Playing with blockchain
How Blockchain will revolutionize the gaming industry
Last month, I attended the Gaming Developer Conference in San Francisco. Because I was representing CryptoKitties, I was mainly interested in the intersection of blockchain and gaming (with a bit of VR thrown in there, because we have a soft spot for VR).
But before I dive into my GDC experience, I should first lay out my thoughts on crypto and gaming. As I see it, there are currently five tiers when it comes to blockchain incorporation within games.
And I’ll rank them 1–5
Tier one is your typical video game with zero blockchain integration. These would be classics like Snake, Pong, and Tetris.
Tier two is a typical centralized game like League of Legends, but where third parties have created a token to buy items within the game. Another good example is something like Wax.io, a decentralized Ebay-style marketplace where users can purchase virtual in-game items with WAX, their proprietary cryptotoken.
Tier three is a game with a day-one built-in virtual currency. Think Pokemon Go!. It’s not quite a cryptocurrency, but it’s close.
CryptoKitties falls into tier four. The decentralized digital assets, CryptoKitties, are represented by a non-fungible token. The digital assets essentially are the game. We cannot take a cat away from a user, and even if we go out of business, the cats will always exist — these cats will outlive us by eons.
Essentially, in tier four, a digital item is decentralized but represented by a fungible token. A good example is the game Enjin, in which the items you collect are actually represented by a token (ERC-20 in this case) in your wallet.
Tier five is the promised land. Not only is every digital asset attached to the blockchain, the entire history of that asset is recorded in the ledger. Imagine a sword. You buy it. You get all stabby-stabby. You wash it, sharpen, polish it. Then you trade it. Every hack, slash, and polish of that sword’s existence can be retraced through the blockchain. And a thousand years from now (nuclear annihilation notwithstanding) you can go back and trace every moment of the item’s existence.
On an interesting side note, Chinese game developer Tencent just announced that their latest project, Let’s Hunt Monsters, will release in early May. They’re touting the game as a revolutionary combination of Pokemon Go! and CryptoKitties. While the idea is interesting, the execution doesn’t quite deliver that promise.
Players rove the world capturing monsters via an AR minigame in which they toss a “monster-sealing soul ball” to entrap the creatures. Every catch is recorded on the blockchain and can be used in battle, evolved, and traded. As a separate, seemingly incongruous, and — let’s just say it — awfully familiar feature, users can also collect, breed, and exchange legions of adorable cats.
Here’s the big caveat: while it is true that the creatures are recorded on blockchain, they are not decentralized. That means a user never truly “owns” their creatures in the same sense that they own a CryptoKitty — Tencent can take them away any time if they they please (and if the game gets shut down, the critters go with it). For that reason, Let’s Hunt Monsters is just the latest example of taking standard game mechanics and bolting on blockchain features, Franken-style.
Anyway, back to GDC
All this is to say that crypto hype has officially hit the gaming world. The problem is, there’s not much crossover: game designers don’t fully understand crypto, and cryptoheads don’t know how to build games. So far, people have been simply bolting blockchain features to existing gaming conventions.
Even the EVP of Blizzard seems doubtful about blockchain games. The most progressive major gaming companies so far have landed somewhere around Tier 3, simply swapping out in-game virtual currencies for a cryptocurrency. They’re already raking in cash with their centralized virtual coins, so why mess with it? But shortsighted view neglects the major opportunities coming down the line.
CryptoKitties takes it one step further
Of course, there’s the fact that the game is designed around collecting digital items. But more than that, at Axiom Zen, we have something we lovingly refer to as the Kittyverse. This is the greater ecosystem of CryptoKitties beyond the core team, in which community members create game experiences that build the broader universe.
Many of these are tools or resources to help breeders, and some are more robust and add to the blockchain. KittyHats, an accessories market for your cats, is a great example. By giving your cat a rakish hat or flashy shades, you can add a bit of personal flair to your pets. The items are tokens, so they’re recorded on the blockchain and go with the cat wherever it goes (future owners can choose to remove them but really, who would want to do that?). KittyHats is just one example among dozens of brilliant features our incredible community has created.
We cannot express how much we love this stuff
We want CryptoKitties to be infinitely extensible; we set no limit on the possible directions the community can take this game. Kitty collectors want to do more and more with their cats, because the more you can do with them, the more valuable they become as a digital asset. The doors are wide open, and this incentivizes the community to create their own tools and features and to realize their own vision of the game.
When a community member has the freedom to build on top of their favourite game, they change from being a player to being an investor and creator. They’re free to shape their own gaming experience. Between the community-driven additions and the new primary features we’re working on internally, CryptoKitties (and the Kittyverse) is getting bigger and better by the day.
Traditional gaming companies haven’t yet engaged their communities so directly. While they can listen to their fans and implement their ideas, the process is slow and necessarily limited by their manpower. Opening up your product to the wider world is scary, but it also builds deeper relationships between games and players.
It’s still early days, and nobody has yet successfully integrated gaming and blockchain seamlessly. So far, the two have been mashed together, in some cases more gracefully than others, but not woven into one cohesive piece. We think CryptoKitties is a great start, and we can’t wait to see what’s next.
Written By Benny Giang
Edited by Grady Mitchell
Follow us on Twitter or check our successful blockchain game, CryptoKitties.
