Challenges of crypto-native gaming
Blockchain gaming has seen a huge interest in the last couple of years, but it can be noted that the most popular games like Axie Infinity, Splinterland, Crabada, actually have very few on-chain components.
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They often use blockchain to represent in-game assets with NFTs or tokens, but they run the game logic off-chain. One of the reasons is that it’s very costly to run computation on a monolithic base layer like Ethereum, for example.
However, with the rapid progress in scaling that we’re witnessing, especially in the realm of rollups solutions like Starknet, Arbitrum, Optimism, Obscuro (soon™), it is becoming possible to move the game logic on-chain. Such games could be called crypto-native games.
Cool, but why would we want to do that anyway?
I suggest reading gubsheep‘s crypto gaming thesis to understand why crypto-native gaming might be the next frontier; how it might unlock a new realm of possibilities we’ve never seen before. The kind of things that are only possible when you deploy the whole game as a smart contract, like generative and autonomous games; on-chain composability between every component of every game; open-source development leading to infinite creativity; permissionless, uncensorable, unstoppable games; and so on…
But it is very early, and many challenges lie ahead. However, it struck me that some of the most common challenges met by the pioneers of crypto-native gaming are natively addressed by Obscuro.
Front-running
OG blockchain dev Ronan Sandford spoke about building games on L2 at EthCC 4, and he raised the issue of front-running:
Front-running is possible because a player could read his opponent’s moves in the public mempool, before they actually happen in the game, and react accordingly. As Sylve points out, this is the equivalent of MEV in decentralized finance, hence the term gaMEV.
Randomness
Many games rely on randomness, and in a previous talk about building games fully on-chain at EthCC 3, Ronan mentioned the difficulty of generating an unpredictable number every block or every second.
It is indeed hard to find a secure source of entropy on a public blockchain, because the internal state of a contract as well as the entire history of the blockchain are visible to anyone.
Hidden information
A lot of game mechanics involve hiding some information from the players, and this is a delicate matter to deal with on a public ledger. It’s one of the challenges raised by Sylve in his post Four challenges in blockchain gaming, where he explains that even a simple game like rock-paper-scissors would actually be tricky to build on-chain, and it would involve techniques such as commit-reveal schemes or zero-knowledge proofs.
In his post Preventing cheaters in fog of war games, Edward A Thomson looks for a solution to reproduce the classic fog of war on-chain, where the goal is to hide part of the map or the enemy’s position.
Obscuro and crypto-native gaming
You may have guessed it, the common denominator to the challenges mentioned above — front-running, randomness, hiding information — is transparency, which is the nature of public blockchains. And this is where Obscuro stands apart from other rollup solutions.
Obscuro is a decentralized Layer 2 privacy solution built on top of Ethereum. It leverages Trusted Execution Environments to create confidential rollups, enabling any EVM-compatible smart contract to benefit from low gas cost and privacy.
Obscuro’s confidential rollups introduce computational privacy, which means the possibility to fully obfuscate smart contracts. You can therefore hide any part of your game, you can use any data as a source of entropy, the mempool is also hidden etc.
There is some degree of privacy possible with zero-knowledge proofs, and a game like Dark Forest is a perfect illustration of that. However, zero-knowledge proofs are not a general-purpose privacy solution, which means they can’t fully obfuscate smart contracts the way Obscuro trivially could. To further read on this topic, I suggest the blockchain privacy trilemma by Cais Manai.
Some ideas to build on Obscuro
- on-chain versions of classic games like Poker, Battleship, Mastermind…
- a Civilization type of game with hidden prizes
- the anonymous lottery idea from Killari
- deploying the entire plot of a game, and no one could peek in the code
- the Six Moonshot ZK Applications from gubsheep
- shapeshifting NFTs whose attributes evolve unexpectedly based on any blockchain or real-world event
- autonomous, generative games where no one can predict what’s next, not even developers
… and a lot more!
I would like to thank all the people mentioned in this post for their ideas, as well as dialectic for their Thoughts on on-chain gaming which were a great inspiration.
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