Blockchain in Gaming — NFTs and Play to Earn Farming
What is the Blockchain?
The simplest definition of Blockchain is that it is a distributed database. Blockchain is a member of the Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) family, which allows multiple distributed nodes (or organisations) to coordinate and record data using a consensus algorithm, to ensure all nodes are maintained and updated correctly and synchronously. Blockchain is immutable, meaning that once written, the blocks cannot be updated or deleted. Each of these blocks of data are secured and bound to each other using cryptographic principles.
For more information about Blockchain; I highly recommend our whitepaper that explains it in-depth. You can find it here.
Now that we’ve introduced the technology, let’s get into specifics for the article: NFT supporting blockchains.
NFT stands for non-fungible-token, which means they’re “unique”. By that, I mean no two pieces have the same code, like trading cards. Even if 50 people have a Pikachu Pokémon trading card, each one is unique.
Images, gifs, and even videos are becoming NFTs, and artists surely enjoy it. However, they’re usually created in a limited fashion to introduce scarcity and value. That’s where investors and collectors come in, communities and influencers, as well as the entertainment industry like gaming.
NFTs in Gaming
Even if we agree that it would be amazing to own Ashbringer from World of Warcraft, Ace of Spades of Destiny 2 or Thor’s hammer Mjölnir, I believe that will detract from the experience and immersion that a person feels whenever playing a video game containing such iconic items. I wouldn’t however be against new, select items that are not tied to any character in a fictional universe being owned by a person in real life, like in the case of Enjin assets.
Enjin is a company that focuses on blockchain, owning a coin with the same name. They’re also a crypto digital asset developer, and creators of an NFT named Oindrasdain. It’s an art piece depicting an axe, which the game Lost Relics (previously named Forgotten Artifacts), has added to its files. So, when you login into the game, it detects your ownership of the NFT by checking your wallet that is linked to your account and provides you with the item. In this case, the item is bought rather than gained. However, we can see the appeal of pay to earn games, especially if collectibles’ value is transferable to other games. Hence, broadening the scope of the item increases its intrinsic value.
I’m happy that I won’t be the person in charge to balance these items in each respective game, it sounds like a nightmare!
The Potential to Abuse NFTs in Gaming
I hate to say it, but when someone can manipulate a system to make money, the worst in people comes to the surface. We can take as an example World of Warcraft’s botting problem. There are thousands of bots in World of Warcraft farming gold and inflating the virtual economy.
A gold coin is worth almost 7 times more than Venezuela’s Bolivar. You might ask what this gold is used for, and the answer is another controversy.
Boosting other players through content in World of Warcraft is a multi-million-dollar business with guilds and communities selling their services for in-game gold. Thus, it’s creating fake achievements, spamming the game’s population with sale offers and opening possible buyers to scams.
Blizzard did ban the boosting communities to solve these issues. However, it serves as a good example of the possibilities. Once you insert this kind of behaviour into NFT rewarding games, you can see how it can quickly transform into a disaster if not implemented correctly. Let’s not forget that alongside the game-development issues, there are also possible blockchain coding vulnerabilities.
Whenever someone is caught abusing the game’s TOS, they usually get punished by having their account banned, and if future exploits are coming from them on a second account, the next action is an IP ban. In today’s technology, a VPN can be used to work around that, however, that’s also against the terms of service and a hardware ID ban is next.
Now that we’re talking about gaining actual money from NFT farming, instead of just cheating or abusing an in-game bug, I can easily see a future in which “players” open a public cloud environment of virtual machines to run their bots from and farm these NFTs. If the account, IP or hardware ID gets banned, they can just change them and go again, automate it and there’s a high chance of making more than you’re spending.
My Opinion and Future Projects
I really enjoy playing video games, I’ve been doing it for over 20 years. Recently I’ve even made efforts to host a Virtual Internet Café event for my work colleagues to experience the joys of playing video games. This is to welcome new people to the hobby, whilst connecting them across departments, no matter their rank or age. However, I also love technology and the extremely fast pace that it’s evolving in the public cloud and game development.
Every good idea is worth exploring if you prepare for it, research it and are always cautious.
About the Author:
Samuel Stan is a Project Manager in the Partner Team here at Version 1.
