A glimpse into the pinnacle of blockchain games through Dark Forest and Loot: On-chain games (Part 2)

2023-02-23 15:07:53

Collection

The insights brought by Dark Forest and Loot, as well as future possibilities.

Author: Kaspar, Mask Network

This topic has a total of 3 articles, this is the 【Next: Insights from Dark Forest and Loot, and Future Possibilities】 →

[Previous: The Beginning and Dark Forest]* →

[Middle: A Comprehensive View of the Loot Ecosystem]*

1. Dark Forest and Loot

In the previous sections, we spent considerable time explaining two very important projects in the current on-chain gaming landscape, allowing everyone to understand the basic concepts of these projects. So, what similarities and differences can we observe when we analyze them together, and what insights might this provide for the concept of on-chain gaming?

1.1 Differences in Narrative Framework: "Rules" vs. "Clues"

Narrative is undoubtedly one of the most important aspects of the content industry, and the decentralized nature of blockchain has been utilized by Dark Forest and Loot in different ways to construct two distinct forms.

As mentioned earlier, Loot abstracts text and infinitely releases possibilities regarding worldviews and rules, providing players with "clues" about basic elements while completely handing over the interpretation of these "clues" to each participant. In this process, players can not only interpret the clues (e.g., GA), visualize them (e.g., Hyperloot), but also associate them with other elements (e.g., Loot Realms) and create bridges linking different elements (e.g., The rift). This allows Loot to grow into a content ecosystem co-constructed by the participants themselves, which is precisely the inclusiveness that this "bottom-up" model can unlock for all possibilities.

In contrast to the limitless nature of Loot, Dark Forest focuses more on the development of gameplay. Therefore, Dark Forest constructs a "top-down" model. However, unlike traditional NFT or game projects that directly provide a complete game narrative, Dark Forest only establishes the core "universal rules" and basic elements, and through open-source and on-chain methods, it allows everyone to enrich the experience around the skeleton of rules. This enables Dark Forest players to focus more on the game itself without needing to establish a consensus on the rules, creating a vibrant community ecosystem.

1.2 Differences in Game Logic: "Achievement" vs. "Experience"

The different narrative frameworks correspond to different purposes. Dark Forest, as a MMORTS game with clear mechanics, aims to provide a scenario where players can engage in "gameplay", allowing them to compete and strategize within limited resources to achieve victory. Thus, for players, the main goal of participating in Dark Forest is to utilize various means to win, thereby gaining a sense of "achievement" (or other game objectives, e.g., having fun).

In this process, due to the characteristics of being fully on-chain and the encouragement from the core team, players are motivated to develop plugins to enhance their means of victory, fostering a healthy developer ecosystem and leading to a sense of "achievement" derived from creating quality plugins. Therefore, it can be observed that Dark Forest players build an ecosystem around the sense of achievement brought by gameplay and derivative development.

Loot, on the other hand, is somewhat different. To some extent, it cannot be considered a "game" at all, or rather, it greatly transcends the concept of "game." Loot initially lacks a specific purpose, with its core being "experience." The game is merely a part of that experience. Anyone who has drawn RPGs in notebooks or played Dungeons & Dragons as a child should be well aware that with these Loot "clues," it is very easy to construct a game. However, the potential of Loot goes far beyond that of a single game; it can spawn countless games, game components, or merely stories themselves. Due to this richness, participants feel as if they are traveling through different worlds, and the "experience" they gain will be the most unique sensation that the Loot universe can provide.

Thus, when comparing narrative and gameplay, Dark Forest is like the Three-Body Problem on-chain, while Loot is like the Three Kingdoms/Power and Game on-chain.

1.3 Differences in Economic Mechanisms: "Focus" vs. "Connection"

In this regard, the two are somewhat similar. The main purpose of economic mechanisms is usually to attract newcomers while completing incentives for retainers/contributors. Neither Dark Forest nor Loot expects to gain traffic through the design of their economic models.

Slightly different is that Dark Forest has a clear game mechanism and purpose; rules are central. In the setting of these rules, there is basically no token system, and the team prefers to focus on exploring gameplay. Therefore, it is relatively difficult for participants to create an economic model and gain recognition, resulting in filtering out speculative purposes like Fi, making the participating players more genuine. This pure motivation can more effectively stimulate players to think, explore, and build.

