The missing link in blockchain games
How Void Runners is putting humans in space.
The longer you work as a game designer, the more you learn that game design isn’t really about designing games. Game designers are really human interaction designers, trained to ask how human interaction can be shaped and enriched by the addition of game rules.
At their oldest and most fundamental level, that’s what games are : Arbitrary, consensual rulesets that give interactions new incentives and meaning. Those rules can be as small as a sentence and change everything about what happens next. The floor is lava. Home base is safe. You’re it. Last one there’s a rotten egg. We may be in in a golden age of single-player videogames, but throughout history most of games’ best moments have been about interacting with and against other humans.
The Royal Game of Ur is around 5000 years old, and its game board doesn’t *not* look like a cool spaceship, we’re just going to note…[photo credit]
The blockchain is also a tool for reshaping human interaction. It’s designed to bridge critical gaps in interactions between people — gaps of trust, impermanence and transparency. The blockchain asks: what cool crazy stuff could humans do together if our interactions were trustless and permanent and public?
You’d think, then, that blockchain games in particular would be stuffed with rich human interaction. But often they aren’t. Game-skinned defi projects are fascinating protocols, but they don’t let players make interesting adversarial decisions that affect one another. Auto battlers can be spectacular but are zero-player games at heart. We wanted to do better.
But how? Games take many forms, but they often share an underlying structure. There’s a player that takes action, and a game space that gives those action context. There are resources that track progress, success and failure, and rules that govern the interplay between player, space and resource.
So what happens when you try to map those fundamental components of games onto the blockchain? From our perspective, NFTs look like a natural container for both player pieces and game space. Fungible tokens look like the right place to map the resources. The blockchain itself looks like a pretty cool way to transmit, record and adjudicate rules and gamestate.
So with that toolkit at our disposal, we asked ourselves what cool crazy game we could make if its interactions were trustless and permanent and public. What weird experimental, playful human interactions could emerge from its rulesets? What happens when a game about social deduction and human interaction takes place on the blockchain?
Those are the questions that fueled Void Runners development, and as we roll it out they’re going to be our emphasis. That emphasis is going to have two effects, the first of which is technical. If interesting, unpredictable player interaction is our goal, we need to make sure players feel unrestricted. In the current state of the crypto economy that means actively exploring L2 and other solutions to ensure that if there’s an action you want to take in the game, gas fees won’t hold you back.
The second is philosophical. As the game evolves, we’ll design in favor of whatever makes the human interactions richer in whatever weird, wonderful way the blockchain will enable.
The blockchain is about human interaction. Games are about human interaction. Void Runners is a blockchain game about human interaction and spaceships. LFG, humans.
Next post we’ll share more about Void Runners gameplay.
Follow us on Twitter for more on the project, or join our Discord to play Void Adventures — our unique allowlist text adventure.
