Deciphering the Promises and Risks of Full-Chain Games

Background:

To understand the complexities of FOCG, one must first grasp the concepts of game state, game tick, and tick rate.

Game State

refers to a snapshot of all relevant information and data describing the current state of a game at any given moment. It encompasses aspects such as the position and properties of game objects, player scores, health points, game progress, and other variables defining the current state of the game. The game state is typically updated and modified over time-based on player inputs or other events.

Game Tick

also known as a frame or update, is a discrete unit of time used to measure game progress. Each game tick represents an iteration or cycle of the game’s main loop, during which game logic and physics calculations are performed. Each tick typically updates the game state based on current inputs, processes AI behaviors, handles collisions and performs other necessary computations to advance the game.

Tick Rate

is the frequency at which game ticks occur per second. It indicates the number of times game logic and rendering are updated and refreshed within a second, usually measured in Hertz (Hz) or frames per second (FPS). For example, a tick rate of 60 Hz means the game logic is updated 60 times per second. Higher tick rates generally lead to smoother gameplay and more responsive controls but also require more computing resources.

Web 2.0 Games

In the Web 2.0 gaming model, all game components including game state, logic, and data are stored off-chain. This model is managed locally by centralized servers with strong computational and network capabilities to handle real-time gameplay and synchronization.

Over the years, the combination of efficient game logic coding, advancements in hardware, and optimization techniques has made the development of highly scalable games possible.

Web 2.5 Games

Web 2.5 games represent a more decentralized form of gaming by storing in-game assets on the blockchain. These games often involve issuing ERC-20 game tokens and tokenizing in-game assets like skins as NFTs. This addresses the issue of asset ownership in traditional games, as players can fully own and trade these assets on the blockchain.

However, the operation of game states, scalabilities, and scalability in Web 2.5 games is isomorphic to that of Web 2.0 games. One of the inherent structures and computational limitations of blockchain is the lack of native game scalability. Therefore, computation-intensive components are processed off-chain in Web 2.5 games.

A problem present in both Web 2.0 and 2.5 games is the lack of transparency and resistance to censorship. Game logic like item rarity, drop rates, and true randomness are often not publicly disclosed, nor can they be proven to be fair. Players must trust the content and decisions claimed by the game developers without the ability to independently verify them. Moreover, a centralized entity (such as a game studio) has the power to modify, censor, or control the game and retains the final decision on game termination, which can be technically enforced at any time or as necessary.

Full-Chain Games

Full-chain games involve storing the entire game logic, state, and data on the blockchain. The blockchain serves as a decentralized game server where players can participate and contribute to a shared game state without the need for trust.

Client-agnostic full-chain games can be built by multiple front-end operators, all interacting with the same game logic. This approach is similar to Liquity’s decentralized front-ends, which can present the same game logic in different aesthetics and user interface elements. Third-party developers can create profit-making mods by creating NFT characters or using ERC-20 tokens to interact with the underlying game logic.

Placing game assets, game states, and cycles on a trusted neutral blockchain can mitigate censorship and platform risks. This enables on-chain games to safely scale, especially those with high stakes.

However, as mentioned earlier, the lack of native game scalability on the blockchain is a significant limitation. All blockchains have block confirmation times, introducing latency issues. Depending on the blockchain, the time it takes for a transaction to be verified and included in a block can range from a few seconds to several minutes. Therefore, early full-chain games are blockchain-based games with asynchronous game elements, such as turn-based collectible card games.

For other types of games, such as real-time strategy games that run synchronously with immediate or quasi-immediate feedback, extension solutions are necessary. Here are some examples:

• Argus’s World Engine: A sharded Layer 2 blockchain SDK with game sharding similar to high-performance game servers, specifically for in-game computation. This is achieved by decoupling game execution (game shards) from smart contract execution (EVM shards). Their first game shard implementation, Cardinal, achieves higher scalability with 20 blocks per second and can integrate directly with existing game engines like Unity.

