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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

#241
post #193
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…

> Why breed Purrstige Traits? Breeding a Purrstige Trait can be challenging, but it’s rewarding too. Because Purrstige Traits are time-limited, they’re particularly rare — and especially valued as a result. Plus, Purrstige Traits are always a nice visual treat, creating some of the game’s most beautiful and unique cats. From the docs, lots of talk about value. Not much reason why. It reminds me of the Beanie Babies V…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania “A fool and his money…”

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

#242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

1/ Making people play to the best of their ability. People have always been insanely competitive, without bringing in a token in the middle. All you're doing is making it impossible to play (or not lose money) if you're not trying your hardest, all the time. 2/ You're really going to pretend you've never seen communities make their own services on top of a game? The only real difference is that it is fully automated…

Agreed, plus it raises this question: why would any gaming company cooperate with an API that effectively removes their control over their assets and enables competitors and third parties from building on top of them without requiring authorization?

I can only see the "open API" benefit for free open source games. So it wouldn't have helped Vitalik and his famed WoW sword.

Then again, making fun games is hard, and there's no escaping it. So maybe it wouldn't help free games either.

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

#243
post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why breed Purrstige Traits? Breeding a Purrstige Trait can be challenging, but it’s rewarding too. Because Purrstige Traits are time-limited, they’re particularly rare — and especially valued as a result. Plus, Purrstige Traits are always a nice visual treat, creating some of the game’s most beautiful and unique cats. From the docs, lots of talk about value. Not much reason why. It reminds me of the Beanie Babies V…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania “A fool and his money…”

If you were gambling on tulip futures in taverns, you knew exactly what you were doing.

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

#244
post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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) an…

> Sure, if your computer is up to running the boss fight that many times over.

The boss fights have to be very CPU and bandwidth-efficient because every other computer on the network will have to verify many of them. One exception could be that if the probability of winning is low enough with most seeds, you could just make it so that you don't need to broadcast your game (you only broadcast your "proof-of-victory" claim the reward, so if you get a losing seed you just have to broadcast a transaction that pays for your "entry ticket"). That way you could make it difficult to simulate many games while keeping the network performant.

Actually, maybe that's not right because you might be able to make a program that checks to see if you got a lucky seed, so it will just effectively add an annoying roulette-style gambling element of getting good RNG. I don't know.

Anyways, I think a somewhat-fun single-player game may work if it's something like this:

(1) You pay a fee to play a provably-fair deterministic dungeon-crawler type game like nethack.

(2) When you die, you get an NFT for every item you earn. There are massive network fees that prevent you from easily trading the NFT on an open market. So it's preferable to get them through the singleplayer game.

(3) The NFT is used in some hearthstone-like multiplayer card game that encourages you to collect a variety of cards. The "rarer" NFTs are not explicitly better than the common NFTs, they just allow for more exotic gameplay situations so they will simply be more desirable because they are more fun. This encourages you to play the single-player game many times to collect a wide variety of items.

(4) Optional: implement competitive (tournament pool) gambling on top of the card game.

Making a bot to do the singleplayer game would be difficult/undesirable here because:

- you would have to program it to understand the user's different tradeoffs between going to different parts of the dungeons and getting different types of loot, which is sort of subjective decision making.

- trading rewards between players is infeasible due to fees, and there's no trustworthy way to "buy an account" off of a botter.

- the reward is mostly cosmetic and has sentimental value: you can just fork the card game to play it without the NFTs, even to gamble.

- the singleplayer game is somewhat fun in itself, and has a skill cap to prevent bots from stomping actual players (Sort of like TF2's MvM)

I think a crypto game like this could work if it was open source, 100% of fees go to miners, and the development is funded-by-donation. But many crypto games are pretty scammy so they don't pan out.

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

#245
post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if there are any prn games where the gameplay is so good you forget about the prn

The Fate series which later spawned a massive franchise (multiple games, movies and books) started off as an eroge.

It doesn't have a whole lot more sex than your average fantasy novel, and like your average fantasy novel it's also an extremely long retelling of the author's tabletop game.

(Fate somehow has exactly the same magic system as White Wolf Mage even though it's too old to have copied it. Not sure how that happened.)

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

#246

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.

The collectibles WotC issues could be much more valuable if they are issued on the blockchain where both exchangeability and access to provenance are guaranteed.

But WotC doesn't want them to be more valuable, it wants to be able to capture more value from them. These are not equivalent goals.

And this is one of the big things with many of the apps crypto promoters wave around that are about big incumbents adopting crypto: they implicitlt require those incumbents being motivated to create value that people invested in crypto infrastructure (the exact for depending on the particular cryptocurrency model) can capture rather than seeking to capture created value themselves.

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

#247
post #87

> What Went Wrong? It's in the title of the article. It's a "Blockchain Game". That's what went wrong. It was a flawed concept from its inception. Blockchains are pretty cool from a math/cryptography standpoint, but they really do not provide added value in most areas people try to apply them to. CryptoKitties is a digital trading card game. You get cards, you can "breed" cards together to make new cards, you trade/b…

How would you have a digital collectible without blockchain? The alternative is just a private database somewhere that depends on the whims of a company/individual for its continued existence.

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

#248
post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Fate series which later spawned a massive franchise (multiple games, movies and books) started off as an eroge.

It doesn't have a whole lot more sex than your average fantasy novel, and like your average fantasy novel it's also an extremely long retelling of the author's tabletop game. (Fate somehow has exactly the same magic system as White Wolf Mage even though it's too old to have copied it. Not sure how that happened.)

> Fate somehow has exactly the same magic system as White Wolf Mage even though it's too old to have copied it.

Unless there’s a different Fate that also started of as eroge and spawned a massive franchise, it was first released in 2006, 13 years after White Wolf first released Mage: The Ascension, and so was very much not too early to have copied from Mage.

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

#249

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 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. Anywhere else and I would assume you were joking. This being HN, I have to assume you're being serious. So, at the risk of stating the obvious, that's the point of the blockchain. That you can provide verifiable proof for things like this.

The blockchain proves a chain of custody. Please explain how you mint the proof of boss kill without an authority.

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

#250
post #87

> What Went Wrong? It's in the title of the article. It's a "Blockchain Game". That's what went wrong. It was a flawed concept from its inception. Blockchains are pretty cool from a math/cryptography standpoint, but they really do not provide added value in most areas people try to apply them to. CryptoKitties is a digital trading card game. You get cards, you can "breed" cards together to make new cards, you trade/b…

How would you have a digital collectible without blockchain? The alternative is just a private database somewhere that depends on the whims of a company/individual for its continued existence.

> that depends on the whims of a company/individual for its continued existence

As do most things so it's really neither relevant nor a drawback worth discussing.

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