Enjin Coin and IEBC: Blockchain Gaming for Future Engineers

Enjin is proud to announce our partnership with the Integrated Engineering Blockchain Consortium to explore the use of blockchain in online games as a future sandbox for engineering challenges.

The Integrated Engineering Blockchain Consortium is very interested in seeing what happens when blockchain technology and indelible transaction records are applied to engineering immersion games such as the Minecraft ecosystem. Any means to identify engineering talent early, so that it can be developed and nurtured, would be essential to the future of our profession.

— IEBC Advisory Board

Simulating Engineering in the Gaming World

Gaming is a wonderful sandbox for engineering. People build entire nuclear reactors, computers, and simulate complex resource economies in games like Minecraft:

With Enjin Coin, we can bridge the gap to the real world by enabling the creation of tokens that represent limited resources, tools, currencies, privileges, and even unique blueprints and contracts. A player may earn tools, resources, and building materials by performing increasingly complex tasks in online games.

As a faculty member who was educated at MIT and the University of Michigan and served on the faculty at Drexel University and the University of Montana, I have spent countless hours writing and reviewing computer code and
engineering designs. In the context of Enjin, I believe I can speak for most educators who would agree that few if any technology platforms allow for the direct measurement of the impact of on-line gaming environments such as Minecraft. We know something is happening either by visual observation, or the number of calculations performed, but we cannot correlate the relationship between teraflops and a direct benefit to the physical or virtual world. The ideas behind the Enjin token may provide a means for engineering schools and technical employers to identify natural proclivity toward design and systems
thinking.

Bradley Edward Layton PhD PE
blay@alum.mit.edu

Decentralized Networks vs Hierarchies of Managers

The engineering industry relies heavily on multi-level hierarchies, with senior, middle and junior level positions and certifications holding positions of authority and approval power over engineering projects and plans.

While this is useful and important for human-managed engineering projects, preventing disastrous mistakes and ensuring skilled oversight of projects, certain aspects of this are about to be disrupted by Blockchain technology.

The young engineers of tomorrow were born and raised in massively-networked online environments, and they are comfortable organizing in dynamic, changing networks.

Metcalfe’s law states that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system.

These vibrant networks of online players open up amazing new ways to manage resources and solve problems in the gamified virtual space. Players can re-organize based on their skills and the problems at hand, and their solutions can be verified and recorded by consensus on the Blockchain.

Résumés on the Blockchain

Adding Blockchain-based items to virtual worlds will encourage players to form guilds, earn tokens, and make strategic economic decisions in order to achieve their end goals.

These performances and transactions are recorded on the blockchain and can be examined in the future as a proof of someone’s experience, their successes and failures, and the virtual projects they participated in.

A token called Quant is also working to formalize this process for the engineering field, and a cryptographic résumé called Curiosumé could be used to tokenize anyone’s skills and qualifications.

Minecraft and other Simulation games have long been an interesting platform for architectural & engineering designers as Lego and other building toys have been in the past. In retrospect, each one of us can remember being influenced by the ability to build whatever our imagination took us — that’s why we became designers. The ideas behind Enjin may convert retrospect to introspect

— Malachy Mathews
Senior Lecturer and BIM Anthropologist, Dublin Institute of Technology, School of Architecture

Training Virtual Robots

NVIDIA’s Isaac Robot Simulator is a robotics platform that can be used to build and train robots in virtual worlds. Built upon Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 4, the robots can be trained and tested in 3-dimensional game environments before uploading their minds to real, physical robots.

These ideas can be taken further into online collaborative environments, where players have an incentive to train simulated robots to complete useful objectives. Online multiplayer worlds are ever-changing and dynamic, so these robots could learn to react to situations and obstacles that cannot be simulated in a closed-box environment.

Conclusion

Minecraft mods like Industrialcraft along with Enjin Coin can serve as a great proving-ground for engineering skills, designs, and concepts, in a fun and engaging simulated game environment. IEBC and Enjin will be exploring the use of these tools to give young engineers the framework for creating the engineering processes of the future.