In contrast to DF, Loot has a broader audience and ecological range, and its growth is not limited by any rules. Even within the Loot ecosystem, new ecological circles have emerged, leading to the appearance of token systems generated around the ecosystem. These tokens connect ecosystems with each other (e.g., fundraising, introducing other ecological tokens, etc.) while also effectively incentivizing contributors.

However, these ecological tokens often involve governance issues. The recent "Uniswap deployment incident" undoubtedly sounded a warning bell regarding the topic of "token governance." Therefore, the extent to which ecological tokens can assist in the development of the entire ecosystem remains an issue to be observed and studied.

2. Thoughts on On-Chain Games

2.1 Dilemmas and Challenges

Up to this point, we have outlined the general appearance and important characteristics of on-chain games in over ten thousand words. Does this mean that "fully on-chain" is necessarily the "correct" path for blockchain games? It is still a bit early to say. Although on-chain games have good potential, they currently face numerous challenges:

Imperfect underlying infrastructure and ecosystem: The underlying infrastructure mainly includes chains and corresponding development tools, and its impact on games manifests in issues of latency, cost, and iteration.

Latency: As mentioned earlier, multiplayer online games are often very sensitive to network latency and stability. A large number of high-frequency transaction processing requires very high performance from the blockchain.
Cost: Costs include both the development costs of the game and the on-chain interaction costs for players. Since the industry is still very early, mature web3 game engines like UE and Unity have not yet emerged, making the preliminary workload for developing fully on-chain games larger. Additionally, since all transactions on-chain require payment of miner fees, entering high-interaction scenarios like games often becomes a burden for players, especially in the current context where the concepts of deposits and withdrawals are still awaiting simplification.
Iteration: The immutable nature of the chain undoubtedly brings fairness and decentralization, but it also poses certain challenges for code iteration. Developers need to audit their code very carefully to ensure that there are no vulnerabilities and that the game logic is correct, which can be relatively labor-intensive for any larger game.

Choice of game types and design of game logic:

If we simply categorize game types, they can roughly be divided into five categories: RPG (Role-Playing), ACT (Action), AVG (Adventure), SLG (Strategy), and SIM (Simulation). Currently, most fully on-chain games are limited to emphasizing strategy in SLG games.

First, multiplayer vs. single-player: there is no doubt that fully on-chain games are expected to support multiplayer real-time online. If it is merely a single-player game, the on-chain attributes will not be maximally utilized. For project parties, the same thing might be more efficiently achieved using asset on-chain OCA models, such as the Beacon. Therefore, single-player RPGs and most AVGs have basically been passed over (though there are still possibilities worth exploring).

In traditional game development, for games emphasizing real-time combat, such as ACT and MOBA, methods like frame synchronization or event triggering are usually employed to handle player interactions and states, thus completing a large number of transactions with low network latency. However, the current performance of blockchains makes it very difficult to present such models. Therefore, the game types that are currently more suitable for achieving "fully on-chain" are those that emphasize tactical deployment in SLG (e.g., Dark Forest) and those that focus on experience in SIM (e.g., OPCraft).

However, even for these types of games, there are still many challenges. For open-world building SIM games like Minecraft, UGC content is an important aspect of constructing the experience, so a game engine that can support the corresponding logic will be a major difficulty.

For SLGs, the challenge lies in how to convert game logic into a form that can be implemented on-chain, which involves resource planning and game processing. For example, Dark Forest extends the energy transfer time to slow down the game pace and reduce player operation frequency, thereby alleviating pressure on blockchain performance. This is a very clever approach. However, throughout its development, Dark Forest's game logic has still faced many challenges, such as game balance and the fun of the mechanisms.

Therefore, the concept of "fully on-chain" presents significant challenges in the early stages of game planning and development.
Challenges posed by the fully on-chain attributes themselves:

Everything has two sides, just as "centralization" means efficiency while also implying monopoly, and "complete decentralization" may bring "chaos" along with "freedom."

First, on the narrative level, the free narrative framework and barrier-free UGC content indeed allow for broader boundaries for content. However, when anyone can participate in the act of narration, the quality of content will inevitably vary. On one hand, the overall advancement of the narrative will be inefficient due to community filtering and reviewing of content; on the other hand, when a large number of narrative branches emerge, they will blur and disperse attention from high-quality content, causing community members' focus to become chaotic, leading to longer times to establish corresponding consensus.