• Curio Research: Built a customized scalability chain implementation on the OP stack (using Caldera as RaaS). This is a high-throughput ECS-based game engine that can support their upcoming real-time strategy game.

• Dojo: A “verifiable” game engine built on Starknet that allows game sessions to run off-chain, reducing the need to record every player’s action on the blockchain. Instead, proofs can be generated at specific intervals to verify the correctness of previous actions within that interval, processed off-chain.

Finally, for games with incomplete information, such as those featuring Fog of War, the effective implementation of zero-knowledge proofs (e.g., Dark Forest using zk-SNARKs) is also key to establishing full-chain fairness.

FOCG’s Commitment

Composable Modding

We are currently witnessing a new era in the gaming industry, where players desire to personalize, modify, and seamlessly integrate their identities into games. This level of customization can only be achieved through UGC (User Generated Content) or modding. The popularity of mods in Web 2.0 games like Minecraft and Roblox exemplifies this trend.

Roblox’s Modding Ecosystem

In these games, a new category of “players” has emerged: modders, who actively contribute to the growing mod library and ecosystem. In Roblox, modders can monetize their content through game passes and/or in-game purchases using Robux. The rewards from building and operating successful mods can rival those of developing independent games. For example, the independent studio Uplift Games, known for Adopt Me!, employs about 40 people and earns $60 million annually.

Roblox Flywheel

This dynamic creates a self-reinforcing positive feedback loop with significant network effects. As modders continuously create new games and content, players become more immersed, and new users are attracted through social networks. The expansion of the player base, along with incentives and feedback systems for mods, encourages more players to become modders. The symbiotic relationship between modders and players, combined with intuitive development tools, fosters the rise of unique virtual worlds, experiences, and communities within individual games.

However, mods in traditional games often exist in isolation, lacking a universal framework for meaningful interaction. While this might be intentional, new inputs and contributions from modders are usually confined to isolated virtual worlds. Even when cross-mod interactions do occur, their impact on gameplay is often minimal, such as using the same appearance items (referred to as “allowed gear” in Roblox) across different mods.

The potential for composable modding is a key value proposition of FOCG. The upcoming FOCG project employs various approaches to build its technology stack, but a common method allows third-party developers to interact directly with game logic through smart contracts, enabling them to:

Create new mods with specific token economies

Extend the functionalities of games and mods by adding new items, characters, and maps

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Blockchain-Based Composable Modding Ecosystem

One can imagine a scenario where if a community in Mod A introduces a new resource, it should be directly compatible with the world of Mod B, allowing players there to plant, harvest, and trade the resource.

This motivates modders to design new features considering not just a single mod but all related mods. Composable modding expands the potential for monetization and spreading best practices. However, to achieve this blockchain-based composable modding and ensure a consistent gaming experience, modders may need to operate within a more limited design space compared to traditional games.

Smart contracts as social contracts

In traditional games, players, teams, and guilds rely on informal and unenforceable agreements for interactions beyond predefined game mechanics. This approach has limitations, especially in high-stakes games where breaking agreements can have significant consequences.

In 2014, a massive battle known as the “B-R5RB Bloodbath” involved thousands of Eve Online players. Before the battle, informal agreements and treaties were reached between alliances to fight a common enemy. However, during the battle, one alliance unexpectedly betrayed its allies, breaking the agreement and leading to over $300,000 in-game asset losses.

Curio Research’s exploration of treaties highlights the immense potential of smart contracts in facilitating complex social interactions between players or teams. Game-specific smart contracts like Treaties can formalize agreements between players and execute trust when predetermined conditions are met.

CurioTreaty

Treaties can have various meanings. It could be a NATO-like agreement where, after joining and paying dues, you are prohibited from attacking other committee members. It could be a national bank issuing a token backed by USDC, forcing trading partners who have signed the agreement to strictly use your national currency for the next exchange in the in-game AMM. — Kevin Z of Curio

The customizability and modularity of these in-game smart contracts can extend social dynamics beyond the game and allow direct interaction with other blockchain ecosystems, such as DeFi protocols.

