Thoughts on open issues of games on the Paradigm chain: Player experience is higher than technical details
Author: Ryan Berckmans
Compilation of the original text: Deep Tide TechFlow
Paradigm recently published an article on open issues for on-chain gaming. I worked on game and virtual world development before Ethereum and wanted to post some thoughts in response to Charlie and Dougs article. In what follows, you refers to Paradigm.
Chain types for the four basic on-chain games
There appear to be four basic types of blockchain, although one may be purely theoretical:
(public, private) x (centralized, decentralized)
Centralized public chains such as BSC. Depending on different people, this may or may not include Solana.
Public decentralized chains such as Ethereum or late enough L2.
Private centralized chains such as federated chains running in industry organizations VPNs. Or Ethereum zk L2 which keeps data off-chain and limits the list of participants, but settles on Ethereum.
Private decentralized chains are an interesting concept that may be purely theoretical. Monroe? Encrypted EVM?
These chain types provide us with a lens through which we can explore the potential of pure on-chain gaming:
Why put games on a private, centralized blockchain? What capabilities can a baseline blockchain architecture provide that may not be related to publicity or decentralization? For example, for a closed, centralized game, perhaps the EVM architecture, infrastructure, and tools may provide a platform with superior functionality or cheaper operating costs than existing solutions.
Why put games on a public, centralized blockchain? What are the benefits of public chains compared to private chains? Are there situations where decentralization might be a disadvantage and centralization is preferable?
Why put games on a public, decentralized blockchain? What are the benefits when you start with a public chain and then add in the extremely strong property rights of decentralization, the resistance to censorship, and the expectation that the chain will live forever?
To what extent is the reason for putting games on the blockchain due to the capabilities of the core blockchain technology, rather than the public nature or decentralization of the chain? This seems to be an interesting area of research.
Is this a Mod, or an API?
I think youre right, Mods are a great example of how on-chain gaming can be competitive. Typically, the problem with Web2 mod platforms is that the mod execution environment is internal to the game environment. That said, no matter how cool your mod is, it usually has to work inside the game.
Compared with the Web2 Mod platform, on-chain games can provide better structural separation of data, assets, core algorithms, identities, etc. (as well as the composability of the former), thereby creating opportunities for any downstream architecture, integration and experience.
Of course, the Web2 game API already provides downstream freedom, such as EVE and League of Legends extensive third-party tools.
So, whats the difference between a mod platform and an API?
Of course, in Web2 games, the API is usually a separate product separate from the core data, and therefore technically has different data and functionality than the underlying engine.
On-chain games can provide the functionality of Mods and the freedom of APIs, along with all the other benefits that exist on-chain.
To the question whats the difference between a mod platform and an API?, for on-chain games, the answer might be who cares?
By exposing superior fundamental building blocks such as smart contracts, open data, and more, we enable the market to deliver whatever it wants and transcend the taxonomy of off-chain mods and APIs.
In product economics, combining N capabilities (each with value in its own right) onto a surface tends to make the whole worth more than the sum of its parts. This may help spark our intuition that we have high expectations for the integration of mods, APIs, payments, etc. in on-chain games.
For example, if we make the player guilds data and algorithms public, the market can leverage these data and algorithms to provide relevant downstream experiences to any relevant stakeholders. For example: a dashboard for investors or power users, management tools for guild leaders, secret productivity tools for top guilds, tools for distributing team loot (a common pain point), completely standalone games using guild member rosters (team building activities ).
Of course, these downstream experiences may support arbitrary crypto-financial components, such as payments tied to the core game or natively to the downstream experience, and may be embedded directly into the players primary experience (i.e., the game client), or as a third-party web page, Apps, data sources, New York Times Square billboards, and more. Do these meet the definition of a Mod? API client? The answer is yes.
It seems that on-chain capabilities blur the lines between game mods and APIs, just as modern wallet and account abstractions blur the lines between transactions and operations.
Did I pay someone or did I vote on social posts? Do I create a video call or mint an NFT representing the call as a composable piece of art that can be integrated into Web3 social? The answer is yes - both.
I agree with the importance of users opting in to mods by choosing their clients to explain mods (rather than letting admins make the decision for them).
