"I happily played World of Warcraft during 2007-2010, but one day Blizzard removed the damage component of my beloved warlock's Siphon Life spell. I cried myself to sleep and on that day I realized what horrors centralized services can bring. I soon decided to quit."
-Vitalik Buterin, Inventor of Ethereum.
I - If you gave me a World Computer, I would use it to play World Computer Video Games
Lay down your weapons. It's all just a misunderstanding. In fact, all along, we were all supposed to be friends.
The Metaverse is a confusing, dangerous place. That is okay. We can learn about it and journey through it together.
No, NFTs are not bad. They are just a tool that is sometimes misunderstood and, admittedly, misused.
It may not seem like it to all of us, but for a gamer, NFTs are an ideal tool in their day to day lives.
Like anyone, gamers use agreements to thrive in their environment. But, unlike everyone else, a gamer is more apt to use digital agreements because gaming is an activity that is natively digital. A digital agreement going valid would then be most advantageous to a gamer and digital agreement going awry would then be most adverse.
A Non-Fungible Token on a blockchain represents a digital agreement that allows a gamer to participate in novel models of gaming. This is because the relationship between gamer and digital entity can now be shifted to a higher degree of control and ownership. Notably, play-to-earn mechanics have been introduced and have been adopted–but a deterministic digital agreement can offer much more. Some may not be cognizant, but the traditional video games we deal with today are fraught with cages and holes.
Do I really have ownership of all the video games I purchased on Steam?1 Why is it that I can’t trade my FPS skins for real life money as I please? Why is it that a corporation controlling my account can ban my account without due process or reason? Where did the universe in my MMORPG server go? For years, professional gamers, professional streamers, casual players, mobile gamers ask questions like these and receive a chasm of silence as an answer.
Blockchain gaming utilizing NFTs constructed in the best way would offer solutions to these questions but, to find the best way we must examine some iterations.
There are different types of NFTs. Most live on a blockchain called Ethereum. But, we will see, this is not entirely true. The tokens that represent the contracts live on Ethereum, however, due to computational costs and capacity, the digital entity itself and most applications of the token are planted elsewhere–like decentralized storage protocols like IPFS or centralized cloud servers like AWS. The token only directs towards the hosted data because of fundamental protocol constraints in the blockchain.
You can think of a blockchain as a giant immutable ledger that holds computations. You call its functions and ask it things like: "Does Alice own this monkey picture?" and it will return to you in a cryptographically unforgeable way: "Yes, Alice does own that monkey picture."
This is useful because it gives Alice provable credentials she can take with her anywhere that has access to the internet. It could open doors for her–digital doors and even analog ones2. Some even lead to meatspace parties and concerts. Some allow you access to gated areas in video games, forums, and channels on discord. It is a privilege.
As you know, this system is not perfect. There are problems. For one thing, because the entity attached to the token is hosted outside, theoretically, you could disrupt the relationship between the token and the entity3. Instead of a cartoon monkey you could get a cartoon brown poop4.
Another, is that wallets that hold the tokens, like metamask, that are safeguarded by a 12 word private key are not as secure as you'd like them to be. It's possible to get your monkey NFT stolen if someone tricks you into signing a function you don’t understand5. Or, a malicious adversary might trick you into putting your private key somewhere where they can see it.
Not only is your personal wallet prone to attack, but the bridges that connect blockchains to other blockchains may also be stolen from. The bridge connecting Ronin, the side-chain for Axie Infinity, to Ethereum was hacked for a loss of about $600 million dollars. A social engineering attack initiated by the hackers was able to steal private keys of validator nodes, compromising assets on the bridge6.
Latency is another compromise when dealing with NFTs. Ethereum has a 15 minute long time to finality before your transaction is settled into the immutable ledger everyone values it for. Should blockchain gaming enter mass adoption, the underlying network protocol would need to function at the speed of a gamer’s impatience, which is likely measured in a few seconds.
Because of high demand and limited supply of computational space on Ethereum, transaction fees can be costly. During peak minutes of a popular NFT mint, gas prices, required for you to participate in the mint, could spike up to astronomical values in Ether and–even then–the chances of you getting the NFT you want is not guaranteed. It is possible for you to lose your entire net worth in multiple failed transactions7.
Even more expensive is any attempt at storing large sizes of data onto the Ethereum blockchain. Cost of storing 1 Gb of data on ethereum would cost roughly $70 to $240 million USD in Eth since block space is so in demand. Far too cost inefficient.
