DecentralisedGaming
commented
4 years ago One thing that Anuj brought up in conversation was to split this into advantages based on trust (or trust minimisation) and those which are separate. Naturally, the use of blockchain technology in gaming is to mainly to minimise trust issue.
I will sort the above list into these two categories and add some descriptions. Some items in the above were essentially duplicates, so I've reconciled those.
Trust based
-
Anti-cheating
- In a decentralised game the guarantees can be much stronger. Generally want to check player actions (moves) in a decentralised manner. This means check that the updates to the game state is transparently and correct. Bitcoin solved the BGP, which is anti-cheating for money. Translate "transactions" to "player actions" and you have anti-cheating for games. This would allow for provable Hi-scores.
- high-fault tolerance / Difficult to hack
- Unstoppable - given that the networks have high-fault tolerance they are seen as unstoppable.
-
Transparent economics
- All parameters are public. All transactions are on-chain. All transactions are provably correct (see previous point.
- Provenance (Provably fair item acquisition) is included in this point on transparent economics
-
Censorship resistance
- Permissionless
- This is related to the first point on anti-cheating, but is less about anti-cheating per se, and more about the nature of blockchain protocols being designed not to favour any particular person / node.
-
True ownership
- Game assets are tied to a player's private key. Unless that key is stolen it is computationally infeasible to steal the assets without tricking the player. However, assets tend to be represented by tokens in many blockchain games, so it tends to be tokens that are truly owned. IF the game assets are part of an open-source game with a transparent economy (which includes high-fault tolerance) then such games have the strongest notion of ownership possible.
Not Trust based
- Reduced hosting costs
- Assuming that the network is mostly decentralised and not just reliant on the dev team.
- Reduced bandwidth costs
- Assuming that players can sync with other nodes without relying on the devs.
- Easier fundraising
- This is applicable to any blockchain game. Selling tokens allows for fundraising from a wide base of people and was a highly popular method in 2017.
- Player loyalty
- Players who own tokens may feel like they have a greater sense of ownership of the game, and therefore have greater loyalty. This could be applicable to any blockchain game.
- Player governance
- Can be via forking open-source code and assets (need both to be open source).
- governance via tokens (something like a DAO), so players may have more influence on the game.
- Community preservation via forking
- Open source blockchain games can be forked. Moreover, the history of player progress is public so that can be preserved in a new chain (a hardfork). Player progress does not need to be lost. This is useful if the developers are bankrupt.
We have a couple of documents made in Google docs that list the advantages, but I figure let's put them here and have people collaborate. I will put the pain points into a separate issue, although the two lists may end up in the same chapter.
Brainstorm of terms / ideas
Here is a list of key ideas. Some of these may apply to any blockchain game and not just decentralised ones.