Shuji Utsumi, Sega’s co-CEO, comments in a new statement that there is no point in implementing blockchain technology if it doesn’t make games ‘fun’.
Things I often find lacking in videos games: good storytelling, adjustable subtitle/UI size, immersive world with adequate pattern of life (eg background characters, random environment animations, …).
Things I don’t miss: NFTs, microtransactions, constant in-game awards/points collections.
He is right.
We’re at the stage of capitalist indoctrination where even the games we play have to generate a sellable artifact of some sort or another. The number of games I see on the app store where you pretend to buy and sell land using real money has kinda become ridiculous.
Or better yet, games where you get monopoly money for pretending to do a job in the game
I have never been able to figure out the answer to this, so maybe someone here knows: exactly how does one implement blockchain technology into a game, and what’s the purpose of doing so? Like in terms of actual gameplay, what’s it supposed to achieve? Is there a valid reason you’d want to include it?
The most successful example for a blockchain game is “Axie Infinity” which is something of a Pokémon-like. It used blockchain technology to track the unique “Axies” (= Pokémons) which could be traded and sold. So the blockchain was used to do just that.
The big promise of games like “Axie Infinity” was “play-to-earn”, games which allowed players to earn money through playing the game, such as trading in “Axie Infinity”.Could this only be done with blockchain? No. All of that could technically also be achieved by other means.
So ultimately all of the talk about the blockchain was mostly PR and a way to distinguish the game. Nobody would have cared about it, if it had not had this feature. Which is very representative of all blockchain games.The talk of how blockchain technology would allow players to transfer items from one game to another; or create unique characters which could be transfered between games; etc. have always been pipe dreams, They would have required a level of cooperation between publishers and developers of games that was simply impossible to achieve.
As a footnote: The use of blockchain in “Axie Infinity” ultimately resulted in an in-game economy that was largely a pyramid scheme. The game is still there, but the economy imploded and most players only ever made cents, if they earned anything through the game at all.
That “play-to-earn” system ended up just being a means for people to exploit others in poorer counties to grind countless hours in the game for a pittance.
Capitalism wins again!
It’s all just buzzword bingo.
We can use the blockchain to track ownership of in game items!
That’s just called a database. Databases on a central account server are several magnitudes more efficient. Using blockchains for this is stupid.
You can transfer game items from one game to another game!
This would be a ton of efforts on part of the devs, and even then it wouldn’t really work in most cases because it turns out different games are different games. And even when it does the player experience of being handed end game items when starting a game is also questionable. Even if blockchains for games catch on, this idea never will.
The entire point of the blockchain is to create a decentralised zero trust database, but even if there are legitimate use cases for such a thing (which I’m not convinced of myself), games aren’t one of them.
The reason the blockchain pops up in games (and everything else) is that cryptocurrencies have an extreme illiquidity problem and the crypto “millionaires/billionaires” need new fools to buy cryptocoins so they can turn their illiquid cryptocoin “fortunes” into actual fortunes. This is why NFTs exist, this is why Axie Infinity (which is just NFTs with a terrible game built around them) exists, and sometimes they also dupe established companies into motioning something in the direction of “the future” (every crypto game project by an actual game studio).
That’s just called a database.
That’s the rub. Eventually blockchain will be useful for tracking ownership of things like land and cars, whose current ownership is tracked by an analog token minted by a a validator and stored offline (which is to say, the government has a piece of paper on file). I recently bought a house, and I had to buy mortgage insurance in case it turns out that 50 years ago someone fraudulently or mistakenly sold this house to someone else when they didn’t actually own it, and then I bought it from the guy who bought it from the guy who bought it from the guy who bought it from the guy who bought it from the guy who sold it illegally, so it’s not really mine. Blockchain will eliminate that. Game companies mint tokens to represent digital “assets” that they say you “own” but in reality it’s the asset creator that can make more of the asset, destroy the asset or deny others usage of the asset (which is the real, functional definition of “own”).
I’m still working my way through my thoughts on this after Bored Ape Money Pit but I think that blockchain is one of the infinite number of ways that traditional ownership models are trying to impose themselves on digital assets when it’s the fundamental nature of digital assets to be infinitely replicable for a cost so low as to approach $0/per, and to make it very hard to exclude people from having or using these replicas. I work in software. We’re getting to a point where the real value in software is in designing ways to stop people from using it unless they’ve met certain conditions (usually, having paid for a license). Most of what I do is authentication and authorization. That is to say, determining who a user is and what they’re allowed to do. These are external, artificial controls. In real life when you eat an apple the apple is gone. When you and your family live in a house, that house is full of people. When you “eat” (or in some other way extract the value from) a digital apple that apple can still be there. An infinite number of people can exist in one digital space via instantiation without ever having to acknowledge one another. Digital assets defy exclusivity, and without exclusivity their can’t be ownership. So what we end up with is a million people who have the same bit-for-bit perfect picture of a monkey, but one guy who has a certificate from the monkey picture center that says he’s the “owner” of the monkey picture when ownership doesn’t really confer any rights, privileges or abilities that everyone else didn’t already get for free.
I’m not sure I agree with your mortgage insurance example.
The problem isn’t record keeping, but answering the question “if you use an asset as collateral for a loan to purchase that asset, what happens to the loan if the purchase is invalidated”?
Block chain might make title searches easier, but it wont have any impact whatsoever on the existence of a legal system that can independently audit and invalidate contracts after the fact.
The asset isn’t digital, so ownership can’t be enforced digitally.
The current system is a pile of digital databases and paper records that need to be checked before sales can happen. Actual questions or disputes are handled by the courts. Block chain can’t change that, only change the underlying way we store the data.The problem isn’t record keeping, but answering the question “if you use an asset as collateral for a loan to purchase that asset, what happens to the loan if the purchase is invalidated”?
And the solution to that problem is good record keeping. Blockchain can improve the record keeping by making it public and verifiable.
Again, it’s not a record keeping problem, it’s a problem with people being able to dispute the records, and transactions being able to be nullified.
The records are public today, and you can go check them. It’s usually even accessible via the Internet.
Part of buying a house is the mortgage company checking all those records, and other ways things can go sideways.Issues usually aren’t because someone misread the records, but because a record was created that was invalid, or things you can’t record on the block chain, like “back taxes” or “grandma had two wills”.
The block chain doesn’t add anything that a public website doesn’t provide more simply, and it’s just as susceptible to the courts coming in and saying that a transaction was invalid because the estate executed the wrong will, or something like that.
Your two examples of the causes, “back taxes” and “grandma has two wills” would be solved still in the case of Blockchain. I’m no die hard fan of crypto currency. However if taxes were verifiable on chain, wills were verifiable and unique globally, then there would be no second will.
Say what you will about Blockchain being one big slow database, it is still one big slow database of huge magnitude, that enforces global uniqueness. Again I’m not entirely sold on the premise but look at how our taxes are done, social security numbers, identities. All these problems stem from a lack of a decentralized authority. If some random credit agency says bill down the street is me, we have no concrete and secure means of verifying uniqueness.
Personally, i have been saying for years that identity should be tied to asymmetric encryption. Definitely do not need Blockchain exclusively to solve these problems, but it’s better than what we have now.
