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Everyone loves to play computer games, be it mobile games such as Candy Crush Saga or desktop first-person shooters such as the latest Call of Duty. Independent of which game you play, blockchains may forever change the way you play. Here is how.
Games are good, but…
Just as all good things have their faults, traditional online games too have their own flaws. Three critical ones are the following:
- Most games allow players to buy in-game items, such as power-ups, new guns, faster cars and more. However, the ability to officially introduce these items into the game lies with game publisher, such as Blizzard or Bungie. Although “modding” games is possible, most games explicitly forbid it in their end-user license agreements.
- Games may also not receive updates after just a few years, due to various reasons.
- Cheating is very common in traditional online multi-player games. It seriously worsens the gaming experience for a lot of players, and game developers go to great lengths to develop anti-cheat software. However, such systems can only do so much to prevent humans from cheating 😐, and often invade the privacy of honest players.
- Another issue which often plagues online multi-player games, is network lag. This may be caused due to packet losses, longer physical distance between the player’s client and the game server or other causes. Moreover, such servers are a central point of failure in case some entity tries to bring down the game. Using a decentralized network can help solve some of these problems, but game publishers are wary of allowing their software to be run on servers not owned by them.
Imagine being able to sell your in-game tokens for real money.
How blockchains can help
A few of these critical problems can be solved using a blockchain to store the state of the game itself. Blockchain technology allows the creation of a distributed, immutable database. The technology was initially used for the Bitcoin cryptocurrency, but can also be used to store immutable data, such as land titles and even digital cats (in a game, of course). For those of you who are new to blockchains and cryptocurrencies, check out my previous posts here. Digital tokens or crytocurrencies are an essential component of the blockchain and have become a major application of the technology. Games too, have their own tokens, such as XP in Fortnite, but these tokens cannot be exchanged for real money, like cryptocurrency. Bitcoin and Ethereum, which are the two most popular cryptocurrencies have a really large market cap, due to the software-limited generation of tokens. The same principle can be applied to in-game assets, such as rare characters. Imagine being able to sell your in-game tokens for real money.
Games hosted on a Blockchain
Theoretically, games can be hosted on blockchains in the form of smart contracts. A smart contract is a computer program present on the blockchain hat enforces one or more rules for a transaction to be valid. A recent patent by IBM proposes this very idea, wherein players request for a smart contract from the blockchain, so that they can play the game. You can read more about smart contracts here. The advantage of a smart contract is that it can automatically verify any other information to provide access to the game. A game designed in such a way can also update the blockchain when he/she accesses one or more assets. This means that the entire history of the game is publicly visible. Moreover, due to the P2P (peer-to-peer) network used by blockchain, local copies of the game can be easily hosted on nodes, thus providing a better gaming experience such as less lag, since every server will have a copy of the blockchain (and hence the game contracts) required for the game to run. This also makes the network resilient to DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks.
Preventing cheating
On a blockchain, every new transaction is broadcasted to all nodes on a best-effort basis. In the case of a game using smart contracts, every change to the state of the game will be broadcasted to all nodes (eventually). If a player tries to cheat in a game, nodes running valid versions of the game can test if a move like that or a state like that is possible, thus preventing most cases of cheating. To read more about how this can be done, check out this document.
Community support to development
Most computer games are closed-source by nature, which means their source code is not available. This is one reason why some good games can never be resurrected, even by dedicated fans. Miscrits, which was shut down by its parent company—Broken Bulbs Studios is an example. Since the state of the game is determined by actions of players, and due to the public visibility of this state, developers can obtain new insights. Due to the public nature of a smart contract, players also have the ability to create “modded” version of games very easily. Such versions can be shared with other nodes, and if they become popular, the game developers can merge changes into the original version, thus improving the original game. Another crazy advantage is that due to the immutable characteristic of the blockchain, smart contracts are also permanent entities, thus allowing players to play various versions of the same game even after a new version has been released. How cool is that !
Challenges
Don’t get yourself too excited yet. Existing blockchain-based games, such as Cryptokitties, have experienced phenominal growth during their early years, but haven’t grown their player base much afterwards. In fact, making a profitable game is the difficult part. Presently, blockchains cannot support a large number of transactions, and in games such as FPS, the number of changes to the state are huge. Another reason is the requirement that these games require tokens (purchased with real money / mined) to play the game, which prevents many people from participating, and crytocurrencies used by such games often have disproportionate mining fees, even for small transactions. A few of these problems can be solved by performing some transactions off-chain, but this is still in its infancy.
Enfin
Still excited? You can find a list of blockchain-based games on stateofthedapps.com, but remember that these may require a lot of investment on your part (in the form of cryptocurrencies). In a few years, most of these challenges may be overcome, but till then, keep playing !
Techprodezza 