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.