Good luck getting this past play store review, I think the technical term is "in-app payments circumvention"
Show HN: WordLines – A zero-knowledge proof-based blockchain puzzle game
11–20 of 24 posts
Re: Show HN: WordLines – A zero-knowledge proof-based blockchain puzzle game
#12Any mobile or online game like this without all the blockchain stuff?
> WordLines is a ripoff of NYT's Letter Boxed game [0] on the Ethereum chain.
Re: Show HN: WordLines – A zero-knowledge proof-based blockchain puzzle game
#13Re: Show HN: WordLines – A zero-knowledge proof-based blockchain puzzle game
#14As a technical demonstration, this little project is really interesting. There's only one aspect I'd like to poke at a bit: "Mobile gaming is more interesting than PC/web clients to me. If nothing it means developers can use push notifications and make games a much more mindless/regular part of players' day vs. depending on users to actively seek out their game on their computers." This is one of the dark patterns th…
I think we're really abusing the terms 'dark pattern' and 'ethics' at the point where merely popping a notification about ingame events is covered.
When Tetris was first released back in 1986, its uniquely addictive nature led some to theorize that it was intrinsically harmful, or more conspiratorially, that it was a weapon made by Russians to harm US productivity. Had Tetris first been released in the modern era, I think both of these (patently insane) complaints would have been taken more seriously.
Re: Show HN: WordLines – A zero-knowledge proof-based blockchain puzzle game
#15Congrats for the impressive technical feat! One (maybe naive) question: at a certain point in the demo, Rainbow wallet forecasts a 400$ gas fee. Does this mean that in order to play this game, I need to spend hundreds of dollars for each round? I know that there are many other chains that are vastly more efficient, plus all the L2 optimizations and all. I was just wondering if this is actually the case in this partic…
I never noticed this in the demo
It's about 24 seconds in. Look at the bottom left corner.
Re: Show HN: WordLines – A zero-knowledge proof-based blockchain puzzle game
#16As a technical demonstration, this little project is really interesting. There's only one aspect I'd like to poke at a bit: "Mobile gaming is more interesting than PC/web clients to me. If nothing it means developers can use push notifications and make games a much more mindless/regular part of players' day vs. depending on users to actively seek out their game on their computers." This is one of the dark patterns th…
Mobile gaming has the lowest retention on the market - 90% of users leave on day 7.
Mobile gaming is catered towards more casual audience succeeds better with micro-transactions (i.e. $0.99 - $2 like in-app purchases)
Most of the notifications get turned off if spamming most of the time and do not really help that much if the gamer is not intrinsically into that game. So its like fake marketing when you push but loose out anyways.
The dark pattern is really gacha style and gambling related casino games where slots are not real but you need to pay to spin. Users who get hooked spend thousands of dollars on it.
Re: Show HN: WordLines – A zero-knowledge proof-based blockchain puzzle game
#17Congrats - that's really cool. It's a super interesting space for sure and I'm pretty convinced it's the future of blockchain games.
If anyone's interested, we built a 3D Dungeon crawler with ZKPs as part of a hackathon. There's a major mistake on the ZKP validation (left as an exercise for the reader to spot!) but works great as a POC and a nice couple of hackathon prizes too. Also has NFTs and randomness from an oracle for good measure.
Code: https://github.com/Derked/FantasyCampaign
Video run through: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zp5nEtPFvBo
Happy to answer any questions.
Re: Show HN: WordLines – A zero-knowledge proof-based blockchain puzzle game
#18"there are no clean non ZK mechanisms to prove your solution outside of sharing the solution itself"
This is not entirely true. Witness hiding proofs are not zero knowledge (no simulator) but also do not reveal the solution. It is a subtle but important difference that can matter in some situations -- for example, a witness hiding proof could potentially allow the verifier to prove a related statement (e.g. proving that the proof protocol was executed).
Re: Show HN: WordLines – A zero-knowledge proof-based blockchain puzzle game
#19As a technical demonstration, this little project is really interesting. There's only one aspect I'd like to poke at a bit: "Mobile gaming is more interesting than PC/web clients to me. If nothing it means developers can use push notifications and make games a much more mindless/regular part of players' day vs. depending on users to actively seek out their game on their computers." This is one of the dark patterns th…
I think we're really abusing the terms 'dark pattern' and 'ethics' at the point where merely popping a notification about ingame events is covered. When Tetris was first released back in 1986, its uniquely addictive nature led some to theorize that it was intrinsically harmful, or more conspiratorially, that it was a weapon made by Russians to harm US productivity. Had Tetris first been released in the modern era, I…
There's also a difference between "merely popping a notification" and actively hoping to make your games a mindless part of players' days, as in your parent's quote.
Re: Show HN: WordLines – A zero-knowledge proof-based blockchain puzzle game
#20As a technical demonstration, this little project is really interesting. There's only one aspect I'd like to poke at a bit: "Mobile gaming is more interesting than PC/web clients to me. If nothing it means developers can use push notifications and make games a much more mindless/regular part of players' day vs. depending on users to actively seek out their game on their computers." This is one of the dark patterns th…
I think we're really abusing the terms 'dark pattern' and 'ethics' at the point where merely popping a notification about ingame events is covered. When Tetris was first released back in 1986, its uniquely addictive nature led some to theorize that it was intrinsically harmful, or more conspiratorially, that it was a weapon made by Russians to harm US productivity. Had Tetris first been released in the modern era, I…
I see a fundamental problem in the following general attitude: "make games a much more mindless/regular part of players' day vs. depending on users to actively seek out their game". Why do this? Why not just put the game out there, and if it's any good, players will start raving about it. Sure, in this case it's pretty harmless. But when most executives and/or developers start thinking this way, it turns into a sort of arms race for users' attention. User attention is basically the new "market share" that they seek to maximize. I think that as long as this is the general view on things, the companies' incentives (or individual developers, to a somewhat lesser extent) is misaligned with the public good.
And specifically on notifications, we have evidence that they don't have a positive impact on our attention spans: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/2858036.2858359 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26121498/