Check https://www.cryptokitties.co/guide/ways-to-play

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.

> Why breed Purrstige Traits? Breeding a Purrstige Trait can be challenging, but it’s rewarding too. Because Purrstige Traits are time-limited, they’re particularly rare — and especially valued as a result. Plus, Purrstige Traits are always a nice visual treat, creating some of the game’s most beautiful and unique cats.

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.

What is challenging about it?

I can’t wait for the world to wake up from this insanity.

They won't ever. Some part of the population will always fall for it. Hope is a powerful emotional that overrides all logic.

Ya…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania “A fool and his money…”

If you were gambling on tulip futures in taverns, you knew exactly what you were doing.

Back in 2002 I used to hang out in Yahoo pool rooms. I was in a league even.

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.

The other ones i had i was young at the time and dumb and let someone hold onto them and they got me never heard from him again good ones too

Yea i miss those days. I have 1 id still left out of all the ones i had. You_can_suck_it_just_dont_bite

You might be interested in minecraft name trading. Much of the same things ring familiar with what you said

Has anyone done something similar for a "gacha waifu" type game ala Genshin Impact? If they get the random generator making nice looking characters, I can see the ability to trade unique and attractive characters appealing to some. But it has to be backed by a decent game.

With 2D, rather than 3D: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.sizigi.wco...

This isn't crypto and I don't know if things are tradable, but Arrowmancer checks the waifu and randomly generated aspect.

dev here: the characters aren't tradeable atm.

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.

[1] https://waifulabs.com

Thanks that's interesting. Crypto isn't required for trade of course but I guess one place it helps is that the developer doesn't need to implement the trade details themselves, just read results from the blockchain. Not sure if this is even possible at the fidelity level people would want though without external data hosting, most NFTs I heard about just link to a resource on a server anyway, and that could be troublesome in a game.

I remember the craze around collecting the cards without really playing the game. And then, separately, playing the game without collecting the cards, with the "Pokemon Trading Card Game" for game boy.

Neopets, Valenth & more come to mind as early 2000s crypto-less versions of this. You can make the exact same comments about the fun-ness of those games. And yet people loved them.

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.

Those were just kids games no? Monetizing something like that with the crazy fluctuations in prices seems incredibly problematic, kids can trade cards for sure, but when you tie money to every transaction it looks more like selling cigarettes to kids

It was all just marketing all along :) Thanks for the enlightening comment!

There is a magic the gathering like trading card game on ethereum that seems neat. I doubt it will get big enough to make sense, but having come from paper MTG as a kid and not being able to really digitally collect cards since... that would be super cool. You would actually 'own' the cards.

This is one of the few areas where I think there's a legitimately useful role for NFTs. WoTC (the owners of MtG) could "mint" a limited number of cards each year, just like today, controlling the rarity of certain ones, etc. People could pay WoTC for them, and they could be traded in the blockchain, which shows the "chain of custody" all the way back to WoTC, which is what makes it "authentic". Online tournaments could check your ownership of cards via the blockchain, and I can even see IRL tournaments checking the blockchain too, if you want to print a copy of your card.

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.

> They already do this sort of thing with MtG Online

Exactly. They can track all this stuff in their own database. WotC doesn't stand to benefit from putting anything on a blockchain.

Generalized case: no one stands to benefit from putting such things on a blockchain.

Except the people making money by running or grifting off a blockchain.

I think it's possible they might see some benefit. It would basically hinge on people's faith in WotC vs a blockchain to administer that data. If the blockchain was more trusted - say because of concerns WotC might go out of business one day, etc - then using it might entice people to put more money in.

Your words are contradictions.

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?

WotC doesn't care if a potential consumer trusts their long-term business model, but they sure do care if the potential consumer trusts their purchase won't poof out of existence one day.

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.

What is this mysterious demographic that were never interested in the decades old proven track record of wotc but suddenly interested in digital marketing bullshit that don't actually last forever(links go dead all the time without a caretaker, nfts aren't an exception)

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 don't get the hostility, nor why you keep trying to shove words in my mouth.

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.

If gameplay is also mediated through WotC's servers, though, then the cards would lose any intrinsic value when/if WotC goes under or stops supporting the game.

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.

I don't think that's the case. It's also a tabletop game so the rules are all out there in public and not even inhumanely complex.

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.

> It's also possible for a third party to create their own server to implement the game

No, it wouldn't be possible because the concept of IP and copyright exists regardless of blockchains.

Neither apply to game mechanics.

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.