Besides the aforementioned challenges regarding experience and mechanism design, the economic model also needs to be reconsidered from a new perspective. When placing the entire game on-chain, it indeed gains maximum openness and composability of the economic system, but it also means almost complete loss of control over the game's economic system, which will bring significant variables to the game's development.

2.2 Hopes and Expectations

Given that "fully on-chain games" face so many challenges, why is it still worth pursuing? Or rather, what are we expecting when we talk about "fully on-chain games"?

What is most exciting about fully on-chain games is their ability to broaden and break the traditional definition of "games," releasing new dimensions of possibilities and providing players with a different experience. This experience comes from the "permissionless interoperability" brought about by being fully on-chain. Imagine if World of Warcraft suddenly opened a Minecraft dungeon, where all the equipment and weapons obtained come from Loot. These equipment and weapons could also be used as character skins in Dota, and the achievements in Dota could be converted into experience and medals for a Game ID, unlocking a special card in Magic: The Gathering. Such cross-game, cross-platform, cross-genre, and cross-worldview interactions can be realized by anyone. This high degree of interoperability and composability creates a more open and free ecosystem under the concept of games, leading to richer combinations.

At the same time, the importance of narrative for games cannot be overlooked. This is particularly felt by players of the Chinese version of World of Warcraft. A good narrative often leaves a profound and lasting impact on players, which is why NetEase was able to attract millions of players to its reverse-water-cold World of Warcraft veteran server after the closure of World of Warcraft. The criticisms and complaints at that time seem so familiar now.

As players, we will always yearn for greater openness, more freedom of combination, and more unique narrative structures. This is why The Legend of Zelda can achieve legendary status, and why LEGO, as a simple building block game, has become popular worldwide for 90 years. Perhaps people cannot imagine how many combinations can be created with just six simple LEGO bricks; the answer is an astonishing 900 million. Fully on-chain games release the possibility of building "game LEGO," and their highly composable and expandable characteristics are worth looking forward to by all game players in the future.

2.3 Directions and Possibilities

Considering the current overall development of blockchain, as well as the insights provided by Dark Forest, Loot, and other fully on-chain games, there are many future development directions worth exploring. Here, the author will briefly throw out some ideas:

2.3.1 Infrastructure and Tools

Game Engines Game engines play an extremely important role in the development of any large game. For fully on-chain games, there is also a need for tools that can help developers quickly deploy game logic. This can shorten development time and provide a data standard for subsequent iterations and mutual calls in the open ecosystem.

Currently, a relatively mature project in this field is the fully on-chain game engine MUD developed by @Lattice, which allows developers to quickly deploy game logic into contracts and achieve significant improvements in development efficiency, such as contract and client state synchronization.

Interestingly, since the current fully on-chain games are primarily written in Solidity, Starkware's Cairo is also a commonly used language. However, MUD does not integrate well with Cairo. Therefore, the founders of two active projects in the Starkware ecosystem, Realms and Briq, have jointly led the development of a Cairo-based fully on-chain engine Dojo. However, due to the core ideas of Dojo being too similar to MUD, MUD's founder Ludens expressed some dissatisfaction, leading to a small wave of controversy. Ultimately, Ludens also stated that he is very willing to assist in the plan to deploy MUD to StarkNet.

Although MUD is a very good framework and has developed fully on-chain games like OPCraft, as a foundational infrastructure for game development, this remains a direction with much exploration and development potential.
GAME ID

Game ID refers to the DID generated by players based on the game, primarily reflecting players' reputation and skills. The types of games encompassed by this direction are broader and not limited to fully on-chain games. For example, projects like DeQuest and Carv represent one implementation of Game ID, while the Rift focuses more on identity composition within a specific ecosystem.

The importance of Game ID lies in its ability to connect players with various different games, serving as an indispensable thread and needle in the process of building game ecosystems.
Distribution Platforms

Distribution is an extremely important aspect of the gaming industry, serving as a bridge linking game developers and users. The more open the ecosystem, the greater the demand for such roles. From the history of game development, we can see that platforms like STEAM and EPIC have successfully seized the opportunity of the shift from consoles to PCs. Therefore, we can also believe that under the trend of integrating games with blockchain, there is still enormous untapped value.