So how do we fix these issues?
You would need a blockchain that functions as a true World Computer.
The Dfinity Foundation, led by Dominic Williams, set out to solve all these problems. Let's see what they have done so far:
They have created a blockchain called the Internet Computer Protocol (ICP). A decentralized computing network, similar to AWS or Google Cloud, but without the big tech corporation that could unilaterally impose its decisions on its users. Instead, ICP runs using independent data centers coming to consensus to provide computational resources in a decentralized protocol. ICP is a computer made from a network of computers.
ICP is scalable through a novel type of cryptography called chain-key technology that allows large amounts of data in the ICP to be verified through a single public key that weighs 48 bytes8. In contrast, for Ethereum, you would need to download roughly 400 gb of blockchain data just to sync with the network and that amount of data grows as the Ethereum blockchain grows. ICP has a higher degree of scalability making it a more ideal decentralized platform for blockchain gaming.
NFTs made on the ICP are end-to-end on a blockchain9. This is because there is no need to host the contracted entities outside. Data fits, affordably, in the blockchain.
Instead of a corporation deciding on network policies for you, what happens on the ICP is decided by the users, through a modified proof-of-stake protocol called Network Nervous System (NNS). Proposals are presented and then stakeholders of the ICP token vote on the proposals by locking their tokens into Neurons10. Stakeholders are then rewarded with yield for their interest in choosing a proposal. It is possible for you to set your neuron to follow another neuron you might select for being more knowledgeable in a particular topic, making voting for proposals more efficient. Proposals would only be implemented if the voters come to a consensus11.
The NNS can even be extended to the application level through the Service Nervous System (SNS)12. Developers would be able to launch a game dApp13 and allow the community of users to govern changes in the game using a similar protocol architecture as the NNS. Applied to a gaming dApp, game developers would only be able to introduce a new feature (weapon or character etc.) to your game only with your agreement through voting. SNS as a tool allows developers and users to come to a consensus as to the best paths for contents for a game.
Accessing your NFTs and gaming applications makes use of a new type of authentication system called Internet Identity (II)14 that seeks to do away with the password login of traditional IT systems. An II would allow you to authenticate yourself to your gaming account by touching a fingerprint sensor, using face identity, using a PIN lock, or a Yubi key. An Identity Anchor number is generated for you and you may attach your various devices to it using the II dApp. Only devices attached by yourself to your identity anchor would be able to access your account.
Authenticating yourself to your gaming account would be as easy as touching the fingerprint sensor on your laptop or using face identity on your phone.
II - Alice in Metaverse
“What this ends up looking like–pragmatically–is that I might have a sword or a character in a video game and be able to carry that into another video game.”
Now that we have learned of some new tools–what is the difference? We can demonstrate by asking: Does Alice own her digital assets?
If we define ownership as the state, act, and right of possession, we can compare ownership models and trust relationships between gaming assets acquired through corporate cloud game servers, gaming NFTs tokenized on Ethereum (including L2s and other L1 PoS protocols), and gaming NFTs on ICP. Does Alice have the state, ability to act, and right to own her digital products?
On a corporate cloud gaming service like Steam, Alice is allowed ownership of her digital assets by the issuing corporation because data containing ownership of the asset is stored on the issuing corporation’s database. She is explicitly not allowed by the issuing corporation to trade any in-game assets like skins or gaming points in a secondary market. Although Alice and the corporation agree that she purchased the in-game assets, Alice must trust the corporation to hold the data pertaining to asset ownership which is her user account. Because the database is centralized in nature, it is possible for the corporation to deplatform Alice completely, locking her out of possession of in-game items. This business model is maximally extractive on the user because the corporation can unilaterally dictate the agreement of ownership for the end user and has been earning the ire of many gamers16. The corporate gaming cloud is essentially a data cage.
When Alice participates on Ethereum–which is meant to be a general computational platform that all computers may share–Alice holds her digital assets in a crypto wallet like Metamask and is secured by a private key only she should have access to. There are, however, some trust assumptions in using a browser wallet with a private key: Alice must trust that her installer for the crypto wallet app has not been compromised and should she be tricked into revealing her private key all her assets would get stolen. While there is a secondary market available for Alice to sell or trade her assets to gain or recover monetary value, economic models for the supply of gaming assets often rely on inflows of new players to match supply and demand dynamics for the assets to maintain their price. Once new player inflows dwindle or stop, supply rate of assets end up outweighing demand and this causes a rapid decline in value17.