That really depends on the community that grows around the game. People spend money on all kinds of expensive stuff that they could replace with a cheap replica if they wanted to, but they don't, they want the original thing. If the community sees value in an original WotC NFT, they'll have value.

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.

The collectibles WotC issues could be much more valuable if they are issued on the blockchain where both exchangeability and access to provenance are guaranteed.

I would argue it's the opposite. The physical copies are unique objects that only one person can own and enjoy. 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. But everyone else can still enjoy it just as easily.

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.

Note I'm comparing digital collectibles with provenance determined by WotC servers to digital collectibles issued on the blockchain, i.e. NFTs. I'm suggesting the latter could prove to be more valuable than the former. I am not comparing digital collectibles to physical collectibles.

>>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.

People are only willing to "pay" for worthless NFT garbage due to the bigger fool theory. The grifters who created scams like CryptoPunks are already running out of fools.

That's an entirely speculative claim, and doesn't even make sense.

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.

I'm not anti-decentralization. But obviously only a moron would pay for an NFT regardless of the CO2 emissions.

Again, there is no substance behind your claim. There is no difference in a digital Magic card and a physical one in terms of motivations to pay for one.

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.

But WotC doesn't want them to be more valuable, it wants to be able to capture more value from them. These are not equivalent goals.

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.

Ceteris paribus, WotC can capture more value when the collectibles it issues are more valuable. It can sell them at a higher initial price.

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.

> Ceteris paribus, WotC can capture more value when the collectibles it issues are more valuable

Obviously, but equally obviously we aren't talking about a situation where ceteris paribus even approximately holds.

Yes, I think it was clear I wasn't implying that it was, given I went onto address the other factors right afterwards. The ceteris paribus was just an analytical device to control for one factor - initial sale price - and establish what its effect is on WotC's profitability.

The MtG NFTs should be traded on MtGox so we come full circle.

They can do that even more easily with a standard server...

I hate it so much that you've outlined a very viable use of a blockchain.

Now think about whether anything at all would be amiss if "the blockchain" were to be replaced by a good old trusted database.

What happens when someone turns off the database?

The obvious question would be why do you hate it so much. I can't recall the viability of any piece of technology affecting me so negatively. We create technology to solve problems. Even if you can't think of a reason why some technology should exist, I can't imagine why it should elicit such strong emotions.

The CO2 footprint for one.

You're a day late with that argument... https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/09/15/1059520/the-merg...

So bitcoin has moved to proof of stake?

Bitcoin doesn’t even have smart contracts. How is it relevant?

Is it not a blockchain technology?

It is, however, not the blockchain technology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_fallacy

And yet it causes more climate change than Scotland.

The entire thread is about Ethereum...

I doubt it, they just hid the dirty little secret that everyone putting up the stake will now mine it on another chain

(Pssst, you're supposed to move the goalposts to "inequality")

Are you talking about sky weaver?

I started playing it and I am having fun, unfortunately I'm not good enough to beat any real players though.

Haven't heard of sky weaver -- It was listed here, but none of these are ringing a bell, so I think it maybe already died! https://ethereum.org/en/dapps/?category=gaming

>It's basically like that except there is no underlying game to play,

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.

But you can choose what to do with your cards. And there are formats that don't need you to spend tons of money to have fun.

Yes I do! My legacy decks have a value between 5-10k and they see play almost every week. Just go to a tournament to see people playing with the real cards as proxy are not allowed. For Magic the high price is mainly driven by the need to have copies to be able to play.

they should set up a fractional reserve system, where you deposit your valuable cards at a card bank and get a "card voucher" you can then use to play actual games with. The card bank could then lend out the cards to other players for profit.

over time, you may not even need the actual cards anymore and just have the vouchers.

Probably slightly less dumb than collecting bored money pictures. But only slightly.

They are like porn games, the gameplay is not the focus, fucking is.

Except it's you getting fucked in crypto.

There are some porn games that are considered very fun and even influential on the larger games industry, particularly coming out of Japan such as Rance[0], a grand strategy series that's run for over 30 years.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rance_(series)

I wonder if there are any prn games where the gameplay is so good you forget about the prn

The Fate series which later spawned a massive franchise (multiple games, movies and books) started off as an eroge.

It doesn't have a whole lot more sex than your average fantasy novel, and like your average fantasy novel it's also an extremely long retelling of the author's tabletop game.

(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.)

>It doesn't have a whole lot more sex than your average fantasy novel

The all-ages versions of Fate also remove all of the sex with minimal effect on the story.