FOCG’s Challenges

While FOCG promises to innovate modding patterns and social interactions on the blockchain, a closer examination reveals a series of challenges.

Technical Limitations

Beyond the absence of native blockchain scalability for gaming, various technical constraints must be considered:

• High gas costs and low TPS - The bottlenecks of most mainnet chains make supporting synchronous gaming and concurrent game sessions/instances challenging.

• Vulnerability of on-chain randomness - Validators can see the outcome of randomness before it’s confirmed on-chain, leaving room for manipulation (requires VRF/ZKP solutions).

• Machine cheating - Decentralized gaming entities have limited means to regulate and enforce anti-cheating measures. Bots can interact with games just like human players, without any inherent restrictions.

• Non-intuitive UI and UX for Web 2 gamers - Using dApps often requires creating wallets, signing transactions, bridging assets, etc. It’s crucial to simplify this process (e.g., wallet account abstraction) to attract non-crypto native gamers.

• Security - When FOCG has assets of real value that can interact with DeFi, exploiting vulnerabilities becomes irreversible, potentially having a permanent impact on the entire FOCG ecosystem.

Costs of Composability

The promise of composable modding introduces certain trade-offs, especially when considering that the factors that initially made modding ideal and successful might be hindered by on-chain implementation.

Successful Roblox mods like Jailbreak, Arsenal, and Adopt Me! have amassed large followings, with total visits exceeding 40 billion. Each mod offers unique game mechanics, rules, environments, and in-game assets:

• Jailbreak immerses players in a plot of prison escape and police chase.

• Arsenal offers a Call of Duty-like FPS experience.

• Adopt Me! revolves around the adoption and care of virtual pets.

From a player’s perspective, the appeal of these mods lies in their unique game mechanics, narrative storytelling, and thematic elements. Playing Roblox can be compared to logging into Steam, as both provide a variety of game types and experiences for players to explore. The community has attempted to make mods more interactive, like in the “Pixelmon Modpack” for Minecraft, but these mods remain isolated from other modpacks and run on local servers. However, there currently seems to be low demand for such interactive mods among players, as reflected by the absence of official frameworks in major modding ecosystem games.

For Modders: Physics and Game Balance

Achieving composability in a permissionless modding ecosystem requires careful consideration of game physics and balance, crucial for ensuring a fair and enjoyable gaming experience.

In traditional games, modders have the freedom to modify game physics according to the game mechanics they desire, as their mods don’t necessarily need to interact with other mods. For instance, while basic physical principles exist in Roblox’s game world, each mod can flexibly define and implement its own physics rules. Jailbreak has specific physics rules related to vehicle handling and collisions, while Adopt Me! has a unique physics system related to pet movement. It’s this flexibility that allows Roblox to attract and accommodate modders with expertise in various genres, such as FPS, horror, and casual games.

To make mods truly composable, consistent game physics must be maintained across all mods. As new items, economies, and systems are added to the game without permission, considering game balance introduces additional inflexibility. For example, FOCG needs precise calculations and framework designs to prevent new characters or strategies from being overly powerful. Moreover, integrating new inputs into the entire tech stack (including front-end and related contracts) requires complex coordination.

One can imagine that fully composable modules could create chaos in this regard and limit new inputs to merely aesthetic changes, rather than allowing inputs that could affect game outcomes. Such consistency might hinder the diversity of modders and lead to a homogenization of the modding ecosystem.

A permission-modding ecosystem could mitigate some of these issues, but this would contradict the fundamental principle of autonomous worlds that FOCG should adhere to.

Specific Types of Game Logic and Infrastructure

Different types of games require different refresh rates, making it impossible to build new mods for games that rely on higher refresh rates than what the FOCG infrastructure can currently support.

