Programmable Money on the Base Layer
The economy is a massively multiplayer game of sorts. Unfortunately it's pretty boring for most of us. We trade our skills and time to an employer taking the actual risks within the ecosystem. A business can lose money during a given fiscal year, while a person earning $30 an hour will always earn $30 an hour. Risk and potential reward are traded away in exchange for stability and security. Interestingly enough this also seems to be how governments seem to operate when governing the people. Everything is a tradeoff.
Trading Money for Power
Proof-of-stake gets a lot of backlash from proof-of-work enjoyoooors. We don't want the rich to be the ones in charge, do we? To be fair this is already how the world works. 1 person 1 vote is a farce seeing as a few million dollars here or there can completely change public opinion on certain key issues. In fact I'm hearing a rumor that USAID is being accused of all kinds of mismanaged funds designed to do this exact thing all around the globe.
Bitcoin maximalists seem to think they have the answer, but their product is so basic we've seen multiple devs on crypto Twitter begging for their accounts back which is just a sad state of affairs. And who controls Bitcoin anyway? Who are the thought leaders? All of those guys are super rich as well. It seems that no matter where we look it is the capital allocators that are in positions of power. That shouldn't be a stocking statement to make considering that money and power and intrinsically linked.
The interesting thing about crypto is that it's the first real economic pathway to a reversal of this tendency. On a philosophical level crypto allows society trade power for money in a non-toxic way. Rather than someone being in charge of a power that might corrupt their actions, crypto seeks to automate that governance and distribute the value outwardly to the entire community. This is the basic concept of disintermediation we've heard so much about. Removal of the middle man is key to ensure an efficient system that isn't getting chopped up by rent-seekers.
In terms of actual games being on the blockchain... well I'm quite shocked they don't really exist yet. At least not in the way that I envisioned. WEB3 is still a fleeting dream; it absolutely does not exist yet. We will know it when we see it, but thus far it hasn't gained any traction or network effect. Chalk it up to the infrastructure only being fractionally complete with no proper templates to speak of that devs can clone or fork into a new thing.
A weird thing I realized about blockchain gaming is that once again we've fallen back into this pattern of trying to create a product where the player is trading their money for power. Everything in crypto is pay-to-win rebranded as play-to-earn and wrapped up with a hyperinflationary bow.
There are some "exceptions" to this statement that aren't really exceptions at all. Take, for example, all the first person shooters on AVAX. Those aren't pay to win. You don't really get a practical advantage for buying a skin that makes your gun look cool and unique. This part of the economy is also on a blockchain and arguments are made that it's "decentralized".
But, they are in fact, not decentralized whatsoever. A First-Person-Shooter could never actually be WEB3 under the current tech stack that we are working with. They are all completely dependent on a centralized server running all the matches and matchmaking unilaterally controlled by the dev team. Do we see any of of these games getting cloned into dozens of mods and spawns of the original thing? No, because the code is not open-source and the IP is proprietary. We see this pattern over and over again where the devs create some heinously centralized product and then wrap a tiny thing on a blockchain and call it "decentralized". Not good enough!
Starting from square one.
The ultimate problem we are facing now with games on the blockchain is that gaming enthusiasts refuse to admit that we have absolutely no idea how to create a product with truly decentralized architecture. Show me the game that anyone can spin up a node and the community is the agent holding the ban hammer, acting as Game-Master, and doing all the upkeep. This is not a product/network/community that exists even after a decade of blockchain development. Even worse: nobody even notices there's even a problem.
What are the capabilities of blockchain?
Well Hive is pretty good in this regard. What are we offering? 3 second blocktimes and immutable text/javascript. That's honestly a lot better than what most chains can accomplish, but at the same time it's nothing compared to what would be needed to run a full scale modern game in a decentralized fashion.
What we need to be doing here is going back to the absolute basics. Creating games that require very little bandwidth. On a very real level platforms like Bitcoin and Hive are running on a single 56k modem; the entire network not just individual users. That is the level of resources we have at our disposal, and it's going to require some very out of the box thinking to make anything that makes sense or works in any capacity.
What is our strength?
While the amount of bandwidth we are working with is quite smol, the features we have built in are something that game developers have never in their wildest dreams had access to. Every single player in the game can prove who they are with cryptographic certainty. Imagine trying to do that in a game before crypto existed. It's a powerful thing that we still haven't even come close to scratching the surface. It's yet another reason why we need to develop a powerful non-kyc system of reputation.
Another massive advantage is stated in the title: crypto is inherently massively multiplayer by default. This is also a huge win and something that could have never even been fathomed in the early days of gaming. And the obvious derivative advantage of all this is that there is money on the base layer: also something that had previously proved impossible within the gaming industry before now.
Money ruins everything I guess!
And yet somehow here we are with every single blockchain game that gets invented being so contorted and twisted around the money aspect that it always ends up being a ridiculous ponzi who's purpose is to enrich the creator. I have not seen a single project in this entire ecosystem with the vibe of: "Yeah we just wanted to create something that was really cool and didn't care about scraping every last cent off the top for ourselves." Ironically enough this is the only way a valid decentralized game can come into existence; it can not bend over backwards for the token. Even more ironic is that open-source devs that just want to build cool stuff are nowhere to be found in crypto. All the real hardcore devs that do open-source work are completely turned off by our shitty greedy industry full of scams and absolute vaporware.
Your game doesn't need a token.
And speaking of tokens... there's very little reason for a blockchain game to ever have a native token in the first place. And yet they ALL have one for the reason I just illustrated... what essentially just boils down to greed and ignorance. Games (especially RPGs) are already chalked full of resources that do things and have value. The blockchains these things are built on already have a native currency. Most of the time the only reason to create a new one is to engage in pay-to-win ponzinomics.
NOT ALL GAMES QQ ðŸ˜
The big exception to a lot of what I'm saying here are CCGs. Collectible games are inherently pay to win because all of the collectibles have both value and power within the game. The only question is how much strategy can be employed through the gameplay. What I want to see is more role-playing-games... and if I have to look at another idle-mining pay-to-win ponzi marketing themselves as "strategy" I'm gonna lose my shit.