> Fate somehow has exactly the same magic system as White Wolf Mage even though it's too old to have copied it.

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.

The setting was written in 1996 with Mahoutsukai no Yoru/Kara no Kyoukai.

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.

> The setting was written in 1996 with Mahoutsukai no Yoru/Kara no Kyoukai.

Still three years after Mage was published.

Not in Japanese though.

Wait, Kara no Kyoukai and Fate are set in the same universe?

Sort of, the setting is the same but none of the series are actually in continuity with each other. Even Fate/Zero isn’t actually the same universe as Fate.

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.

The Melty Blood fighting game series is a spinoff of an adult visual novel as well

Gaming with being able to earn money is something I normally call gambling or work.

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

Gambling and gaming are quite interconnected, maybe you can describe it as a spectrum between games and gambling. Free single player games are the 'purest' games, you're only betting that it's worth your time. Cheap single player games, you're still gambling in that you're 'betting' the game is worth your time and $5. Closer to the gambling side are things like Poker, CS Skins, the Diablo Auction House, Eve Online mining, etc. Probably the purest form of gambling is slot machines, since they are purely random chance.

This is an absurd argument! By that logic buying a book is akin to gambling: You don’t know how good it is until you start reading.

Books have nothing in common with gambling except for the books about gambling.

People with absurd notions very often conflate the colloquial definition and the precise definition of words and then try to draw conclusions out of the confusion. Like anti-science people who talk about theories and theories.

That... actually makes sense to me. You're gambling the cost of the book that the amount of enjoyment you get out of it is worth the time it took to read it.

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!)

Unfortunately, that definition of "gambling" is so encompassing that it effectively means everything is a form of gambling. Which is, of course, absurd.

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 sort of mixed up risk and gamble in that analogy. I stand by the part that many games fall on a spectrum between “game” and “gamble”. counter strike, wow, eve online are games with a gambling element: loot boxes, skins, etc. Poker is a gamble with a game element, e.g, bluffing. Slot machines aren’t games at all.

I think cryptokitties is somewhere between Poker and Slot machines.

I suppose I'm overlooking something, since I cannot follow this line of reasoning.

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?

There is no gambling involved in buying a book. I give you $X you give me a book.

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.

Not all "risks" are "gambling"

This is leaving out the most important part of the incentive structure: most books are entertainment and their value to the reader is based on things other than money. That means they’re not interchangeable and people make decisions based on things like the author or publisher’s reputation as opposed to the current exchange rate.

Your argument started well but veered off the tracks. The examples I would give of parallels between gambling and gaming are arcades, loot boxes, merchandiser machines, and free-to-play games with a virtual currency

I also had fun making gold in Skyrim, which was offline. I don't recall it being work, but whatever.

It can be a puzzle with a built in score and fun, but rarely are these direct-to-cash games fun.

D3 got much better when the real money auction house closed.

In my opinion, nothing has ever come close to the rich economic system that emerged naturally in Diablo 2. Maybe it just hit me at a good time in my life, towards the end of high school.

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.

You sound like you've never played Eve Online

There was a stable economy time where there weren’t continual “buff patches” dumping more and more items, and it was a good time.

Very much agreed, but…

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.

People would search by “best I can equip” and you caught a whale.

I would disagree with that.

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.

I mean, the real improvement to D3 was they massively upped the drop rate of rare items, which "coincidentally" happened when they stopped taking a cut off people selling their rare items for real money.

Yeah. The money always causes a conflict with the fun. Only the pure cosmetic games seem to avoid that when the money flows.

That's not the point I was making.

Playing a little bit with game economics is fun to a certain point.

Offline is key here

Thing is in WOW you had a large population of actual gamers who were willing to pay real hard currency for ingame currency. Because the game in itself was attractive as a game. Cryptokittens have none of that value.

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.

Game boss dies, triggers a web3 call which mints the NFT. What’s the problem?

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.

Who gets to trigger the web3 call? a centralized server?

> 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 blockchain proves a chain of custody. Please explain how you mint the proof of boss kill without an authority.

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.

You are obviously not a gamer or understand the appeal.

Very interesting to find this type of sentiment on hn.

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.

I remember when CryptoKitties clogged the ETH blockchain and it has become unfeasible to do most of the transactions.

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.

I generally agree with your sentiment.

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.

[0] https://cryptoroyale.one/

Yeah lots of “cart before the horse” happening in this space. When talking about games these days we often imagine rich engaging audio/visual interactive experiences. The crypto people don’t really seem to understand that kind of game.

