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

Thinking about the opening of games on the Paradigm chain: player experience is higher than technical details

Paradigm recently published Open Issues for On-Chain Games. I worked in game and virtual world development before Ethereum and wanted to post some thoughts in response to Charlie and Doug's article. Hereinafter, "you" refers to Paradigm.

Chain types for four basic on-chain games

There appear to be four basic types of blockchains, although one of them may be purely theoretical:

(public, private) x (centralized, decentralized)

  • Centralized public chains such as BSC. According to 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 VPNs of industry organizations. Or an Ethereum zk L2 that keeps data off-chain and restricts the roster 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 purely on-chain gaming:

  • Why put the game on a private, centralized blockchain? What capabilities can a baseline blockchain architecture provide that may not be related to openness or decentralization? For example, for a closed, centralized game, perhaps the EVM architecture, infrastructure, and tooling might 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 the extremely strong property rights of decentralization, resistance to censorship, and the expectation that the chain will last 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 publicity or decentralization of the chain? This seems like an interesting area of research.

Is this a Mod, or an API?

I think you're right that mods are a great example of how on-chain games 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, games on the chain can provide better structural separation of data, assets, core algorithms, and identities (as well as the composability of the former), thereby creating opportunities for arbitrary 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, what's the difference between a mod platform and an API?

Of course, in Web2 games, the API is usually a separate product from the core data, and thus technically has a different data and functionality reduction 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 "what's 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, etc., we enable the marketplace to offer whatever it wants and transcend the taxonomy of off-chain Mods and APIs.

In product economics, combining N capabilities (each of which has 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 player guild data and algorithms public, the marketplace can leverage those data and algorithms to provide relevant downstream experiences to any relevant stakeholders. Examples: dashboards 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), fully standalone games using guild membership lists (team building activities ).

Of course, these downstream experiences may support arbitrary encrypted financial components, such as payments related to the core game or natively related to the downstream experience, and can be directly embedded in the player's main 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 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 composable artwork 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, putting the choice of active mods in the hands of users helps create a market. This market is driven by superior user experience (unique or unique to on-chain games) through competitive pressure (for both on-chain and Relatively powerful, but not for off-chain games).

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 is the distance between 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 does not refer to 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 on better WiFi and more attractive train staff.

As you know, there is ongoing evidence that soon, cross-chain/inter-chain swaps may be as simple, fast, easy and relatively cheap as L1 swaps are done today.

If DeFi operations across L2 become "good enough", this could have implications for the real benefits of combining the game's open economy with full-fledged DeFi/liquidity, rather than on AppChain or other chains.

For example, suppose a chain succeeds in becoming a valuable and moatable chain hosting an open economy for a series of indie games. Perhaps the factors that make this chain so ideal for on-chain economics have nothing to do with DeFi or liquidity.

What if the more players, the more Ticks?

As for the technical open question on the Ticks problem, I like your mention of modifying Rollup's state transition function to include a game loop with a time difference since the last Ticks.

(Deep tide note: tick means the number of delayed frames per second of the server)

Another area of research might be changing the number of ticks depending on how much the player is active, the size of ticks can be constant or dynamic.

For example, consider a world where time speeds up or slows down depending on how hot the game is. Or the time is not speeded up, but the resolution is increased.

We can imagine a zero-knowledge proof "Ticks World Chain", where anyone can submit the next Ticks of the world without permission, as long as they are willing to calculate. In the early days of launch, the world chain may run 5000 Ticks per day, and in later years, when only a group of loyal nostalgics are left, the speed may slow down to 20 Ticks per day.

Of course, in this PoW world chain example, controlling the relationship between the amount of Ticks and hardware performance may require support similar to Bitcoin's difficulty adjustment.

Limit incentive compatibility maximization by introducing artificial transaction costs

I agree that compositionality is financial in nature, which leads to increased economic efficiency and pushes the system to its limit of incentive compatibility, which I call "maximization of incentive compatibility".

As to 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 professional (iii) when specialization increases, we acquire better, cheaper, and novel goods and services.

In other words, compositionality helps increase the transaction network size of on-chain games by reducing transaction costs, that is, reducing friction.

A large-scale transaction network makes specialization possible, thereby achieving intrinsic financialization and creating a high degree of economic efficiency, which in turn pushes the game to the limit of its incentive compatibility.

If transaction costs are conversely high, intrinsic financialization may be hampered, and games tend to settle in a state of economic inefficiency where players etc. only partially respond to incentives.

As lowering transaction costs drives economic efficiency and incentivizes extremism for compatibility, on-chain games can intentionally limit the scope of markets 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 the transaction costs that might be introduced to mitigate or limit intrinsic financialization and economic efficiency instances of access control? What are the underlying strategies or components that can be used to reduce intrinsic financialization?