Of course, giving users the choice of active mods helps create a market. This market is driven by, among other things, superior user experiences (unique or unique to on-chain games) and the emergence of composable, permissionless innovation. Relatively powerful, but not for off-chain games).
An open economy on L2/L3 may always be close to DeFi
Regarding the idea that an open economy on-chain benefits from proximity to DeFi, one area of research I dabble in is the notion of a distance metric between any two chains.
How far are the two L1s? between any two L2? Between two L3s of the same family?
For users, all costs are transaction costs and all benefits are transaction benefits.
This doesn’t mean straight-line distance, but user experience.
One advertiser once joked that instead of spending $1 billion to shorten train journey times to London, they should spend $50 million providing better WiFi and more attractive train staff.
As you know, there is ongoing evidence that soon, cross/interchain exchanges may be as simple, fast, easy, and relatively cheap as L1 exchanges are done today.
If DeFi operations across L2 become good enough, this may have an impact on the actual benefits of combining the games open economy with mature DeFi/liquidity, rather than putting it on the application chain or other chains.
For example, suppose a chain succeeds in becoming a valuable and moatable chain hosting an open economy for a series of independent games. The factors that make this chain so ideal for on-chain economics may have nothing to do with DeFi or liquidity.
What if the more players, the more Ticks?
As for the technical opening of the Ticks issue, I like your mention of modifying Rollups state transition function to include a game loop for the time difference since the last Ticks.
(Deep Chao Note: tick means the number of delayed frames per second of the server)
Another area of research could be changing the number of ticks based on the amount of player activity. The size of ticks could be constant or dynamic.
For example, consider a world where time speeds up or slows down depending on the heat of the game. Or time doesnt speed up, but resolution increases.
We can imagine a Ticks World Chain with zero-knowledge proof, where anyone can submit the worlds next Ticks without permission, as long as they are willing to calculate. In the early days of launch, World Chain might be running 5,000 Ticks per day, and in later years, when only a group of loyal nostalgics remained, the pace might slow down to 20 Ticks per day.
Of course, in this example of the PoW world chain, controlling the relationship between the number of Ticks and hardware performance may require support similar to Bitcoins difficulty adjustment.
Limit maximization of incentive compatibility by introducing artificial transaction costs
I agree that compositionality is inherently financial, which leads to increased economic efficiency and pushes the system to the limits of its incentive compatibility, which I call maximization of incentive compatibility.
As for why compositionality has this effect, a fundamental reason may be that compositionality reduces transaction costs. As Adam Smith explains, (i) transaction costs limit the scope of the market, (ii) the scope of the market limits the scope of specialization. ization, (iii) when specialization increases we obtain better, cheaper and novel goods and services.
In other words, composability helps increase the size of the transaction network for on-chain games by reducing transaction costs, that is, reducing friction.
Large-scale transaction networks enable specialization, thereby enabling inherent financialization and creating a high degree of economic efficiency, which in turn pushes the game to the limits of its incentive compatibility.
If transaction costs are conversely high, intrinsic financialization may be hampered and games tend to settle into a state of economic inefficiency, with players etc. responding only partially to incentives.
Since lower transaction costs drive economic efficiency and incentive compatibility extremism, on-chain games can intentionally limit the scope of the market by introducing artificial transaction costs to find solutions.
You give an example of licensing as a transaction cost that inhibits inherent financialization.
Let me explore access control and its relationship to introducing artificial transaction costs to limit maximizing incentive compatibility:
Interesting research questions might include, are all transaction costs that may be introduced to weaken or limit inherent financialization and economic efficiency instances of authority control? What are the underlying strategies or components that can be used to reduce intrinsic financialization?
My intuition is that, yes, any kind of transaction costs that can be introduced to limit inherent financialization seems likely to be an instance of access control, and there may be a variety of orthogonal access control primitives.
Examples of authority controls that limit inherent financialization and economic efficiency may include:
Use password/authentication. Like all passwords, this can be (i) something you are, such as a level 90+ mage, (ii) something you know, such as a password found in a copy, or (iii) something you have, such as Moxie, the general.
Use rate limiting. Of course, this could be one operation per identity per time period. Or like the entire game world in each cycle has ten chances, maybe one person can claim them all.
