Unlocking the Future of Gaming: An Interview With Modeo Cheng, Lead Game Designer of Curio Research

Games have touched us all in one way or another. From an all-consuming passion to a livelihood, they have been integral to human civilization for ages.

Thanks to emerging tech innovations, though, games and gaming have undergone a paradigm shift in recent years. Besides being more user-centric and community-oriented, novel gaming protocols now integrate transferable in-game assets with “real” monetary value.

Modeo Cheng is aiming to be a leader of this change as Lead Game Designer of Curio Research. By designing Treaty, the world’s first blockchain-powered game introducing composable, in-game player agreements, he is working to disrupt the status quo and foster grassroots gaming innovation.

I spoke with Modeo about the paradigm shift happening in the industry, the potential for fully on-chain games, and creating a new era of gaming experiences.

Please tell us a bit about yourself and how you got into blockchain gaming and Web3.

I’m a big strategy gamer who has experience playing thousands of hours of games such as Football Manager, Civ, and Hearts of Iron. Currently, I am a Computer Science student at UC Berkeley, but I have dropped out to fully focus on Curio and our game, Treaty.

I have a passion for research, and in 2020, I worked on a few research projects exploring regulations on freelance platforms and the impact of open innovation on gig economies.

Through this experience, I discovered how certain platforms might pose concerns for gig workers, underscoring the importance of decentralized systems.

In 2021, I joined Smrti Lab as an analyst to research tokenomics and evaluate game projects, which led me to realize the potential for blockchain to disrupt gaming. Currently, at Curio, I lead the game design and have developed the vision for Treaty.

What is the current state of on-chain gaming in your view? What key problems are you solving at Curio?

On-chain games have completed their first cycle. In my opinion, the last generation of on-chain games, known as GameFi, has become obsolete. None of their economic models have been successful. They claim everyone can profit from playing the game.

However, few users pay to consume their content, which effectively makes them Ponzi schemes that don’t work. This is disappointing, and I sympathize with those who feel that on-chain games are fraudulent.

On-chain games have much greater potential than financial derivatives. Developers are taking bold steps to build fully on-chain games, where both assets and the entire game logic exist on the blockchain.

This shift towards fully on-chain games unlocks composability and game autonomy far beyond what traditional studios can offer.

To realize our vision, we are addressing some key challenges. We are creating a new type of game that does not exist on the market currently. Therefore, we are building many novel components from scratch. Our game design approach differs significantly from that of most studios.

Rather than devising rules around an existing game template, we derive them from our envisioned game experiences and test them through tabletop simulations.

Our methodology leans heavily on first principles, choosing to reinvent and innovate rather than merely enhance what existing games offer.

To achieve our goals, we are working hard to solve some of the toughest technical challenges in this field.

Our demo launch earlier this year showed us that the current EVM framework is very restrictive for game performance, and it is impossible to make significant improvements without modifying the architecture.

To tackle that, we are developing our own custom rollup framework, Keystone, on top of the EVM.

Treaty, the game you’ve built at Curio, involves a functional social layer, enabling in-game social interactions between players. Is that correct? Please tell us why this is significant.

The traditional structure of grand strategy games and MMOs lacks the intricacy and depth of social networks found in real-world communities. In games like Rise of Kingdoms, relationships are predetermined by game studios.

Players don’t have the capacity to organically form and govern their own social structures. A significant reason for this has been the absence of virtual assets and a meaningful system to protect those assets.

In the conventional web2 model, there are no substantial incentives to guard assets that don't exist tangibly. However, the advent of smart contracts has transformed the landscape, enabling game assets and logic to exist in an immutable, decentralized ledger.

This innovation calls for the construction of a social layer over the assets layer to safeguard users' stakes on-chain.

Through smart contracts, our first game, Treaty, offers a robust response to this challenge.

It introduces an automated stream where participants can conveniently monitor promises and enforce agreements, a virtual analog to the legal enforcement bodies in the real world that protect people's interests and rights.

This structure forms the basis for more complex and authentic virtual relationships, rivaling and potentially exceeding the social network depth of real-world communities.

It will redefine the virtual society, making it possible for MMOs and grand strategy games to mirror the rich and multifaceted nature of human interaction found in the physical world.

What are some of the main technical requirements for migrating real-world social relations to an on-chain gaming environment?

Trust-building is the most important element. It is vital for people to believe that the on-chain world they interact with is fair and trustworthy. Only then will they be willing to stake their assets and construct meaningful relationships with strangers onchain.

We are working on a novel sovereign rollup framework to make it happen, and it’s gonna be much more performant than traditional blockchains, tailored to our exact use case.

Another challenge is lowering the barrier to treaty creation. It is important to recognize that people are used to making agreements verbally using natural language and expecting players to write treaties in code is not ideal in the long run.

Fortunately, some great LLM tools are now available to support the translation of natural languages into code. Looking ahead, players can expect to be able to make transactions or even generate smart contracts within chats in future versions.

Curio is exploring alternative execution environments for on-chain gaming with Keystone. Can you explain this move briefly?

Current on-chain game architectures are unable to robustly support both the social layer and the high throughput needed to make great MMO games. Keystone is our flagship on-chain game architecture and the first architecture that addresses both needs very well.

The tick-based game engine and the contract execution layer interoperate with stateful precompiles, allowing games to run lightspeed while player treaties are seamlessly integrated and enforced. This is a huge step towards the end game of blockchain games.

Currently, there is no EVM framework to support games that can be played smoothly. We discovered this issue during our playtest earlier this year. Therefore, Keystone is one of our major in-house projects that aims to place the game engine in the chain.

With custom precompiles, smart contracts can access the underlying ECS chain state. Instead of Solidity, game logic can be written in Go and can be massively parallelized.

In short, on-chain games will now be over 100 times faster than before.

How do you see the future of on-chain gaming? What are your plans for this future? Any upcoming projects that you’d like to share?

We are at the cusp of a new era where the nascent space of on-chain games is beginning to emerge and take form.

We envision a future where games with web3 native features become a unique and groundbreaking category of their own, offering an entirely new gaming experience, unlike anything that has come before.

Our plans are directed toward leading this revolution. As part of our efforts, we're currently developing our flagship game founded on the concept of 'treaties'. But we're not just creating a game, we're also building the critical infrastructure like Keystone to support it.

We see our work not just as a singular product, but as a catalyst for an entirely new breed of games. Our first goal is to set a pioneering precedent that will inspire and pave the way for a wave of innovative crypto-native games.

The exciting journey ahead is filled with vast possibilities, and we're looking forward to sharing more about our upcoming projects as they evolve.