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The collapse of cryptokitties, the first big blockchain game

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Re: The collapse of cryptokitties, the first big blockchain game

#231

Post by the_af »

px43 wrote: post #116
Melchori wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gaming with being able to earn money is something I normally call gambling or work. It's depressing to think about it. And yes people who made gold in wow were also not gaming but working. It wasn't cool, fun or whatever 10 years ago

The status quo in gaming today is that people work thousands, or 10s of thousands of hours building, collecting, exploring, etc, and it's all owned by some emotionless gaming company that might just decide to delete all your stuff, or just disappear all together, without notice. Giving players control of the things they worked hard to get just seems like the natural progression as we assign more and more value to the…

> it's all owned by some emotionless gaming company that might just decide to delete all your stuff, or just disappear all together, without notice. Giving players control of the things they worked hard to get just seems like the natural progression

This makes no sense to me.

You are always at the mercy of the gaming company. "Stuff" in games has no meaning outside games. If you assign it meaning, you don't need an NFT or whatever: it's in your mind.

Vitalik could have drawn a picture of his magic sword, or simply relive his fond memories of it.

If Blizzard or whatever company takes the game down, the "stuff" becomes meaningless. Existing in blockchain is meaningless. Outside the game engine, it means nothing.

I've also heard "but other companies could take your NFT and...". Well, I'm skeptical. It's still the case that your stuff had its meaning attached to a game or account that no longer exists; whatever other companies do with it cannot replicate the original experience that gave it meaning, I.e. the game.

It's also unclear why Blizzard (or whatever company) would cooperate with making the ingame "stuff" remain outside their control.

Finally, if another company could build an enticing experience rivaling the original game, it's unclear why they would artificially tie it to a competitor (even risking lawsuits if they mentioned trademarks).

Re: The collapse of cryptokitties, the first big blockchain game

#232

Post by ben-schaaf »

lmm wrote: post #127
cowtools wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I guess, but grinding/mining is not sybil proof. So the only thing that cryptocurrency improves is replacing that with buying and trading items with actual money, or mining stuff with PoW. You couldn't have a blockchain equivalent of World-of-Warcraft. You have no meaningful way to testify that you recieve an item from killing a boss, for example. The only thing you can really implement with cryptocurrency is a…

> You have no meaningful way to testify that you recieve an item from killing a boss, for example. Surely you could have a smart contract that implements that (and, in the extreme case, I guess you submit the random seed for this boss fight and a hash of the button inputs you used or something - of course there's no way to stop you using a bot to automate pressing the buttons at the right time, but that applies to re…

A hash of the inputs can't be used to replay the game and thus verify what happened. You'd need the full input list, including mouse movement. In my experience FPS games send around 200MB/h in networking, so assuming only a 1000th of that is needed to store the inputs that comes out to ~5600USD/h. Even if it took just a kB that's still ~30USD just to play the game for an hour. (This of course ignores actually running the game inside a smart contract, which would also take an obscene amount of gas)

Re: The collapse of cryptokitties, the first big blockchain game

#233

Post by saurik »

XCSme wrote: post #176
saurik wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the real world, people play trading card games all the time and a big part of the ecosystem is trading the trading cards. Only, it is really annoying to have to ship around and maintain physical cards, and I want my card collection in the cloud. Some people would thereby prefer to play an online version of, say, Magic: The Gathering, or whatever the Pokémon one is called, etc. The problem now is... how do you do t…

> If only there were some off-the-shelf technology for tracking digital assets Isn't this any relational database where you can set the owner_id of an item? > your entire game backend would then be built around a single marketplace that might randomly pull your game for some reason and shut down your entire company Most online games have some sort of digital assets they have to keep track of, and that's one of the tr…

No: most online games don't maintain a marketplace where users can trade their assets for cash, running auctions or whatever similar to eBay. That is the issue here: people want to be able to sell their cards to other players, and now you need to build a mechanism that supports that correctly without becoming riled in the customer support issues.

