Despite the promises of "decentralization" and "trustless ownership," the majority of crypto games today are at best "partially decentralized." Web3 is a branding package, but in reality, most are still "Web2+." While game assets exist on the blockchain, game logic, state, and storage still reside on centralized servers.
Why? Simply put, building a fully decentralized game on the blockchain is not easy. The reason is that blockchains are still too slow in 2023 to handle the massive transaction volume required for video games. Ludens, CEO of Lattice, told Cointelegraph:
Building a game entirely on the blockchain right now is like building a video game on a computer from the 1980s. We don't have complex fully on-chain games yet because the blockchain, even Layer 2, is not powerful enough at the moment.
Furthermore, developers must make important trade-offs when using blockchain technology to target a wider non-crypto audience.
For example, the developers of Aurory created a hybrid inventory system called Syncspace, which allows players to keep their assets in Aurory's custody but transfer them to their Solana wallet if they wish.
Julien Pellet, the Infrastructure Tech Lead at Aurory, told the magazine, "Syncspace is Aurory's user experience strategy. Not every player wants to deal with the complexity of crypto wallets. We attract more non-crypto native Web2 players by building Syncspace and allowing certain assets to exist off-chain, and that's a trade-off we accept."
However, there is a passionate decentralized community interested in a fully on-chain "autonomous world" where players build everything from scratch. Some have even adapted a game to form a communist collective where everyone "wins" equally.
These autonomous worlds face many obstacles, but considering their limitations, the early results are impressive.
Web3 Games' Origins
Web3 games are striving to address the additional challenges brought by the emerging field's short history. In the previous crypto bull market cycle, most blockchain games attempted to be financial products first and video games second.
This strategy helped drive the play-to-earn game sector briefly into the mainstream as token prices soared. However, if the attraction is built on providing financial returns, enthusiasm can quickly disappear when token prices plummet.
Games like Axie Infinity, Pegaxy, or Crabada, which once promised huge returns for players, have now fallen off a cliff. For Axie, its unique active wallet count reached around 700,000 in November 2021, but the more common number now is between 80,000 to 100,000 daily. The Metaverse Index (MVI) token, which tracks a basket of major gaming and metaverse tokens, has dropped 95.6% from its all-time high in November 2021.
In response, Web3 games are now abandoning the "play to earn" slogan that helped propel the sector into the limelight and embracing phrases like "play and earn" or "play and own," downplaying the importance of profits and focusing more on the benefits of game asset ownership or simply emphasizing the fun of the game.
Jonathan Tang, the Backend Tech Lead at Aurory, told the magazine, "The core focus of a game should be leisure and entertainment, not providing financial returns. As Web3 game developers, our task is to think about how to leverage blockchain technology and what it brings while prioritizing the fun of the game." Some argue that an excessive emphasis on financial returns has damaged the industry's reputation, partly due to the influx of scammers.
Pellet added, "The last bull market attracted scammers who had various well-designed strategies, such as cloning websites and fake projects, to embezzle millions of dollars from legitimate players and teams. These scams are much harder to execute in Web2 games."
Entering the Era of Fully On-Chain Games
Encouragingly, a small community interested in building autonomous worlds is working to bring on-chain minimalism to blockchain games. Compared to Web2.5 counterparts, fully on-chain games have their assets, game logic, state, and storage all on the blockchain. Game state refers to the current state of the game world, such as a player's progress and owned items, while game logic simply refers to the game rules—how players move, interact, collect, and consume.
Why put everything on-chain? It ensures that the game state remains immutable and transparent on the blockchain. But more importantly, it opens the door to the kind of open composability possible in DeFi, allowing aggregators like 1inch Network to build on top of Uniswap or Curve and integrate Synthetix for cross-asset swaps.
Composability allows anyone to build second-layer rules on top of the game's original rules. In fully on-chain games, these second-layer rules exist as smart contracts on top of the core game developers' original smart contracts. They are experienced by all players in the game, unlike third-party mods in traditional games that only change a player's local game experience.
Collective Action
Take, for example, Dark Forest, an on-chain RPG game created by an anonymous creator named Gubsheep in 2019 on the Gnosis chain. It saw players create their own permissionless guild system through an external smart contract created by their own DAO (DFDAO). Through the guild system, smaller players were able to overcome the collective action problem in competing against larger whale players by pooling their own game resources.
As DFDAO stated in their blog:
"Somebody needs to take down orden_gg. Orden_gg has won twice in a row and is currently at the top of the leaderboard. If we unite for collective victory, we can defeat the unofficial bosses of Dark Forest together."
Toeknee, co-founder of DFDAO, told the magazine, "The Stellar Giants (guilds) are a small game on top of DF contracts, but from the perspective of the DF core contract, they are just another player. It's not an EOA account like the others; it's a smart contract with custom logic that shapes its behavior differently. This contract is non-upgradable and audited, so players can verify for themselves that we can't change the rules or keep planets after they donate them."
Players of Dark Forest also created their own in-game marketplace or even forked the game entirely onto different chains/L2s like Gnosis/Optimism. The new game, Dark Forest Arena, introduced new game modes previously unavailable.
Communist Takeover
Or take another fully on-chain game, OPCraft, an experiment in Minecraft-style built by the Lattice team on Optimism. A few weeks after the game's launch, a player named SupremeLeaderOP created a "communist society" where any player who chose to join the guild would give up all their resources and share them with every other player in the society.
These rules are not social commitments between players. They are binding and tied to on-chain smart contracts.
