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- cross-posted to:
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Shuji Utsumi, Sega’s co-CEO, comments in a new statement that there is no point in implementing blockchain technology if it doesn’t make games ‘fun’.
I disagree. It makes a ton of sense when proving transactions are legit. So if your game has a lot of high value transactions (think EVE Online), it could make a lot of sense as a way to audit the game servers.
I’m interested in big online games without a reliance on a central server. If all of your trades are handled outside of the game’s servers, and the game server logic isn’t complicated (or made freely available, like Minecraft), the developer ending support for your favorite multiplayer game wouldn’t matter all that much because you could host your own server and keep playing with all the same stuff you had before.
That said, I haven’t seen a single game use blockchain properly, and I’ve only seen a few where I think it could add value. So I’m with Sega, don’t add it unless it’s the best way to solve a real problem. It’s a bad choice most of the time, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad choice all of the time.
But blockchains do not prove anything beyond “50%+epsilon of the miners says so” which pretty much makes it unsuitable to prove anything on any small scale system.
Blockchain could be proof of work (i.e. Bitcoin), proof of stake (Ethereum), or perhaps something different entirely. You could even use proof of an account with a central authority if you want.
Blockchain doesn’t really care what the “proof” is, only that it is agreed upon by the rest in the chain.
So if you tie the proof to something like ownership of a key to the game (i.e. a potentially valid use of NFTs, which is rare), then the Blockchain would merely state that 50+% of the owners of a copy of the game agree that the transaction is legit. You could potentially tie it to membership in a server instance instead, so if the main servers go down, you just fork the Blockchain to your instance and you’re off to the races. And so on.
There are a ton of ways to make it useful, but I highly doubt big game companies will go through the effort when they can just stuff a cheap crypto fork in the game and claim they have Blockchain. But that doesn’t mean the tech is useless, it’s just unlikely to be used properly in a gaming context, at least with the current state of the gaming industry.
The thing is that the word “blockchain” leaves a bad taste in people’s mouths after all the pyramid schemes and scams, and false advertising by silicon valley companies using the word to get investments. There’s nothing actually wrong with blockchain technology and it has real usecases, but I do understand why people are sceptical. It’s sad really, bitcoin was never meant to be an investment platform.
Precisely.
The worst part is that anything decentralized gets coopted by crypto bros. For example, I want to make a lemmy-compatible, distributed service, as in instead of federated instances, you’d donate some of your storage to use the service and a few people would set up gateways to connect people. But pretty much every time I try to look up documentation, it’s all about cryptocurrencies. What I want is:
I think it’s completely feasible, but I got tired of sifting through all the cryptocurrency nonsense. There are plenty of hard problems to solve (i.e. what does moderation look like if everything is immutable? What about illegal content?), but the easy stuff is unnecessarily difficult because of the weird association it all has to cryptocurrencies.
This is why we can’t have nice things…
Bitcoin was designed to gain value over time by making minting more bitcoins increasingly expensive. I don’t think speculation was the intended use, but widespread adoption would be strangled anyway by making holding onto the bitcoin more profitable than most things you could buy with it.
But even then, it makes sense to not bother with any sort of mining, and just have an append only ledger with cryptographic signatures. Let anybody who wants download a copy, and you have all the advantages of blockchain.
Right, a blockchain doesn’t require mining, that’s just how many cryptocurrencies happen to encourage transaction processing. But not all of them do it that way. Ethereum, for example, moved to proof of stake for its blockchain (i.e. you put up X coins and you’re trusted as a verifier), so it doesn’t need to do any mining at all.
A blockchain is just a series of cryptographically verified transactions. How people are trusted and rewarded for verifying transactions is up to the blockchain implementor.
That said, it’s kind of a buzzword right now, so I assume most, if not all, games that include blockchain either do it as a gimmick or do it in a very predatory/scammy way. But that doesn’t mean the tech is bad (i.e. email isn’t bad because fraudsters use it), it just means it’s very niche in usefulness.
Thing is, forming a chain by having each entry reference the checksum of the previous one is also used by the version control system git, which preceded bitcoin, being released in 2005 as opposed to 2009. So technically, it’s not blockchain technology, it’s git technology. In fact, you could easily implement this sort of thing with a git repository. E.g. say you want to keep track of real estate. Have a file for every piece of real estate, and when somebody wants to sell something, they create a branch, and append the file for the real estate they want to sell. They sign the commit. Likely, the buyer and a notary will also add signed commits. Then a clerk at town hall checks if all necesarry signatures are there, and merges it back into the main branch.
I guess if you take a super abstract view if it, that comparison makes sense. But the whole concept is the nature of verification. It would be like requiring the majority of your team to sign every commit before it becomes part of your git tree. And to do so without any central authority.
The innovation with blockchain isn’t in the abstract structure, but the decentralized verification system. A game doesn’t need all of that decentralization, but it could use some of it (e.g. players verify transactions outside of the game, but use central servers for a part of the verification process).
Your git example requires authorized people. Blockchain removes that requirement. Instead of someone deciding something gets merged, everyone (or a majority, plurality, etc) decides what gets merged.
The presence of parties powerful enough to screw you over without using trickery removes the value of decentralized verification. Even if the central authority refuses to merge it, I can proof that they refused to merge it without good reason. The central authority could take my house and disregard the blockchain if they so choose, and at that point, all I could do is prove that they screwed me.
I’m not sure what your point is. You’re essentially saying you’re screwed with the blockchain, but everything you started implies you’re screwed without the blockchain:
Sure, and they can do that now. The only thing stopping your city from taking your house is the court system and police enforcement. In a game, there are even fewer protections, so the game devs can take your digital assets if it’s inconvenient. I guess you could sue them in civil court, but they’re also in control of the EULA for the game. We’ve seen cases where games ban players, which essentially takes away the license they bought for the game.
With blockchain, you could externalize all of those transactions. If the main servers block you, you could join another server that doesn’t recognize the ban. The less control the game companies have over transactions, the more transparent those types of decisions become.
However, it needs to be built properly to actually take advantage of the benefits of blockchain. Everything I’ve seen has simply been a money grab because there’s little incentive to do it properly.
I typed that right after I got home from a long hike, and i fell and hit my knee on the way back, so I was rather tired when I last replied to you.
The point being is that since some trust in a central authority is required, the central authority can handle verification. And because of the cryptographic signatures, the only way they could cheat would by ommitting transactions. Invalid transactions, either because its unsigned or because the numbers don’t add up, can be detected trivially. So if we just give all stakeholders a copy of the transaction, they’d be able to prove that the transaction has been ommitted.
I hope your knee is okay. :)
I’m more concerned about what happens when the central authority disappears. I think everyone has experienced a game being dropped by the studio, and if it’s an MMO or something, you could lose valuable items you’ve purchased even if third party servers exist.
Externalizing transactions means individual servers can decide which transactions (i.e. which central authorities they recognize). So if the game devs act poorly, the community can switch to another authority they prefer. It also gives devs less of a reason to discard transactions between version releases because the community would expect those transactions to remain valid (they are separate from the game after all).
So I think they are a lot of good ways it could be used to players’ benefit, but unfortunately it’s usually a gimmick or scam.