Whitelists, including authoritarian whitelists run by developers, whitelists based on on-chain governance, or sweepstakes. There is an interesting intersection with passwords, and technically every form of permission control is a whitelist. We can generate a whitelist of everyone who has completed the weeks raid, received the weeks special item, recently met at least five players at the city tavern, or has received a specific legendary item.
After building permissions, there is a separate question of what to do with it.
You mentioned controlling who can play games and who can deploy code. These can be broken down by different game characters and codes with different perks (e.g. access to social systems but not combat).
We control who can transfer in-game assets. Account abstraction transfers that bypass our controls can be mitigated in general ways, such as by reducing property rights such as modified taxes, automatic repossession of assets upon demonstrable violations (in-game penalties), or by limiting who can acquire assets for the first time (This may not be the same as controlling who can play the game).
Crucially, the degree to which incentive compatibility is maximized depends on the practical feasibility of transaction costs.
So partial access control may be enough to keep the economy interesting.
For example, Path of Exile has had less friction for in-game transactions over the years, but it famously required characters to physically meet up in-game in order to manually exchange items in the trade window.
The developers of Path of Exile dont allow automatic item transfers because they understand that this is the minimum transaction cost friction needed to make the economy interesting. Automatic item transfers create too much economic efficiency, ruining game pacing and exploration.
Another example is Diablo 3s physical auction house, which is a good case study of the dangers of accidental economic efficiency.
In less than a month, players quickly cleared the entire game, months faster than the developers expected.
In this day and age of Diablo III, finding items yourself is foolish -- anything worth using is cheaper on the auction house. Why spend 50 hours grinding gear when you can get an awesome item for 30 cents? Why be the worst player in your circle of friends when everyone else can be invincible for $3?
Moderating the chances of maximizing incentive compatibility by introducing artificial transaction costs seems to be an interesting area of research. In particular, issues related to the differences in issues and tools between successful on-chain games and established models in off-chain games.
On-chain metagame dynamism seems easy to handle
On the question of metagame stagnation, I like the examples you mentioned of seasonality, automated feedback, and research directions for novel governance mechanisms.
The concept of seasonality is deep and diverse.
Is the new season an instance of most or all of the game, where the player starts over from scratch? Is the new season mainly around elements like rewards and leaderboards, or is it around the concept of physics? Is the new season mandatory? Can veteran players opt out and continue playing older seasons? How will the on-chain impact impact these decisions or opportunities?
New seasonal or dynamic models may be provided on the chain. For example, due to digital scarcity or on-chain capabilities for zero-knowledge privacy.
Taking Augur as an example, it adopts a voluntary fork model in which users must make mutually exclusive choices among N target forks.
Maybe players can base this on season preference (Season of Fire or Season of Water?), Mod Collection (which randomly drawn subset of Mods will be active next season?) or based on storyline (Did the prince slay the dragon, or did the dragon slay the prince? ) fork their own player base. Then, unlike Augur, these forks can perhaps be re-merged at a later time to preserve the integrity of the gaming community.
What does immutability actually mean for a game or world? This is a great example of a virtual world topic with a deep literature that goes back decades. Early designers of virtual worlds were well aware that immutability and persistence had many critical and structural implications.
We might tend to think of immutability and persistence as similar concepts, but in an on-chain game or world, they are orthogonal.
Immutability is what can be changed, why it can be changed, and by whom.
Persistence is the concept of how long content remains changed and why it is possible to revert to some baseline or next generation.
An interesting empirical result from older virtual worlds is that there is a positive correlation between the permissionlessness of mutations and the types of mutations that persist.
That is, in the old virtual world, the more people who could change things (e.g. anyone could change things, or only non-newbies, experienced players, trusted players, trained administrators, developers people, etc.), the broader the type of change that persists (e.g. only character changes persist, or do object classes, objects in physical locations, the world as a whole, or features/custom algorithms also persist).
It turns out that this correlation isnt just due to product economics (i.e. the more people you allow to change something, the more things can be changed), but due to the games positioning or value proposition:
Games that only allow limited persistent change for a few people tend to approach the player experience in a cinematic or prescriptive way. Youre playing our world.
Games with a high degree of continuous change played by many people tend to be sandbox-like and extremely social in terms of player experience. Our world was created by you.
Whether this historical correlation will continue in on-chain gaming seems to be an interesting area of research.