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.

Something like the 40-year-old-and-still-ongoing DnD game might make sense in this setting [1]

Considering blockchains survive for 40 years which is not a given.

[1] https://nerdist.com/article/dungeons-and-dragons-neverending...

wow, thats a nice example as well

CryptoKitties is a lot of fun, for what it is. It's super deep and while it's more of a sandbox than a typical game, I became obsessed with it when it came out, though not for monetary reasons (if it has one huge drawback as a game, it's always been how much it costs IMO).

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.

You cannot have a conversation about "crypto games" without addressing how crypto makes the game better. For the sake of this conversation, it doesn't particularly matter how fun CryptoKitties is. What matters is how does the blockchain integration make the game better than it would otherwise have been.

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.

So I've been thinking about this and working on this for years, so I have a different perspective. Is everything fully better for having blockchain integration? Clearly no. Are the benefits worth the trade-offs? I'd argue yes, on the whole.

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.

Thank you for the verbose answer, though I disagree with most points.

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.

#2 is the most important one to me, so I'll address that specifically.

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.

Sure, but my point is that the lack of blockchain technology is not what's preventing most games from featuring this, it's only the developer's willingness to do so.

> In the world of blockchain gaming, it's trivial to build tools

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.

These reads to me as: Haven for asian bot farms.

Why do anti-crypto people always seem to go into all every conversation with completely bad faith?

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.

> Why do anti-crypto people always seem to go into all every conversation with completely 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

I'd add, someone can have a master's in math and be a phenomenal software engineer and still clueless vis-á-vis crypto.

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

You don't have to be a master in math or a phenomenal software engineer to use common sense and logic. And common sense is more than enough to deal with crypto.

Because the world they seem to be advocating for is a dystopian hellhole.

> 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

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.

1/ Making people play to the best of their ability.

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.

Agreed, plus it raises this question: why would any gaming company cooperate with an API that effectively removes their control over their assets and enables competitors and third parties from building on top of them without requiring authorization?

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.

> 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.

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.

HyperDragons. Someone made a game where you bred dragons that could eat CryptoKitties to absorb their attributes. The composability and interoperability of the blockchain means anyone can extend your game and build mechanics with your assets, without your permission. It's truly an open API.

And what here does the blockchain offer that a database table doesn't? Other than the ability to monetize.

The fact that I can build upon CryptoKitties with no obstacle. If CryptoKitties was on a private database I would need to get access to their API and also trust them with the ownership/management of the assets. Now I can just build it on the blockchain and have people destroy CryptoKitties in my smart contract to get benefits in my game. No API functionality or permission from CryptoKitties needed.

So how does this open API works? Every time you use it you have to pay a third party?

You submit the action you want to do, anywhere in the ethereum network, and if it's valid (e.g. if you're running an operation that destroys a kitty then you'd better include a digital signature showing that you own that kitty) then it will be accepted and published. You have to pay a "gas fee" which in theory a) should be pretty small and b) is what pays for the running of that ethereum network. In practice under the current implementation those fees got to be big enough that they kind of killed cryptokitties, but this might be fixable.

What do you mean? All of the data is on the chain. It's a global "third-party" that everyone is a part of.

Even "the ability to monetize" is hardly unique - it would also be trivial to monetize that database table (see: Diablo 3).

That the two projects both shared the same DB.

Unless the intellectual property assets (art and character designs) have been licensed putting them on a blockchain does not make them legal to use.

What do you mean? HyperDragons is just interacting with the CryptoKitties smart contract. They are not using any art or other IP from CryptoKitties.

So cyptokitties are not cartoon characters like Pokemon?

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.

I would still be able to build applications utilizing the Pokemon NFT, and use it in my game, without infringing on the copyright. The NFT itself is just an ID with some meta data and doesn't contain any IP. The IP is in Nintendo's own front-end for the NFT.

Couldn’t that have been done equally well with a centralized ledger? Lots of games have “high stakes pvp”, such as eve online. They don’t have a blockchain, and yet you can still steal stuff permanently from other players if that’s how you want to play the game.

Let's say I want to build a game where you can destroy your EVE Online spaceships to get bonuses in my game. How would that work? That's what happened with CryptoKitties and HyperDragons.

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.

This is not inherently made possible by the blockchain itself though.

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.

> This is not inherently made possible by the blockchain itself though.

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.

Two things are wrong here:

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.

So, let's see. To emulate the ERC-721 smart contract you would need:

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.