My hunch is that yes, any kind of transaction cost that can be introduced to limit intrinsic 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 ciphers, this can be (i) what you are, like a mage above level 90, (ii) what you know, like a cipher found in a dungeon, or (iii) what you have, like Moxie.
  • 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 a raid of the week, received a special item of the week, recently met at least five players at a 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. Abstract transfers of accounts that bypass our control can be mitigated in general ways, such as reduced property rights, such as modified taxes, automatic repossession of assets upon provable 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.

Path of Exile, for example, has been less frictional about in-game trading over the years, but it has been known to require characters to physically meet up in sync in-game in order to manually exchange items during the trade window.

The developers of Path of Exile don't 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 3's 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 a new season mandatory? Can veteran players opt out and continue playing the old season? How might on-chain influence affect these decisions or opportunities?

New seasonal or dynamic models may be provided on-chain. For example, on-chain capabilities due to digital scarcity or zero-knowledge privacy.

Taking Augur as an example, it employs a voluntary fork model where users must make mutually exclusive choices among N target forks.

Maybe players can base it on season preference (fire season or water season?), mod collection (what random subset of mods will be activated next season?) or storyline based (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 exactly does immutability mean for a game or world? This is a good example of the topic of virtual worlds with a deep literature going back decades. Early virtual world designers were well aware that immutability and persistence had many key points 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, possibly reverting to some baseline or next generation.

An interesting empirical result of the old virtual world 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 can change things (e.g. anyone can change things, or only non-novice, experienced players, trusted players, trained admins, developers people, etc.), the broader the type of change that persists (e.g. only character changes persist, or object classes, objects in physical locations, the world as a whole, or functions/custom algorithms persist).

It turns out that this correlation isn't just due to product economics (i.e. "the more people you allow to change something, the more things you can change"), but the positioning or value proposition of the game:

Games that only allow limited persistent change for a few people tend to approach the player experience in a cinematic or prescriptive way. "You're playing our world."

Games with a high degree of constant change by many people tend to be sandboxed 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.

Perhaps a game can be played many times by any number of people, but cannot be modified or expanded by anyone. Such games perform extremely well off-chain, like Tetris. Or imagine how many people would continue to play League of Legends or Dota even if the update stopped. Can similar games be successful on the chain?

In short, immutability and persistence and their relationship to metagame stagnation and on-chain game chance appear to be a rich design space and area of research.

Now turning to the problem of meta-game stalling:

The point is that meta-game equilibrium is a function of the net opportunity cost of the game as a whole or, in sufficiently connected systems, even the game's network.

Often, all that is needed to refresh a 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 algorithms as data. This is a popular pattern in Web2 game engines, especially to enable more advanced author tools.

You mentioned automated feedback to help refresh the meta game. Of course, automated feedback can take countless forms.

Personally, the two forms of automated feedback that I'm 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 season's popular builds determine the next season's challenges.

(ii) Genetic algorithms modify game physics, data, rules, ability levels, assets, etc. between seasons, including semi-predictable genetic traits and classic components of random mutation.

Perhaps mutations can be oracleized or crowdsourced. Imagine a zero-knowledge machine learning + data pipeline submitting seasonal mutations that are provable transformations of model output from private hints written by players.

For example, as an advanced player interested in helping formulate the next season, I might open up the game's downloadable management app, where I type a hint to suggest input for instance boss spawns ("A boss where the player's spells often bounce back 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 game's domain.

How do the classic motivations of gamers apply to blockchain games?

The Hero's Journey in The Hero with a Thousand Faces and the fundamental motivations of gamers are important concepts that run through some of the highest-level questions, such as why the game should be on-chain, why financialization might enhance or diminish the fun, and why An open economy may or may not drive the game's success.

There is a lot of empirical and theoretical evidence to support the argument that players typically want to re-experience the Hero's 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 games must be limited to a subset of motivations unrelated to the Journey of Heroes, such as competition, speculation, and socialization? This seems like an interesting area of research.

Nick Yee has studied the motivation of gamers for many years. First, by conducting a series of studies with players in an online massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG). Later conducted research at his gamer motivation company.

Raph Koster knows more about virtual worlds and the motivations of players to inhabit them than anyone else in the world.

Both Nick and Raph will 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 they're 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 you're building a world, your game is actually something that 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, and even subvert it?

For example, perhaps an important part of on-chain gaming ends up being better described as "activity in the internet world". These games can be deeply embedded or easily accessed from other web experiences such as hyperlinks, normal 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 graphs of player connections. Not just for viral growth, but for the core game loop. Clearly, on-chain capabilities like open data, permissionless, embeddable, etc. could drive this.

In short, how does on-chain affect the game or the world? What about governance opportunities or obligations? social function? Blurring the lines between world, game and internet? These seem to be interesting areas of research.

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