Also, BTW: part of what makes the physical cards valuable in the long term is that even if the company that sold them goes out of business, the cards don't disappear and they still work to play the game... your dismissive attempt to build this sort of thing using centralized tech is thereby pretty ridiculous on the face of it even if you didn't try to tackle the money issues yourself.

What you want is a game that has no backend and preferably is coded using forwards-compatible technologies like HTML/JavaScript that can use these APIs to access their state for the long term... and again, that's Ethereum.

(Note: I ran a market for apps for over a decade and before that I was a game developer for almost half a decade; I thereby know what things are and aren't hard.)

Re: The collapse of cryptokitties, the first big blockchain game

#234

Post by the_af »

Karellen wrote: post #129
glitchc wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an absurd argument! By that logic buying a book is akin to gambling: You don’t know how good it is until you start reading. Books have nothing in common with gambling except for the books about gambling.

That... actually makes sense to me. You're gambling the cost of the book that the amount of enjoyment you get out of it is worth the time it took to read it. If you enjoy the book, your payout is those feeling of enjoyment. If you lose, the price is the cost of the book and the time you wasted reading it - but you have the paltry consolation prize of a now-second-hand book that you can sell at a loss to a used book s…

Unfortunately, that definition of "gambling" is so encompassing that it effectively means everything is a form of gambling. Which is, of course, absurd.

I could be said to be gambling that my comment will be read. I am also gambling that someone will not disagree with me. I am gambling that by writing this comment I'm not wasting time that could have been better spent in other endeavors. I am gambling that I will not die of a stroke just after writing my comment, making my final conscious act a pointless one.

If it sounds absurd, that's because it is. Of course it's not gambling, and neither is reading a book.

Re: The collapse of cryptokitties, the first big blockchain game

#235

Post by lmm »

cowtools wrote: post #223
lmm wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To the extent that it is broken in world-of-warcraft, it will be more broken here because there will be fees associated with playing, so players will be incentivised to make the most of their money by cheating and trying to optimize the smallest possible "proof". Ultimately on a technical level it's just another form of proof of work - the boss issues a challenge and the player has to figure out a response that mee…

With a normal bot, you can only run one boss-fight at a time and you are subject to network latency and imprecision of your actions. In this blockchain scenario, couldn't you run millions of different simulations of the boss fight on your own computer and publish the one in which you get the most loot, take the least damage, produce the most compact proof, or whatever? In any case, the "proof-of-victory" as I'll call…

> couldn't you run millions of different simulations of the boss fight on your own computer and publish the one in which you get the most loot, take the least damage, produce the most compact proof, or whatever?

Sure, if your computer is up to running the boss fight that many times over. I assume the game would only let you run each "challenge" once (and I guess might charge you a tiny fee to enter the boss fight) and most random inputs would lose; in that case they just have to make it more expensive to do that than to make currency by mining.

Re: The collapse of cryptokitties, the first big blockchain game

#236

Post by largepeepee »

foerbert wrote: post #188
rideontime wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They already do this sort of thing with MtG Online Exactly. They can track all this stuff in their own database. WotC doesn't stand to benefit from putting anything on a blockchain.

I think it's possible they might see some benefit. It would basically hinge on people's faith in WotC vs a blockchain to administer that data. If the blockchain was more trusted - say because of concerns WotC might go out of business one day, etc - then using it might entice people to put more money in.

Your words are contradictions.

You say they will see benefit.

Yet all you mention is how the blockchain might usurp the faith wotc relies on.

Why would wotc ever fund their potential demise or depend on people that never had faith on their product in the first place?