While the token may be safeguarded by the economic security Ethereum offers, the same cannot be said for the metadata the token points to outside the blockchain. Exploits exist that can disrupt data stored on IPFS18 and allow an adversary to cheat value distribution because of the disjointed relationship between token and metadata19. Updates to IPFS for managing malicious activity can be clumsily executed as IPFS does not have a built-in governance protocol. Scalability in cost of storing data with the combination of a smart contract platform like Ethereum and a decentralized file storage protocol like Filecoin or Arweave is also questionable20. Ethereum takes a step in the right direction towards a gamer’s sovereign ownership but is unable to fully complete the most desired outcomes due to technical dilemmas in protocol design.
On ICP, Alice can participate in a network that has an emphasis on the decentralized identity log-in and the end-to-end on a blockchain security model of a digital asset. Like in Ethereum, digital assets on ICP are managed through a digital wallet (Stoic or Plug) but have the added optionality of using Internet Identity (II) for a more secure log in. You may sell or trade your digital items as they are under your control through a private key with the added advantage of interoperability through Canisters21 which are an evolution of smart contracts. Canisters are used as the building blocks of dApps on the ICP. They allow scaling and interoperability to an infinite degree which means digital gaming assets and gaming dApps would be able to keep up with mass adoption. If Alice owned her sword on the ICP platform she could take it with her through different gaming dApps and perhaps even generate monetary capital through borrowing against it using a DeFi protocol. The built in security mechanisms would indeed make it difficult to separate her from it and the interoperability opportunities would make it less likely that the value of her sword would decrease in monetary value by imbuing it with utility in different virtual environments.
Ownership is correlated with prosperity in the history of human society. If this is so, then is it a worthwhile question to ask what would happen if Alice owned what she played22?
III - Blockchain Singularity
“Blockchain singularity is the migration of all of humanity's systems and services to blockchain.”
Paradigm shifts occur when there is a new idea introduced that counteract the present status quo24. The idea of blockchain gaming is very much untested but offers a unique opportunity for gamers to truly own their digital assets and have a democratic say so as to the progression of their gaming applications. In the era of 2020 to 2021 we had an exciting upsurge in blockchain activity as NFTs hit the consciousness of the masses–often with emotionally and monetarily violent reactions. This can be seen as the Installation Phase of technological adoption which is triggered by a radical invention of a new paradigm that leads to the disintermediation of an old paradigm.
Blockchain was invented by a pseudonymous person or persons named Satoshi Nakamoto. This was a solution to a distributed computing problem called the Byzantine Generals Problem25 which is an abstraction for the problem of generating an algorithm that allows multiple computing devices to agree on a function even if there are malicious or malfunctioning devices interrupting the protocol consensus. The initial use case for it was as a peer-to-peer cash network that could send value in the form of Bitcoins from one digital wallet to another by use of public and private key signatures.
An innovation emerged on blockchains through Ethereum which was invented by a young computer programmer named Vitalik Buterin. Instead of just a peer-to-peer cash system, the Ethereum blockchain incorporates a virtual machine that enables the programming of autonomous code called smart contracts. Logic can be programmed into an ethereum account and it can act as a digital vending machine that will provide a deterministic output once prompted by a predetermined input.
The Internet Computer Protocol seeks to further expand the capabilities of blockchains through both integrating with the Bitcoin and Ethereum networks and offering refinements to protocol design that will allow decentralized networks to operate independently from tech corporations. As we familiarize ourselves with the new paradigm of blockchains that enable deterministic agreements, business models that offer a robust platform through decentralization look to present themselves. As an entrepreneur or venture capitalist in the gaming industry, you may either choose to build your endeavors on top of a big tech corporation that would have the ability to turn your acquired services off, or you may build on top of a decentralized network that no one entity controls but is subject to the democratic voting of the network’s community. This is a synergistic opportunity that will be presented more and more to builders and users alike until there is a potential for all of our gaming infrastructure to be hosted and used through ICP, and indeed even past gaming–to all humanities digital agreements.
The infrastructure for this extension of the internet is being set and is looking for the right product-market fit26. Just as the advent of the cars and the internet, people encountering these technologies didn’t understand what to make of them in an initial epoch. Exploratory improvements had to be made in these industrial technologies and then an epoch of creative destruction occurred where the iterations of the technology that were not appealing or useful were discarded. The products and services that survived, triggered an explosion of adoption that strengthened interconnectedness and interdependence of systems in their technologies and markets. Profound transformation took place in the economy and society as the new technology set itself to a path to ubiquity until the technological cycle is ready to begin anew once more.
