Will the Real Blockchain Gaming Please Stand Up?

Now, I’m one of the least picky pedants when it comes to definitions and descriptions of new and emerging technology. So no, I don’t really get annoyed when people talk about the deep web and dark web or WWW and internet -- of course, each term is distinct and when it comes to discussions, very important to distinguish. But for average Joe (and that means most of us, dummy), it’s really uninteresting to boil down terminology when a simple “internet” or “online” tag gets the message across.

[Stop wincing, Hackers, you know I’m right]

So now that the blockchain industry (whatever that means) is in a period where blockchain gaming is one of the hottest trends in development, it’s interesting to see what the term really means.

If definitions defined blockchain gaming

Taken at face value, blockchain gaming could simply be any type of game that makes use of or is related to blockchain technology -- these days, it can be the use of one of any hundreds of cryptocurrencies out there, or it can be a game using smart contract technology, or it can simply be a decentralised application or Dapp that lives “on the blockchain”.

To restrict blockchain games that use blockchain technology alone -- either through use of block mining, block time, or block hash results to determine outcomes in gameplay -- would probably exclude the majority of titles out there claiming to be blockchain games. Pick up any number of gaming Dapps and you’ll realise that few of them would actually suffer if replicated on a non-blockchain infrastructure.

Let’s take Axie Infinity as an example, since most games now are really just carbon copies of the game. If you were to take the code, and build the game on a PC with a different programming language, you could recreate the exact same type of game. Replace NFTs with pre-loaded item generation based on RNG, replace cryptocurrency with digital currency, replace the chain with a traditional database.

In fact, you’d end up with a game that’s possibly faster, definitely cheaper, and a lot more stable. And you wouldn’t lose the soul of the game (if, we want to argue, that Play-to-Earn games have any soul).

So if the real test of what a blockchain game really is is whether or not the use of blockchain actually made the game what it was, have we ever had any examples of “real” blockchain games?

The OG blockchain games were gambling games

We might have to go back to the earliest crypto games that emerged in the years following Bitcoin’s launch just over a decade ago. Satoshi Dice comes to mind, that infamous pioneering app of today’s crypto casinos. Launched in 2014, and taking on an entirely new spin of dice as a gambling tool, Satoshi Dice was so popular that at one point, it was even thought to account for over half of all Bitcoin transactions globally.

Perhaps the true innovation of these early blockchain games was “Bitcoin dice”, which is still a popular crypto gambling variant that exists on sites like Bitvest and Crypto.Games (themselves some of the oldest crypto sites still around today). Like any gambling game that relies on random number generation to generate a fair outcome, crypto dice would introduce a decentralised, trustless concept of fairness, giving birth to the term “Provably Fair”.

Unlike in regular casinos or gambling, where machines and gaming rigs spit out random outcomes via Random Number Generator (RNG) systems, the Provably Fair concept did not need third-party verifications. In fact, the entire casino and gambling industry relies on only a handful of certified RNG verifiers, and these require manual inspections and certifications to ensure fairness -- a cost naturally passed on to customers.

But with Provably Fair in crypto dice, players were able to verify for themselves that the outcomes they saw were fair since they involved hashing certain “seeds” that were randomised from both the player (client-side) and the casino (server-side). The hashed results use the same SHA-256 algorithm that Bitcoin used, ensuring that neither player nor casino would ever be able to know the outcome of a bet before it was placed. In this way, for the first time, players were able to verify for themselves that dice outcomes were not manipulated by the casino (instead of trusting that casinos and RNG verifiers were being honest).

This Provably Fair standard for use of hashing algorithms is so popular now that even big brand casinos are beginning to catch on, and you’ll find many crypto casinos today employ some form of this mechanism in their games.

Blockchain world building

Then there was another breed of games that perhaps summed up the term blockchain game in an even truer way, at least philosophically. World-building games like Huntercoin and Spells of Genesis predated smart contract networks like Ethereum and made attempts that mirror the claims made by so-called metaverse games of today: virtual worlds that persisted on decentralised blockchains, with players mining tokens with their interactions recorded on the blockchain, with difficulty rates adjusted according to mining activity.

Though experimental, they used blockchain smart contracts on PoW chains similar to Bitcoin -- so you can imagine just how complex they were!

Of course, their complexity proved to be their downfall as well. Mainstream adoption needs simplicity and ease of use and the Huntercoins of the past could never really come close to the pick-up-and-play structure of games like Axie Infinity

Modern Blockchain Gaming heroes?

If we examine the term “blockchain gaming” today, we can’t go far wrong using the definition from [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain_game#:~:text=A%20blockchain%20game%20(also%20known,use%20cryptography%2Dbased%20blockchain%20technologies.&text=In%20some%20cases%2C%20players%20of,play%2Dto%2Dearn%20games.): “A blockchain game (also known as a NFT game or a crypto game) is a video game that includes elements that use cryptography-based blockchain technologies.”

I find it so interesting that it’s chosen to say that blockchain games are also known as NFT games! This probably is accurate in context, if that it completely ignores the history of blockchain games as I talked about earlier. But it is a nod to the importance of the NFT sector and how far it’s come to even define the way we view blockchain gaming.

And while you’ll know my views on NFTs and NFT games aren’t necessarily the most uplifting, I must pay homage to great projects being developed right now that promise to make more out of blockchain games and NFTs than simple “play to earn”. CryptoKitties and its spawn should take full credit for creating a form of collectible game that is more secure and transparent. Upcoming MMORPG Cradles is another, with an interesting plan to use block time and a new NFT protocol called EIP3664 to enable “entropy increasing” worlds to create a metaverse that persistently evolves over time.

Blockchain games may have begun their journey by being defined by their underlying technology, and may currently be defined by hype and trends, but it could be that modern titles come full circle and use blockchain technology -- be it algorithm, smart contract, or NFT -- to introduce true gaming innovation.

On that hope, I couldn’t possibly be more optimistic for the future of blockchain gaming.

Note: So I had a few comments to me in DM from this article written for Cradles (disclosure, but my profile already says so, I’m also the CMO there) and a few nice comments came out of it so have repackaged the article for Hacker Noon. You can read the original article here.