Currently, many Launchpads and platforms combining Launchpads with Game ID have emerged for ordinary chain games, among which noteworthy projects include TreasureDAO, which aims to become the web3 Nintendo within the Arbitrum ecosystem, and Cartridge, which aims to create a web3 Steam within the Starkware ecosystem.

2.3.2 Selection and Design of Game Types and Mechanisms

Strategy Games (SLG)

First of all, SLG games undoubtedly fit well with the concept of fully on-chain games. On one hand, they can present a complete gaming experience in a light graphical and light real-time combat environment. On the other hand, they have a high tolerance for narrative, allowing for games like Loot or Realms that provide deep narratives and grand backgrounds, as well as simpler narratives focused on strategy like Dark Forest, or even purely competitive card games like zkHoldem that have no narrative at all.

Moreover, in terms of game mechanics, besides player-versus-player competition, cooperative confrontation systems are also an interesting and suitable direction for fully on-chain games. For example, Topology's ISAAC, or one could imagine a fully on-chain version of Plague Inc. Classic board games and 18xx-style games would also be excellent themes and directions for transformation.
Role-Playing Games (RPG) & Adventure Games (AVG)

As mentioned earlier, single-player games often struggle to effectively utilize fully on-chain characteristics (excluding MMORPGs). However, this does not mean that this path is closed; rather, it requires more intricate thinking and design. For instance, puzzle games within the AVG category are very suitable for a fully on-chain + zk context. The former PLUR was a very interesting attempt (although it was not a fully on-chain game; those interested can check out this tweet).

As for the RPG direction, Realms: Adventures has also proposed a good idea where players engage in single-player dungeon challenges similar to Beacon, but in reality, players interact with the dungeon, creating a competitive dynamic with the dungeon's creator/owner. In this case, introducing assets and economic systems sketches out a very interesting picture. Additionally, narrative-rich themes like Cthulhu tabletop RPGs and Dungeons & Dragons are also worth exploring.
Simulation or Exploration Games Linked to the Real World

One of the most important features of blockchain technology is the permanent recording and storage of data, which can lead to many meaningful attempts. For example, Guardians of Earth is a reality exploration game deeply involved and invested in by Dr. Jane Goodall. Similar to Pokemon GO, it encourages players to seek, explore, and document rare plants and animals they discover to earn "capture" rewards. These records can help mark and protect rare species. Although it has not yet achieved full on-chain status, the overall logic of such games is not complex, and the content to be placed on-chain is very valuable. The entire reward mechanism can also be fairly realized through on-chain economic models, making it a direction worth exploring.

"The End". The boundary between "Now" and "Future" may be blurrier than we imagine

With the continuous emergence of the web3 concept and the increasing number of products adhering to decentralized principles, we gradually hear many comparisons between web2 and web3 application experiences. This comparison is undoubtedly valuable; whether for founders, product managers, or investors, it allows for a clearer understanding of where current web3 applications stand and what aspects are worth improving.

However, this does not mean that all products that have not reached or surpassed web2 experiences are meaningless or valueless. We must always be clear that, whether from the underlying technology or product logic, we are attempting something entirely new, trying to collectively build a new world.

The value of comparing web2 and web3 should only serve as a ruler to help us understand current progress; otherwise, it would be like comparing the acceleration times of an F16 fighter jet and an F1 racing car in a 100-meter dash. The F16, as a fighter jet, might lose, but do the purposes and directions of the two really have comparability?

Whether it is fully on-chain games, decentralized social networks, or network nations, these concepts are still niche today and may even be dismissed as crude, impractical experimental ideas and products. Perhaps they represent the starting point of a new revolution and a new future. It is worth giving them more tolerance, encouragement, and constructive feedback to promote their growth. After all, paradigm shifts may occur unexpectedly.

Just like that spring twelve years ago, still dominated by free text messages, no one could have imagined that this criticized, crude product would change the lives of 1.4 billion people in just a few years. And do these criticisms and complaints seem so familiar now?

Appendix

Blockchain Game Dynamics and Research

Development Trends and Research of the Blockchain Game Market

Topic or theme

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A glimpse into the pinnacle of blockchain games from Dark Forest and Loot: On-chain games (Part 2)