them.

From an economic perspective, these are weak property rights for modders, and therefore do not have a motivating effect. Therefore, mods are usually maintained by enthusiasts and amateur hobbyists out of altruism.

The complete on-chain game solves this problem. In on-chain games, players have a stronger motivation to create modules because they can create uncensored and permanent modules (the second layer rules mentioned above) and then incorporate them into immutable smart contracts. The basic ownership rules of any token, game mechanism, social structure, or player-created rules in the game are completely under the control of the game players, without being constrained by a set of underlying licensed game logic and rules. Most importantly, they will also compete with the creations of other players in the game economy.

In the world of blockchain games, core game developers promise to only be responsible for modifying the basic rules of the game. This will fix Vitalik's game skills in World of Warcraft, and the days of developer dictatorship will be gone forever.

Now let's take a look at some examples of on-chain games.

On-chain gaming example

My first thought is the Dark Forest, which is a multiplayer strategy game with a space theme created by Gubsheep at 0xPARC Foundation and has been deployed on the Gnosis chain since 2019.

The entire game logic and state of Dark Forest are stored on the chain. Unlike traditional online games today, it does not have centralized servers or databases to handle game operations or store game states.

The interstellar war taking place in the dark forest

As I mentioned before, the magic of blockchain games lies in the fact that players can use their blockchain properties to design emerging rules. There are many examples of this in Dark Forest, where players have created an in-game market that allows for the trading of in-game resources without the need for core developers to release patches for trading systems or auction houses.

The Dark Forest does not have a built-in guild system, so a group of players (DFDAO) proactively built their own permissionless, on-chain guild system through an external smart contract. This allows many small players to coordinate and pool their resources in a trustless manner, making them more competitive on the leaderboard dominated by experienced players. As recorded on DFDAO's blog:

In the fourth round, we deployed The Astral Colossus, which is a smart contract player that allows other players to provide resources as a team. This solves the trust issue between players because all the code for everything is recorded in a smart contract, which you can read and know what it will do, making the whole process trustless and permissionless.

DFDAO also forks the Dark Forest game completely onto a different chain. Their forked version is called Dark Forest Arena, which introduces various new game modes. In any other MMORPG, all of these actions would be considered illegal operations, black market transactions, or hacking activities; but in chain-based games like Dark Forest, all modifications can be allowed and run in code.

Dark Forest Arena Game Mode

In addition, in OPCraft, we can also find emerging rules led by the community, which is a Minecraft chain version built on Optimism by the Lattice team. In the early testing of OPCraft, players created different plugins to automatically collect resources, chat with each other, teleport on the map, and change the color scheme in the game. The content in the Lattice link is preserved.

A player named SupremeLeaderOP created a communist republic by deploying an on-chain smart contract and established a set of corresponding rules. Any player who voluntarily joins the republic will give up all their existing property, and the republic will merge their assets into a collective shared treasury according to socialist theory.

Of course, new rules appearing in games is nothing new. If game developers don't create guild tools in the game, Eve Online players will coordinate offline social alliances on Discord. Everquest and World of Warcraft players have developed informal social currency systems - "DKP" (dragon kill points) - to manage and reward players' time investment in in-game raids.

The difference in these designs is that they can be embedded on the chain without permission under the openness of game composition. The players of OPCraft Communist Republic do not know the creator of this mechanism, but they do not have to believe whether he will fulfill his promise.

In the diplomatic strategy game Conquest on Gnosis Chain, players use xDAI Token as collateral to produce spaceships, form alliances, and attack each other in a "civilization" conflict. Similarly, the creation of on-chain smart contracts means that player alliances will be constrained by actual value assets, ensuring that players take real action and achieve trustless interaction between player alliances.

A look into Conquest

Challenges Faced by Fully On-Chain Games

Since blockchain games are so amazing, why haven't they become more widely popular?

The most obvious obstacle facing on-chain games is scalability. Sending each player's action on-chain involves a lot of computation, which is why most on-chain games are turn-based and not deployed on the Ethereum mainnet. The immutable code that permanently exists on the chain makes it difficult for developers to patch vulnerabilities caused by negligence.

At the same time, unlicensed games have also provided opportunities for speculative players and bots. Existing blockchain games, such as Axie and Pegaxy, have set relatively expensive entry barriers to avoid such problems, while traditional games also deal with this issue through KYC methods and selective bans. However, these centralized measures cannot be used for permissionless on-chain games.

To some extent, the problems of on-chain games are remarkably similar to those of imperfect real-world institutions, which are difficult to change due to social rigidity and collective action problems (such as imperial systems or democratic politics). These issues must be faced by the community and core developers together in order to find innovative solutions and creative mechanism designs to curb bad behavior, rather than directly censoring it.

Introduction to On-chain Games

On-chain games still largely exist in the form of proof-of-concept. Developers are still trying to find the best way to scale, and this concept has many names. Lattice calls it an autonomous world, Bibliotheca DAO calls it an eternal game, Etherplay calls it an infinite game, and Topology calls it "on-chain reality".

Above are just a few examples of emerging rules in blockchain games. There are infinite possibilities. Just as DeFi's open-source composability gives tokens interoperability, the root of each Dapp exists as a shared state on the blockchain, allowing tokens to be split in various ways. Similarly, fully deployed games on the blockchain will be the same.

Afterwards, you will be able to create your own ERC20 Token as a currency in the game, build any possible social structure - religion, country, faction, and store them on the chain, write your own task line, reward or punish with Token, and link them into immutable smart contracts.

We cannot classify these as "in-game economies" because they are not isolated from the real world like traditional games. These are real-world value economies that blur the boundaries between creators and players, existing permanently on the blockchain. They have the ability to continuously evolve from countless individual spontaneous decisions, experimenting with new production and trade methods without restrictions, providing players with countless ways to benefit.

Conclusion

Although I am somewhat strict in defining existing blockchain games in this article, it is worth noting that Web 2.5 games still have richer ownership rights than traditional games, and at least provide players with the freedom to exit at any time. In traditional games, game assets are protected as intellectual property and cannot be sold; in on-chain games, players can sell their tokens in the game and be rewarded for their time investment.

However, the advantages of Web 2.5 games over traditional games are also the gap between it and fully on-chain games. The off-chain game logic hinders the game from fully utilizing the potential of blockchain technology, and only fully on-chain games will truly use open and permissionless blockchain infrastructure.

Some of the greatest electronic game works and genres are byproducts of emerging rules, reflecting a similar pattern: gaming enthusiasts and amateur hobbyists are constantly trying and exploring in their creations. MOBA (Dota) and tower defense games both originated from the custom game Mod community of Warcraft III; PUBG: Battlegrounds was originally a mod of the FPS shooting game DayZ, which itself was a mod of another FPS shooting game Arma 2; Counter-Strike was a mod of Half-Life, one of the most popular games of the 90s.