Value of a technology is justified by a technology's ability to improve the human condition. A network that would enable sovereign ownership of digital assets would shift the value accrual from the incumbents that are the governments and corporations, to the individual. True data ownership not only means that the user has the control of their own data but that organizations would have to pay the user to acquire permission to obtain or share the data27. In this latest iteration of the technological cycle and industrial revolution, gamers are offered the chance to play in an autonomous, self-sovereign network that never existed before28.
Given the choice between a cage and an open field ripe with resources, who would choose to play in the cage?
IV - Dfinity Foundation
“My background is gaming and my passion is blockchain.”
Dominic Williams is a video game builder at heart. Earlier in his entrepreneurship endeavors he created the distributed computing systems for Fight My Monster, a video game aimed for younger gamers that involved monsters you could fight and trade with to earn golden nuggets–sort of like gaming NFTs.
After his introduction to Bitcoin and blockchain technology, initially, he acquired a domain name for what he thought of as Gamecoin30, a cryptocurrency that would have allowed you to carry value from game-to-game. His transition to building blockchains involved doing research as part of the Ethereum community31. Inspired by the concept of a world computer32 from the then emerging Ethereum ecosystem, he set himself to work to look for ways to drive large consensus networks. He recognized that decentralized networks allowed for free markets that are most advantageous for innovative entrepreneurs who then exponentially grow the market and network. And that smart contracts were a new type of software that were superior to other forms of software in terms of determinism and security. As CEO of the Dfinity foundation he initiated its efforts on research and development for what would become the Internet Computer Protocol in early 2015. On May 7, 2021, the Internet Computer Protocol underwent a genesis mainnet launch33.
The best way to understand a project is to understand the team behind it. Dominic managed to assemble the largest tech conglomerate of cryptographers, distributed computing experts, programming language experts, and academics for his mission34 in blockchain innovation.
Among many notables working in Dfinity is Jan Camenisch35 who is the Chief Technology Officer for Dfinity. Formerly in IBM as Principal Research Staff Member, he is the main inventor of Identity Mixer, a cryptographic protocol for generating anonymous credentials.
Ben Lynn36 works as senior staff engineer and researcher for Dfinity after working many years in senior engineering roles at Google. He is “L” in BLS Signature37: a cryptographic signature scheme that is both used in Ethereum38 (post-merge) and ICP as well as many other blockchain layer-1 protocols. BLS signatures are a key building block of blockchains used to prove authenticity and integrity in blockchains.
Andreas Rossberg39 is a co-creator of WebAssembly40 (Wasm) and leads the development of Motoko41, the native coding language of ICP. Wasm was a joint project, initiated by Google, Mozzila, Microsoft, and Apple to create a new standard for universal web software that allows other languages to efficiently compile before being turned into the 1s and 0s hardware understands. Motoko was developed to serve as a more seamless programming language designed specifically for the capabilities of ICP.
The Dfinity Foundation is a not-for-profit organization who see themselves as a major contributor to the ICP42. As the network itself grows and develops, the intention is to involve other organizations to contribute research and development to further propagate the network. The beauty of blockchain singularity is that it enables everyone so that anyone can build43.
V - Dfinity and beyond
“We’re not only changing the platform on what you build, but we’re changing what you can build. It’s a new kind of platform.”
The unimagined lies ahead. Just as, an observer of the development of the early internet could not have predicted modern application services like Uber and AirBnB, so too are we blind to what developments may be composed using blockchain technology–good or bad–in our coming future. Yet, knowing this, we may continue to venture forth by building our own path.
The innovation boom of the dot-com era in the 90s that allowed us the technological amenities we enjoy today was in part triggered by the ability of the decentralized nature of the initial internet to offer fairness in entrepreneurship. Since then, the structures of the internet have begun to centralize in the form of big tech corporations that strangle innovation prospects. What we have in our future is an opportunity to once more decentralize the services we use and give ourselves a more deterministic relationship with our digital assets and services.
On some challenges are to be overcomed:
Let us consider some ideas:
First: above all, a video game must be fun.
Second: the opposite of platform risk is platform optionality.
While these two ideas may seem uncorrelated, the latter idea is the most suitable tool to accelerate the former.