Re: The collapse of cryptokitties, the first big blockchain game

#237

Post by the_af »

alanfalcon wrote: post #92
Chabsff wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You cannot have a conversation about "crypto games" without addressing how crypto makes the game better. For the sake of this conversation, it doesn't particularly matter how fun CryptoKitties is. What matters is how does the blockchain integration make the game better than it would otherwise have been. From my point of view so far, even the best crypto game out there would have been better if it wasn't for the crypt…

So I've been thinking about this and working on this for years, so I have a different perspective. Is everything fully better for having blockchain integration? Clearly no. Are the benefits worth the trade-offs? I'd argue yes, on the whole. 1. The global worldwide market place. While this introduces commerce/real money, which come with very real downsides, it also makes the game high stakes (meaning most people play…

> 4. Immortal assets. I poured a lot into City of Heroes back in the day, and then one day the devs shut down the server, and took all my heroes with it.

Had City of Heroes implemented their heroes "on blockchain", this would have gotten you nowhere.

CoH's heroes would have been useless outside their servers, blockchain or not. They mean nothing if you don't have the game's engine to make then do fun things.

NFTs only work when they are the meaning in themselves, but this can only happen when the "game" is fundamentally trivial and uninteresting, like CryptoKitties. Real games require an engine to run them, and if the engine shuts down, your "assets" become meaningless.

Gameplay is what matters. Making a server open-source is more meaningful than running the assets on blockchain.

Re: The collapse of cryptokitties, the first big blockchain game

#238

Post by Jack000 »

max51 wrote: post #187
naet wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check https://www.cryptokitties.co/guide/ways-to-play The reason it seems like they didn't describe the "actual game" is that there is no actual "gameplay". You just pay to collect cats. You can trade the cat tokens with other people, try to sell them on the marketplace, pay to generate semi randomized new cat tokens via "breeding", and... just have them under your wallet / name. There is no action, no RPG, no platfo…

>It's basically like that except there is no underlying game to play, Do you think anyone paying >1k for a Pokémon or Magic card is actually using them to play?! That shit is in a sealed case and only sees daylight to impress people or to resell it. I've met collectors who use home printed cards because they are too scared to damage even 10$ cards.

they should set up a fractional reserve system, where you deposit your valuable cards at a card bank and get a "card voucher" you can then use to play actual games with. The card bank could then lend out the cards to other players for profit.

over time, you may not even need the actual cards anymore and just have the vouchers.

Re: The collapse of cryptokitties, the first big blockchain game

#239

Post by thrown_22 »

bo1024 wrote: post #220
thrown_22 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CO2 footprint for one.

You're a day late with that argument... https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/09/15/1059520/the-merg...

So bitcoin has moved to proof of stake?

Re: The collapse of cryptokitties, the first big blockchain game

#240

Post by the_af »

px43 wrote: post #131
Chabsff wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for the verbose answer, though I disagree with most points. 1) "having everything trading for essentially real money doesn't change that underlying level of engagement." It has been long established that this is absolutely the case. A classic example of this would be Diablo 3's RMAH effectively destroying the game by having the entire economy be driven by real-world profit-seeking grind 2) I consider this t…

#2 is the most important one to me, so I'll address that specifically. MOST games I've seen don't provide a public API for players to interact with, and even when players do reverse engineer them, they get accused of cheating, hacking, whatever, and often get their accounts banned. In the world of blockchain gaming, it's trivial to build tools and meta-games around anything, and there's basically nothing that the ori…

> In the world of blockchain gaming, it's trivial to build tools

It's not trivial, because making fun metagames is hard, because game design is hard, and blockchain is not a shortcut to it.

> I can host a small bit of static HTML that gives users the ability to battle cryptokitties

This is backwards. A game about battling kitties must start with kitty battling gameplay that is fun. This is like discussing the programing language -- who cares? Tell me how your game is fun.

Blockchain won't help you at all there. Nothing about it makes anything "fun".

You are proving the other commenter's point: blockchain is not a special sauce for games. Whether a game is enjoyable or not has nothing to do with blockchain. In fact, it turns to be the opposite: if blockchain is involved, you can almost bet there's very little gameplay at all, because that's not what the developers care about.

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