SupremeLeaderOP cannot retract his commitment to players or bend the rules of his communist guild even if he wanted to. Some players saw the guild as a quirky and fun experiment and immediately pledged allegiance to the communist republic, giving up all their in-game resources in exchange for collective ownership within the guild's treasury. As documented in Lattice's blog:
"Once players become comrades, they are able to mine materials for the government treasury and build with treasury materials on government-owned land, all through smart contracts deployed by the Supreme Leader! The republic even has a 'social credit' system to prevent lazy comrades from spending more treasury materials than they contribute. Lazy comrades are not allowed to build again until they 'repair their social credit' by contributing labor."
In fully on-chain games, players can achieve innovative changes without waiting for core developers to introduce updates through centralized patches. It is a level of bottom-up spontaneous creative expression far beyond what we traditionally think of in video games, but in the Web2 world, experimenting with custom game mods eventually gave birth to billion-dollar game franchises like Dota and Counter-Strike. Dota was first created as a mod on Blizzard's "Warcraft III" game without permission, while Counter-Strike originated as a mod on Valve's "Half-Life" game.
Fully on-chain games are still in their early stages, and builders in this space still refer to fully on-chain games in very different ways. The common label of "autonomous worlds" was coined by Lattice Labs, but other builders refer to these concepts as eternal games, infinite games, or on-chain realty.
While the terminology may differ, the common denominator behind these games is the hardcoded permanence on the blockchain. Just as smart contracts and tokens exist permanently on the chain, fully on-chain games remain fully uncensorable and vibrant even after game studios abandon them.
The cost? Most current crypto fully on-chain games resemble early turn-based board games with simple gameplay loops like Space Invaders and Pac-Man.
Various Limitations
When creating the on-chain racing game Rhauscau, creator Stokarz told the magazine that due to cost limitations, he had to make many necessary trade-offs in game design.
"Most fully on-chain games follow the design of traditional board games and minimal game logic because executing them on-chain is very low cost. At the smart contract level, it's one-dimensional gameplay, and agents simply change the positioning of gameplay."
Although Rhauscau is deployed on Arbitrum Nova, a Layer 2 with much higher throughput than the Ethereum mainnet, the game is still limited to simple gameplay loops that last a maximum of 5 minutes.
Stokarz added, "The first trade-off in Rhauscau's game design is that it had to focus on a simple gameplay loop. A game that is too complex means more transaction speed, which would make it too costly for users. It's a bit like the early mobile game Cut the Rope."
Partially decentralized Web2.5 games do not face the same trade-offs as fully on-chain games because their only crypto aspect is the assets in the form of NFTs. However, they make significant sacrifices in another aspect: the open composability of the game.
The Future of Fully On-Chain Games
No one denies that fully on-chain games face an uphill battle, and scalability is not the only issue.
Ludens emphasizes that the immaturity of fully on-chain games is also due to a lack of coherent set of blockchain game design principles among game designers. "Game designers should put more effort into thinking about how to unlock the full value of the blockchain ledger in game design."
But the blockchain and software infrastructure are also a problem.
"Like in old video games, we first saw simple text-based adventure games. When computers got faster, FPS games like Doom followed. When blockchain computing power increases, it will further expand what we can do in game design."
"Ramping up the chain infrastructure to higher throughput would obviously greatly help scale fully on-chain games. It would allow sharding and execution of game states across multiple chains simultaneously."
On the software side, he wonders what game engines like Lattice's MUD will look like in a few years.
"With our ongoing progress, will MUD be able to write powerful applications?"
Today's video game market is dominated by game engines like Unreal and Unity. Commercial game engines like Unreal didn't emerge until 1998 after decades of experimentation. Today, they provide a software framework for game developers to create games more efficiently and with lower technical complexity.
MUD aims to achieve a similar goal for blockchain game developers. The software stack simplifies the task of building EVM applications using various development tools like on-chain databases.
Fully on-chain games and ZK Rollups
Ethereum's roadmap is built on achieving scalability through ZK Rollups, and various Layer 2s provide significant opportunities for game designers to leverage faster and cheaper transactions. The native architecture of Starknet, a Layer 2 with zero-knowledge proofs, makes it more likely to scale a fully on-chain game, a view strongly held by a small fraction of builders on Starknet.
Cartridge is building its game engine Dojo and development tools for other Starknet game developers. Tarrance van As, the founder of Cartridge, believes Starknet is the only blockchain with the potential to eventually scale to thousands of users.
"With Dojo, game developers can leverage the foundational capabilities of this framework because everything here can be proven," he told the magazine.
"In the future, your game won't even be a Layer 2; it will be a Layer 3 or Layer 4 built on top of Starknet. Custom blockchain environments are designed for specific types of applications, building another layer on top of Layer 2. But he added that ZK proofs could even be generated on the client-side running the game locally.
With ZK proofs, you can even compute the logic on the client-side itself. We might even be able to run the game on local devices and simply provide proofs that it was correctly completed, thanks to the mathematical integrity of ZK technology.
Van As sees tremendous opportunities and believes that fully on-chain games will drive better evolution of blockchain in the next few years, rather than traditional AAA games.
"Fully on-chain games break free from the limitations of traditional game publishers, such as financial support, development cycles, and their closed nature. They are more like Ethereum, in a sense, evolving from a spontaneous, bottom-up culture."
Original article: @donovanchoy, BanklessDAO researcher
Translated to Chinese by @hicaptainz for the Chinese community
Original article link: https://cointelegraph.com/magazine/blockchain-games-decentralized-lattice-starknet-cartridge/