If platform risk is the imposition of power, then the opposite: platform optionality, is the manifestation of free and voluntary play.
A gamer will play the game that is the most fun and abandon the games that are least fun. Platform optionality that is offered on ICP is in essence an antidote to big tech corporation platform risk that comes in the form of monetary blockades that hinder a gamers play and fun.
Instead of artificially obstructed play where the developers set boundaries for you to leap over with money, you can have a natural, associative play where developers enable open doors and wider paths because it is in the interest of their revenue model to generate the largest number of connections for play possible. ICP used to its full gaming potential would not only offer novelty to a gamer but the prospect of infinite novelty.
It is the games that successfully manifest the spirit of free and voluntary play by platform optionality that have the highest propensity to thrive in the advent of the open metaverse.
This type of inversion of relationship dynamics is the aspect of ICP gaming that best represents the concept of decentralized infinity for gaming.
Understandably, this is all difficult to understand.
Barriers to entry must be met to enable mass adoption of blockchain gaming. Some of these barriers are technological and some are psychological. User interfaces and games may be worked on by developers but they will not be touched by the public masses if there is a distrust stemming from misunderstandings. The capabilities of the ICP, while still in its implementation phases, is not comparable to what other blockchains are understood to be capable of. Native gamers of other blockchains may approach ICP with conceptions and measures applicable to other blockchains, but not at all to ICP45.
META, the company led by Mark Zuckerberg, and its mission to create its own centralized corporate based metaverse must not be confused with ICP, Dfinity, and its mission to create a decentralized user-based, cloud computing network using blockchain technology. They are in fact engaged in a lawsuit over suspiciously similar logos46.
The cage that can be closed is hidden in the open field, and to thrive we must be weary of the difference.
On crime and regulation:
All frontiers are dangerous, the metaverse can be expected to be rife with crime and scams. Why is it that today people receive malicious emails and phone calls yet people do not fall for all of them? The metaverse will have peril that comes along with its advantages. People who will be able to navigate will do so by developing a cognitive anti-fragility as well as a few technical tools that help filter out malicious interactions. Just as we do now, we will rely on cryptography and AI to assist us.
Blockchains are inherently transparent. Each transaction in Bitcoin from the very genesis block can be seen through a bitcoin explorer, and each smart contract written in Ethereum can be seen through a smart contract explorer like etherscan. Learning from protocols on Ethereum47, transactions and smart contract code in ICP canisters could be analyzed for patterns that show involvement with money laundering, wash trading, and insolvencies. We would then need better regulatory clarity from lawmakers as to the nuances of participation in the metaverse once finance and video games begin to merge into a GameFi industry.
For an adoption of a technology to occur, the technology must first be understood at least to a certain degree. Retail users must learn to discern for the nuances between a centralized network and a decentralized network, and even further they must discern between sufficiently decentralized networks that are true web3 and insufficiently decentralized networks that may have blockchain validators operating on top of a centralized cloud provider like AWS or may have user funds in a potentially insolvent Centralized Exchange (CEX). The discussions about blockchain technology relating to criminal activity we have been having will continue and will likely get even more noisy.
On energy efficiency:
There isn’t much time left to curb our carbon emissions before we cause irreversible damage to our own planet. Cryptocurrency consensus mechanisms have been criticized48 for their energy inefficiencies.
Although it is likely that Bitcoin will remain as proof-of-work (miners are rewarded for burning electricity) for the sake of its own protocol functionality49, other blockchains have for the most part chosen the exponentially less energy intensive proof-of-stake50 (validators are rewarded for staking their token) as part of their sybil resistance mechanism. ICP is actually neither of these, but a novel type of mechanism that is called Proof-of-Useful-Work51.
Nodes in the ICP network are guided by the NNS to follow a productivity parameter that has them providing a similar number of blocks and smart contract transaction volumes. It is up to the governance of the NNS to decide if a node should be slashed for malicious behavior as activities that cause deviation from the productivity parameter are taken on a case by case basis. This more efficient mechanism achieves entry cost, existence cost, and exit penalty for participating nodes at a lower cost of energy than other blockchain networks52. Because the nodes are operated by independent data centers, energy demands from traditional IT infrastructure do not stack on energy costs of ICP. A transaction in ICP costs less energy than other blockchain transactions.
ICP still has milestones to reach in the environmentally friendly aspect of the protocol. Proposals to develop real-time carbon emission analytics and to develop a decarbonized subnet running on sustainable green energy are still underway53. There is a prospect of moving the entire ICP network to zero emission subnets.
