this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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I have never been able to figure out the answer to this, so maybe someone here knows: exactly how does one implement blockchain technology into a game, and what's the purpose of doing so? Like in terms of actual gameplay, what's it supposed to achieve? Is there a valid reason you'd want to include it?
It's all just buzzword bingo.
That's just called a database. Databases on a central account server are several magnitudes more efficient. Using blockchains for this is stupid.
This would be a ton of efforts on part of the devs, and even then it wouldn't really work in most cases because it turns out different games are different games. And even when it does the player experience of being handed end game items when starting a game is also questionable. Even if blockchains for games catch on, this idea never will.
The entire point of the blockchain is to create a decentralised zero trust database, but even if there are legitimate use cases for such a thing (which I'm not convinced of myself), games aren't one of them.
The reason the blockchain pops up in games (and everything else) is that cryptocurrencies have an extreme illiquidity problem and the crypto "millionaires/billionaires" need new fools to buy cryptocoins so they can turn their illiquid cryptocoin "fortunes" into actual fortunes. This is why NFTs exist, this is why Axie Infinity (which is just NFTs with a terrible game built around them) exists, and sometimes they also dupe established companies into motioning something in the direction of "the future" (every crypto game project by an actual game studio).
That's the rub. Eventually blockchain will be useful for tracking ownership of things like land and cars, whose current ownership is tracked by an analog token minted by a a validator and stored offline (which is to say, the government has a piece of paper on file). I recently bought a house, and I had to buy mortgage insurance in case it turns out that 50 years ago someone fraudulently or mistakenly sold this house to someone else when they didn't actually own it, and then I bought it from the guy who bought it from the guy who bought it from the guy who bought it from the guy who bought it from the guy who sold it illegally, so it's not really mine. Blockchain will eliminate that. Game companies mint tokens to represent digital "assets" that they say you "own" but in reality it's the asset creator that can make more of the asset, destroy the asset or deny others usage of the asset (which is the real, functional definition of "own").
I'm still working my way through my thoughts on this after Bored Ape Money Pit but I think that blockchain is one of the infinite number of ways that traditional ownership models are trying to impose themselves on digital assets when it's the fundamental nature of digital assets to be infinitely replicable for a cost so low as to approach $0/per, and to make it very hard to exclude people from having or using these replicas. I work in software. We're getting to a point where the real value in software is in designing ways to stop people from using it unless they've met certain conditions (usually, having paid for a license). Most of what I do is authentication and authorization. That is to say, determining who a user is and what they're allowed to do. These are external, artificial controls. In real life when you eat an apple the apple is gone. When you and your family live in a house, that house is full of people. When you "eat" (or in some other way extract the value from) a digital apple that apple can still be there. An infinite number of people can exist in one digital space via instantiation without ever having to acknowledge one another. Digital assets defy exclusivity, and without exclusivity their can't be ownership. So what we end up with is a million people who have the same bit-for-bit perfect picture of a monkey, but one guy who has a certificate from the monkey picture center that says he's the "owner" of the monkey picture when ownership doesn't really confer any rights, privileges or abilities that everyone else didn't already get for free.
The thing is - how will your blockchain-based mortgage be enforced? What happens if I start squatting on your blockchain-property? At the end of the day, the answer is "people with guns" - we agree that contracts have legal weight, and there are legal structures (and ultimately law enforcement and their threat of force) that keep you on your land and me out of it. And if we already have to involve all that, what good is blockchain doing that "a database" can't do?
There's a great video about the inherent problems with crypto stuff and contract law here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6aeL83z_9Y
Mostly about the inherent legal unenforcability of contracts on the blockchain.
that's fair, but it's a question of external authority. the idea behind blockchain is that there are contracts digitally built into the token that won't allow the transfer unless the conditions are met.
blockchain provides a publicly verifiable transaction history. of course enforcing exclusivity eventually boils down to giving some group a monopoly on violence, but the difference between using blockchain and a database in tracking who has the right to use that monopoly on violence to enforce their exclusivity is whether there's a verifiable public record of all transactions or just the current state of the data. It allows for the dispute of falsified records, and the automatic verification that all terms of the transfer between owners were met. It doesn't allow someone to sneak behind the scenes and do a quick "DELETE FROM home_owners WHERE owner_name='jrandomhacker'" and then go "Sorry, we don't have a record of your transaction 🤷🤷". You could make the logs of the database public, of course, but then the question just expands from "who has access to the database?" to "who has access to the database and logs?"