Maybe a game can be played multiple times by any number of people, but it cant be modified or expanded by anyone. Games like this work really well off-chain, like Tetris. Or imagine how many people would continue to play League of Legends or Dota even if updates were stopped. Can similar games succeed on the chain?
In short, immutability and persistence and their relationship to metagame stagnation and on-chain gaming opportunities appear to be a rich design space and research area.
Now turning to the issue of metagame stagnation:
The point is, the metagame equilibrium is a function of the net opportunity cost of the entire game or, in a sufficiently connected system, even the game network.
Often all thats needed to refresh the metagame is to add new content that breaks the opportunity cost balance, without modifying old content.
Note that a game that only accepts data extensions can still receive new code by instantiating the algorithm as data. This is a popular pattern in Web2 game engines, especially for implementing more advanced creator tools.
You mentioned automated feedback to help refresh the metagame. Of course, automated feedback can take countless forms.
Personally, two forms of automated feedback that Im particularly interested in are:
(i) The next season of the game is modified by or based on the winners and losers of the previous season.
For example, maybe the most successful player from the previous season becomes the team leader for the next season. In this case, last seasons popular builds determine the next seasons challenges.
(ii) Genetic algorithms modify the games physics, statistics, rules, ability levels, assets, etc. between seasons, including the classic components of semi-predictable genetic traits and random mutations.
Perhaps mutations could be oracled or crowdsourced. Imagine a zero-knowledge machine learning + data pipeline that submits seasonal mutations that are provable transformations of the output of private prompt models written by players.
For example, as a high-level player interested in helping shape the next season, I might open the games downloadable management app and enter prompts there to suggest inputs to the instances boss spawn (A boss that the players spells often bounce back to player), the economic environment (a supervolcano rose in the middle of the plain, causing a catastrophe and global food shortages), or any other type of programmatic input from the games domain.
How can the classic motivations of gamers be applied to blockchain games?
The heros journey in The Hero with a Thousand Faces and the fundamental motivations of gamers are important concepts that cut through some of the highest-level questions about why games should be put on the blockchain, why financialization might enhance or diminish fun, and why An open economy may or may not drive the games success.
There is a lot of empirical and theoretical evidence to support the argument that players typically want to re-experience the Heros Journey with each game, so for example the ability to transfer powerful items they acquired in an old game to a new one tends to break the game The value of experience.
Does this mean that on-chain gaming must be limited to a subset of motivations unrelated to the hero’s journey, such as competition, speculation, and social interaction? This seems to be an interesting area of research.
Nick Yee has been studying the motivations of gamers for many years. First, a series of studies were conducted with players in an online massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG). Later conducting research at his company Gamer Motivation.
Raph Koster knows more about virtual worlds and the motivations of players who inhabit them than anyone else in the world.
Both Nick and Raph would be interesting research partners. But what questions would you ask them? How do we communicate effectively between Web3 and classic games/virtual worlds?
Virtual worlds are places, not just games
Experienced virtual world builders embrace the creed that these worlds are first and foremost places, not just games.
To these seasoned virtual world builders, the differences between Facebook, Twitter, and World of Warcraft are trivial compared to the fact that theyre all places that offer humans some notion of governance.
Experienced virtual world builders will use the term governance broadly, like the US government, rather than narrow, functional DeFi governance.
The important concept of virtual worlds are places before they are games is important because it drives the success of games and entertainment products by providing a high-level general principle:
If youre building a world, your game is actually something people opt in to after enjoying simply existing in your world, so you should make sure your place is liveable before worrying about making your game fun. How can on-chain games learn from this timeless principle, or even subvert it?
For example, perhaps an important part of on-chain gaming is ultimately better described as “activities in the Internet world.” These games can be deeply embedded or easily accessed from other web experiences, such as hyperlinks, regular web pages, social media bots, etc.
Perhaps the social layer of the internet can finally succeed in providing external governance so that on-chain games and worlds require less governance or management than off-chain.
Perhaps one path to success for on-chain games is to rely on traditional social platforms for messaging and player connection graphs. Not just for virality, but for the core gameplay loop. Obviously, on-chain capabilities such as open data, permissionless, embeddability, etc. may drive this.
In short, what impact does on-chain have on the game or world? What about governance opportunities or obligations? Social features? Blurring the lines between the world, games and the internet? These seem to be interesting areas of research.