A sustainable cybereconomy in the free and open metaverse offers financial growth for a protocol participant outside the control of the current systems that are advantageous to incumbents. It turns out that a step towards the path of caring for our environment is to make the inhabitants of earth to be sufficiently financially well off to afford the virtue of caring for the environment54.
On Bot infestation:
Social media sites like Twitter and Instagram and MMORPGs like WoW and Final Fantasy have had a long history of bot infestations making the platforms more annoying to a user so it is a valid concern that games and social media sites that gamers may want to use in ICP may be overrun with the same problem. A bot infestation would be even more dangerous in a Web3 environment as a user's digital property may be at risk. We do, however, have some ideas to prevent bot infestations from becoming prevalent using novel cryptography that smart contract platforms are uniquely capable of.
Proof-of-personhood has long been a goal sought after by cryptographers. A solution proposed by Dominic Williams is a process called People Parties55 designed to anonymously prove personhood through a dApp by virtually providing proof of being in a geographic location. There are also the other concepts such as a decentralized identity56 that uses a council of nodes to prove legitimacy of a person through various log-ins on their various internet accounts and POAP57 NFTs that are given to a person by appearing at certain events. Game developers will still have to test and apply one or a combination of these resistance mechanisms to solve the problem of bot infestation.
On Quantum Computing:
Instead of bits of a classical computer, quantum computers use exponentially more powerful qubits as a basic unit of computation. Using qubits as a computational unit, quantum algorithms58 can be created that may solve cryptographic protocols that safeguard our internet, banking, and parts of blockchain infrastructure. It might be that malicious actors in the future will be equipped with such tools and unravel the different protocols our society depends on today. At present, many cryptographers including the ones in Dfinity59 are proactively developing quantum-resistant cryptography. When the threat of quantum computing comes, the advantage of ICP would be its own decentralized nature. Research, funding for research, and implementation of research to make ICP more robust in a quantum adversary filled future would need not only come from Dfinity but from, prospectively, many different contributors that have the interests of ICP at heart.
The coming blockchain revolution has a medley of prospects:
On composability for stories:
When it comes to storytelling, game developers have changed from a linear model to an open-world model as computational resources in gaming devices improved and development tools like Unreal Engine became more refined. Because of the ability of a Canister in ICP to call a function on another Canister, gaming network ecosystems where multiple dApp games use a shared set of digital assets is possible. This new type of composability60 should be seen as–not only a novel economic tool–but as a novel storytelling tool too. The story of a digital entity is no longer bound by the will of the developer who created and maintains it but by the owner or set of owners that act with the digital entity. Instead of bemoaning the loss of single-game storytelling61 we should be rejoicing about the possibility of multi-game storytelling. Even more than that, we could be looking at metaverse storytelling combined with real life storytelling.
Like Bored Ape Yacht Club on Ethereum, NFTs with CC062 license would allow each owner of an NFT to have a liberal creative commons license allowing use for commercial purposes. Owning a CC0 NFT then would give you the right to create content for your own commercial gain.
The free and open metaverse enabled by ICP would allow each gamer to own their digital assets forever. We could have legacy gaming NFTs that might have been owned by a Daigo “The Beast” Umehara or a Lim “Slayers_BoxeR” Yo Hwan that have provenance of ownership established through blockchain data passed on from greatest player to greatest player. Developers would then be incentivized to compose games based on these NFTs creating a virtuous cycle that leads to a level of monetary and content prosperity that was never possible before.
The drama between professional e-sports rivals like Daigo Umehara and Justin Wong in a fighting game like Street Fighter or Lee Young Ho and Lee Jaedong in a real-time strategy game like Starcraft enhanced the storytelling of a video game past its out-of-the-box storyline. Could a drama platformed across multiple games on a metaverse gaming ecosystem be even more epic?
On DAO governed video games:
To Vitalik Buterin’s dismay, his relationship with a corporate gaming server is top-down.
He is unable to have any say in his in-game fate. A video game governed by a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) such as a Service Nervous System (SNS) would act based on the will of the users instead of a corporation.
Video game patches would have to be voted on by the players who actually play the game, rather than incumbent representatives of a gaming corporation who may or may not be partial to how the general player base feels about upcoming patches. A DAO would not be prone to technical opacity that occurs when the few govern the many as it is a governance protocol that enables a bottom-up approach that follows the majority vote of the player base to decide the acceptance or rejection of an update. Since users and stakeholders would be the same entity in a DAO, the voting incentives would be correlated to the decisions that would best grow the gaming network and growth would return monetary premium to the participants.