Thus, most upcoming FOCGs focus on initially building infrastructure for specific games to meet their scale needs before attempting to make them more versatile.

There is a clear pattern among these teams - almost all focus on building infrastructure supporting strategy games (e.g., Dark Forest, Treaties, Primodium). On one hand, the strategy genre is relatively easier to implement and can benefit more from fully on-chain features through instances like Treaties. On the other hand, a specific type of tech stack might limit the diversity of players and modders, thus undercutting the full potential of composable modding.

Should games be fully on-chain?

In an ideal scenario, the value proposition of Fully On-Chain Games (FOCG), such as composable modding, is highly valuable to both players and modders. Traditional game studios could incorporate these elements into their off-chain or hybrid systems, benefiting from them without being constrained by design space limitations. For example, in-game assets could be tokenized as NFTs, combined with smart contracts to enforce executable social contracts, while other components, including a modding ecosystem redesigned through an appropriate framework to ensure composability, could run off-chain.

The Case for FOCG

Although it’s conceivable that hybrid games could incorporate these features, I remain open to the idea that FOCG could excel in specific areas beyond these hybrid games. I believe FOCG’s most competitive cases are high-risk games driven by player communities who demand that not just the in-game assets and credentials, but the entire game logic, be on-chain.

To illustrate, consider the shutdown of Marvel Heroes, a free online action role-playing game featuring Marvel Universe characters. In November 2017, the game abruptly announced its closure, sparking a wave of refund demands. However, due to clever legal technicalities, consumers found themselves without clear rights to compensation or access to purchased in-game assets.

“You agree that Gazillion and its affiliates, licensors, agents, or employees shall not be liable to you or any third party for any modification, suspension, or discontinuance of the system, or any termination of the license. Gazillion has the right to delete or purge your content when it exceeds time limits and quantities, or when the system or any of its components need maintenance or upgrading.” @GIBiz

Merely tokenizing assets on-chain doesn’t fully solve the issue of game studios exiting maliciously, as game state and progress would still be lost, rendering these assets useless in-game. Moreover, in such cases, studios are not obligated to open-source the game. FOCG addresses this issue.

Provable fairness could relate to in-game mechanics and outcomes. Imagine a group of players battling a common enemy, where the highest damage dealer gets a chance at a high-value item drop or a 4X real-time strategy game with randomly generated positions and resource proximity.

In these scenarios, FOCG could ensure that battle outcomes or randomness are provably fair. This trustless environment benefits not just players but can extend to new forms of “players,” including speculators betting on game outcomes through smart contracts. Ensuring unmanipulated game outcomes and permanence (as game state and logic can be forked) would allow high-risk game ecosystems to scale without platform risk truly.

I believe there are several other elements to further explore and harmonize:

• Further exploration of true randomness that cannot be tampered with by miners, oracle operators, or other players. Mitigating the possibility of front-running or observing outcomes before they’re confirmed on-chain.

• The practicality of on-chain randomness. If not viable, accelerate and expand off-chain randomness solutions.

• Architectural optimizations to better support concurrent game sessions/instances without sacrificing composability.

• Game mechanics and social dynamics that directly interact with adjacent on-chain ecosystems. High-risk FOCG or derivative economic systems could greatly benefit from composability with DeFi functionalities.

• Better alignment of incentives for players and modders. With the blurring lines between developers and players, new business models may emerge, akin to the widespread adoption of freemium models in mobile gaming.

• Decentralized game balance governance structures to accommodate permissionless modding.

I’m hopeful about fully on-chain games creating new primitives, thereby realizing new paradigms of gaming that leverage all advantages offered by blockchain, not just partial ones.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Erik Lie, Richard Yuen, Jonathan Yuen, Adrian Chow, and Harry Lam for their help. Special thanks to my brother Nathan, a Roblox enthusiast, for answering all my questions about gaming.

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