Onchain 👏 Gaming 👏 | Skill Tree #30

1 Housekeeping item upfront: It’s difficult to separate the signal from the noise, so we created a Telegram channel that curates newsletters sharing alpha across different fields, appropriately named ‘The Alpha Assembly’

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Paradigm: Open Problems of Onchain Games

Link

Opportunities

• UGC as the most plausible case for onchain games - UGC on steroids

• mods

  • traditional platforms (Minecraft, Roblox, Fortnite) require 3rd-party developers to spin up new servers (instancing) instead of scripting existing ones. hard to ensure that modes fit existing rulesets

  • instancing leads to fragmentation while onchain games can really be additional/composable

• open economies

  • opening up the economy allows it to become more complex (more financial primitives)

  • sovereign player custody of game assets prevents compliance overhead for studio

Challenges

• Technical constraints limit game design

  • Tooling and game-specific infrastructure is getting built now (e.g. MUD, Dojo, Argus, Curio, Paima) making it easier to deploy games on platform that scale

  • Need for incomplete information (e.g. enemy can't see your move upfront) → e.g. TEE

  • Bots can't be prevented

  • Tick-based game loops are hard to do on blockchains → e.g. custom rollups

• Inherent financialization

  • first-order: each game is a real money market which influences behavior

  • second-order: composability means mods compete with each other and introduce different incentives on top of each other

  • research directions: antifragile design, permissioning of mods, orderflow auctions

• metagames tend towards stagnation

  • autonomous worlds strive for fixed rulesets with little updates → dominant strategy gets figured out & doesn't change = boring

  • research directions: seasonal updates, automated updates (similar to Bitcoin adjusting its mining difficulty), novel governance mechanisms

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Onchain games in Gitcoin Round 18

Link

3 games are looking for public goods funding through Gitcoin:

• Autochessia (auto chess game built on MUD)

• DFarchon (Using ZK for game optimization in Dark Forest)

• BladeDAO (decentralized onchain game studio; 2 titles: Battle royale, factory game)

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Roundtable Discussion: How to Design Game Economies

Link

Nick (Tokenomics Advisor at Shima Capital), Michael (Web3 Lead at Mighty Bear Games), and Heimdall (Virtual Economist at The Citadel) share their insights about creating engaging & sustainable game economies for web3 and onchain games.

— Key takeaways —

Design philosophies

• supply is a function of demand

• if something can happen, it probably will

• if someone can repeat an action, he will until the action reaches market value (zero)

• a majority of players is looking for economic stability (e.g. medium of exchange)

Speculators in games

• General sentiment: Keep speculators in, make it fun, monetize it

• Tip: Speculation doesn’t need to be financial, could also be about the meta for instance

Mechanisms for sustainability

• distribution of supply: measured growth of supply with demand. can also cap growth and monetize it (e.g. NFT-gated)

• prevent easy earning (will be botted)

• well-timed consumption sinks that are actual sinks, not converters. best: recurring sinks like travel costs, taxes

• competitive sinks like auctions

• Challenge: Scaling down supply once demand falls e.g. burning, crafting, seasonal NFT

Learn from web2

• onboarding & UX

• monitoring of player engagement

Unlearn from web2

• LTV > CAC math as now we have secondary trading, other value-adding actions than spending money

• mindset shift from monetizing individual players to looking at the economy more holistically

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The Content Layer for Autonomous Worlds

Link

A world requires more than just physics; it needs real people, their interactions, and stories. While engineers construct the physical framework for Autonomous Worlds, determine how AWs appear; we also need storytellers to keep the narratives flowing, determine how AWs persist.

• Loot

  • Timshel defined Loot in a tweet as a "massively-multiplayer collaborative world-building experiment"

  • NFTs act as narrative devices. The minimalist text-based NFTs serve as a starting point

  • More minimalist pieces may be better narrative devices as they leave more room for interpretation

  • Challenge #1: People cared about speculation and scarcity of the words, not the story - the narrative economy emerged

    • Derivatives expanded this economy

  • Challenge #2: Scarcity mindset (keeping the value of your NFTs) is the opposite of expanding the story (abundance mindset, related to inflation)

• Content layer for Autonomous Worlds

  • Needs to enable content autonomy, meaning the community can create quality content after losing all centralized authors

  • Three types of content formats: Text, static/dynamic non-interactive media formats, interactive media formats

  • Third type = fully onchain games

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Game releases/alphas/demos/playtests

• Shoshin

• Doomsday Season 2 (there will be a token airdrop)

• Bochamon

Teaser: I’m working on a website aggregating everything about onchain games and autonomous worlds, covering games, news, events, and education. Things are coming along well and I hope to officially release the site next week.

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