Those that disagree with the majority vote could opt out of a gaming network and start a different network that follows their preferences. Bitcoin and Ethereum have both experienced “hard forks” in their code and user-base, which is a schism where a set of participants decide on a direction and a different set of participants decide on a different direction. The network deemed the legitimate version of the game would end up with player base and monetary dominance over the other versions. It may be that future DAO games would have multiple active versions running in an open metaverse competing for player-base dominance and monetary growth.
On what smart contracts mean to gaming tournaments:
Since the advent of professional gaming, professional gamers have fallen victim to unpaid tournament winnings by a malicious counterparty. Smart contracts could be used to mitigate counterparty risk on tournament prize pools. Just as we now come to demand encryption in our e-commerce websites and our text message apps, once professional gamers understand the degree of guarantees that blockchains provide, they may demand the same type of counterparty security before they play a tournament that is their livelihood. You have a gaming tournament? Great. Let’s put the prize pool in a DAO governed smart contract and the winner of the tournament gets an unstoppable payout to their account once the tournament is won.
There are even novel types of gaming models being worked on that may introduce the concept of permanent death of your digital avatar. Losing a match would mean losing your NFT in a high stakes competition. A flourishing renaissance era of the gaming industry could be enabled should standards like these–and others yet imagined–become adopted.
On Blockchain gaming helping science :
Gamers may monetize their data at the same time as being able to contribute to research related to different branches of science like psychology and neuroscience. The Corrupted Blood Incident63 in World of Warcraft helped epidemiologists map out the irrational patterns of behavior humans do in the event of an epidemic. Gaming dApps could be set up that help solve fundamental problems in science64. Participating gamers might then be rewarded with NFTs or tokens for their participation. The natural transparency of a blockchain would make it the most suitable type of database for such a task as analyzing and replicating the data for scientific purposes.
On Intimate Digital Relationships:
The old joke that gamers have been wasting their time has become less and less true with the industrialization of gaming. Different types of gamers have flourished in an industry that has come to eclipse many traditional entertainment industries65 in revenue66. But what would a persistent metaverse mean to the relationships of a gamer? ICP may offer a higher degree of trust and guarantees even in the relationship aspects of a gamer's life. Perhaps, in the free and open metaverse, I help you on this quest to obtain a particular gaming NFT in this gaming dApp, and perhaps later on, in a different gaming dApp, you might help me to get a particular gaming NFT I want. All of our interactions are guaranteed by a smart contract.
For many gamers, gaming is more than just a hobby, but a way of life. Interpersonal relationships molded and bonded through the internet are sometimes just as good or even more important than real-life relationships, even more so in the present years. But social bonds through the internet are withheld by the bounds of the internet in its current form. You are not sure that the pseudonym you are interacting with is truly what they say they are. The attempt at social dynamics with others is bound by intermediaries that could de-platform you or demand more pay for their services. Just as we do not yet understand the full psychological implications of interacting with AI, we do not yet understand the full sociological implications of decentralizing our play with smart contracts. As developers experiment with what they can do with this new type of platform technology it is eventual that a few of them may blow up. Not every project will succeed. There is always risk in fanciful envisioning of the future. But, it just might be that the ICP ecosystem will be able to give gamers what we all want: to be free to play.
Written by hiimRave.icp
NFA. Special thanks to the efforts of Isaac Valdez and Sebastian Thuiller at Motoko Bootcamp and the writings of Bob Bodily who helped shape my thoughts on Dfinity and ICP.
This was an incredible write up. I came over from InfinitySwap blog and this is a great article to share to someone who may not understand ICP or blockchain/dlt in general. I'll be sure to sub.
Although I have been active in the ICP ecosystem on a daily basis (many hours a day) since the first day ICP coin was released, I still did not know some of these issues.
It gives the reader a very good and broad view of the future of ICP
Wow.
This was an incredible write up. I came over from InfinitySwap blog and this is a great article to share to someone who may not understand ICP or blockchain/dlt in general. I'll be sure to sub.
Well written
Although I have been active in the ICP ecosystem on a daily basis (many hours a day) since the first day ICP coin was released, I still did not know some of these issues.
It gives the reader a very good and broad view of the future of ICP
thanks