> It just happens to not be possible because the devs didn't make it so. They could have, but they chose not to.

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.

Blockchains are not the only way of achieving what you describe. It's just one mechanism. You seem to be conflating the "result" achieved with the "mechanism".

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.

> Blockchains are not the only way of achieving what you describe. It's just one mechanism

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.

Except that I don't agree those features are only available on a Blockchain.

But there are some features only available on a Blockchain right?

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.

You are speaking in extreme hypotheticals. I am unaware of any set of features that require a blockchain to satisfy them. Is there an as of yet unknown set of features that require a blockchain? I don't know but I'm unaware of any such set right now and your reluctance to specify such a set suggests that you don't know of them either.

Really? You are going to claim that there is literally zero features that a blockchain provides, that are not solved elsewhere?

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?

yes

Ok, if you have a magic, better than blockchain solution that solves the Byzantine generals problem, and allows you to run a global, public, decentralized ledger, with no central authorities, that solves the double spending problem, then I would encourage you to release it and make billions and billions of dollars from 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.

> A property that any web service is capable of providing without the blockchain having to be involved.

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.

You don’t have the Byzantine generals problem with a centralized database.

Whatever the database says is authoritative.

I view crypto as a good way to create an ecosystem rather than just a single game. But to create an ecosystem requires multiple games, by multiple companies. At the center of it all, you probably need a selfless company with tons of money to bootstrap the core IP, that simultaneously cares very much about its IP but also doesn't care too much so they let indies and amateurs experiment with it.

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.

Color me surprised that the person claiming to have enjoyed a crypto game is trying to shill a different crypto game

OK but WHAT IS THE GAME? What do you DO with CryptoKitties?

Disclaimer: I haven't played it, but I read this article.

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).

There's a free mobile game called Clusterduck which is basically the same idea but without the crypto nonsense.

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.

Breeding is a complex and nuanced game mechanic, which when coupled with the worldwide marketplace unlocks a dizzying rabbit hole. Once you understand the mechanics, you realize just why a Gen 1 Tendertears would be a grail collectible to own.

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).

Sounds like gacha, where folks feverishly "collect" pointless pieces of little plastic. All these things (hoarding, compulsive buying, gambling) go hand-in-hand [0], and ends up emptying pockets and possibly devastating lives.

0: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3181956/

> it's definitely something that thousands of people found and find pretty darn fun (again: if expensive).

But do they? They could just as easily be compulsively chasing some chance to cash out big.

CK's breeding mechanics are about as complex as Pokemon Gen1's breeding mechanics, and simpler than Gen3. Congratulations on passing the GameBoy bar. Additionally, all of the talk about openness is now out the window since the breeding code is closed source.

Congratulations on also doing limited time events, welcome to the year 2000 of online gaming!

Just because it's tradition to not let "someone being wrong on the internet" stand: https://www.cryptokitties.co/blog/post/learn-how-our-last-my...

Thanks! Now there's improvement, from "we're not sure just how simplistic those mechanics are" to "well fuck me that's some first year in college simple mechanics".

I knew someone who described slot machines like that

He ended up declaring bankruptcy

Maybe it's just fun to spend money you don't need, or stole, or swindled, or need to launder.

You know how they call the lottery "a game"?

You can trade them, or breed them with other cryptokitties.

You breed them. It reminded me of horse breeding games my girlfriend used to play. Kind of fun. Not worth the ongoing cost though.

For me it's the Mary Kate and Ashley horse breeding game on the Game Boy Color.

Gamer sentiment is generally very anti micro transactions, all the crypto games I’ve seen so far are micro transactions front and centre on steroids

I interviewed the head of a group who funds crypto games and his take was that these types of games no longer get funded exactly because of that. They aren't really fun because they aren't really games.

https://youtu.be/0hzyW-MLSBw

Once again, there's nothing there. Pay, breed, sell. That's it! You didn't miss anything!

Chiming in because we have an open source game engine on Saito (https://saito.io/arcade) which imo is the future of crypto gaming but is usually overlooked by people who want to talk about crypto gaming because what they want to talk about is tokens and speculation rather than actual games.

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.

See Dark Forrest which I believe is the best example of a game, on Ethereum, which is crypto native.

https://blog.zkga.me/announcing-darkforest

It’s just a remnant from the year when ‘blockchain’ and ‘crypto’ where the big buzzwords that attracted investors.

Crypto aside, most collectable card games aren't very much fun in my opinion.

The game is the game of life where you try to make the most money