Original Article Link: https://www.wired.com/story/autonomous-worlds-aim-to-free-online-games-from-corporate-control/
Original Article Title: Autonomous Worlds Aim to Free Online Games From Corporate Control
Original Article Author: MIKE ORCUTT, Wired
Translation: Scissors, Justin Zhao@Gametaverse
Summary: "Games like Minecraft encourage players to be creative, but blockchain-based games will be able to provide players with more meaningful independence."
This kind of promotion sounds like an echo from the ancient era of cryptography, when blockchain was not only fighting climate change but also responsible for curing cancer. Now we log into the Minecraft clone version OPCraft and experience true freedom in the game with the help of decentralized cryptography.
This pixelated world is aesthetically and gameplay-wise very similar to its prototype. Just like in Minecraft, players in OPCraft explore environments made up of blocks, and players can move, destroy, and combine these blocks to create new materials.
OPCraft was created by supporters of encryption technology who do not endorse the currently popular blockchain game mode (GameFi), which typically only adds tokens to traditional game modes and focuses on earning tokens (or NFTs).
The creators of OPCraft are trying to establish a new type of game that integrates the advantages of blockchain more deeply. Their rules and core mechanisms are encoded in smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain (which is a software application that encodes a protocol). This game made its debut in October last year and underwent a two-week test to showcase the vision proposed by the developers called "Autonomous Worlds": a digital space controlled by a decentralized network rather than a centralized entity and capable of interacting with the blockchain.
OPCraft is not the first fully on-chain game, and there are currently dozens of games in the works that aim to build what their creators call "sovereign" or "eternal" game worlds. In an industry that is more profitable and corporate-driven than ever before, these projects are trying to showcase that rethinking long-established patterns, such as game code usually living on privately owned servers and being subject to changes or removal at the whim of their owners, is possible.
Now, the challenge faced by these crypto idealists is to build games that can showcase and prove these ideals. If they can do that, they may change traditional notions of what blockchain can do, such as proving that they can do more than just issue tokens or NFTs.
Screenshot of OPCraft in-game (Source: LATTICE LABS LTD.)
- The Theory of Fully On-Chain Games
Justin Glibert, co-founder of the blockchain research nonprofit 0xPARC, admits that the idea of providing new spaces for self-expression through online games may not sound novel. But he believes that the "freedom" provided by traditional games is actually an illusion.
Like other avid fans of online multiplayer games, players of the space-themed game Eve Online, which has a 20-year history, invest a lot of time and effort into the game, creating and operating complex organizations and maintaining real relationships. Players feel that they have the freedom to shape their own destinies in the game. However, Glibert says that this freedom can actually be taken back by Eve's operating company, CCP Games, at any time.
"They think they don't control the game world," but in reality, the company retains ultimate control over the game, Glibert says. He heads Lattice, a department within 0xPARC responsible for developing fully on-chain games. He says that games built on blockchain can be designed to prevent any entity from controlling the fate of the game world, while also providing users with new freedoms to customize and expand the game's design space.
For Morris and Emerson Hsieh, the risk of game creators or owners destroying the game world that the player community loves is not unfounded. At the end of 2021, the two brothers launched a popular custom Minecraft server called Critterz, where many objects were also designed as NFTs. However, in July of last year, Mojang, the owner of Minecraft, banned the use of encrypted tokens and NFTs, and the Critterz server collapsed as a result.
Morris and Emerson began to consider how to build games that are more independent, interesting, and appealing than traditional games, directly supported by blockchain. "If it's not fun, no one will be interested in it," Morris said. The brothers are currently building a factory-themed game called Primodium to showcase what they call a decentralized economy, where smart contracts deployed on the blockchain can prevent game creators from suddenly changing key components of a game, such as making a weapon less effective or valuable.
Like Glibert's concept of Autonomous Worlds, Morris says their proposal can be summarized as "consensual agreement on rules." Once the creators or founding community of a game define a set of foundational rules, players should be able to trust that these rules will not change, just like the code of Bitcoin fixes the supply at 21 million.
- Games Within Games
During the testing phase of OPCraft, some players demonstrated how games built on the blockchain can create new opportunities for innovation in gaming.
One core rule of the game is that if a player mines enough diamonds, they can buy a piece of land for themselves to prevent others from mining or building on it. A player who claims to be the highest leader of OPCraft took advantage of this rule and occupied a large piece of land around where new players first appear.
This ambitious dictator then announced on Twitter and OPCraft's Discord channel that they had launched a new Ethereum smart contract offering players the opportunity to become members of the OPCraft Autonomous Republic, a new game within the game. "All your private property will enter the government's treasury," the player wrote, "However, from that moment on, you will have access to almost unlimited resources in our treasury."
To join, users simply need to download and run a plugin for OPCraft. Once they enter, the attached software takes over their property and tracks everyone's contributions. Citizens can build things on the Republic's land, but the condition is that their contributions to the treasury must exceed the value they take from it.
The Autonomous Republic is an extreme example of permissionlessness, which refers to a system that allows anyone to build software on it. Others have built smaller-scale OPCraft plugins that allow players to do things like chat with each other or perform simple automated diamond mining actions.
OPCraft was created to showcase blockchain-related features like these and to showcase the toolkit developed by Lattice, a department of 0xPARC. Traditional video games typically use game engines like Unreal Engine to handle the underlying programming details of 3D environments and other components. OPCraft was developed using an engine called MUD, developed by Lattice, which is an "on-chain game engine."
After working on their own on-chain game, Glibert and an engineer at Lattice named Alvarius built MUD. The name is borrowed from the acronym for Multi-User Dungeon, a type of virtual multiplayer game world that originated in the 1970s and inspired online role-playing games like Eve Online. The MUD engine of the crypto era is designed to address challenging issues such as keeping each player's software in sync with the blockchain and adding new content to the game.
- Eat Drain Arson
Last fall, Glibert's team hosted a 12-week Autonomous Worlds development event in London, where 45 participants, including Morris and Emerson Hsieh, built game prototypes using MUD. Most of the prototypes were similar to OPCraft and belonged to traditional multiplayer games, but there was one game called Eat Drain Arson that hinted at new directions for on-chain worlds.
The prototype showcased a floating, skull-like fairy. In the demo, the game's creators, Arthur Röing Baer and his collaborator GVN, had the fairy perform simple actions like eating, setting fires, moving on a simple map, and collecting a limited resource called sludge.
Screenshot of Eat Drain Arson in-game (work in progress) Source: MOVING CASTLES
The world of the fairy and the goals of the game are still under construction. The game is designed to encourage cooperative play for progress. The developers of the game, known as Moving Castles, drew inspiration from online communities formed on Discord servers and Telegram group chats. They hope the game can incubate collectives that exist outside the game, such as organizations in the game having the ability to move to another digital platform. "You start in a restricted world that promotes the emergence of collectives, but in the long run, it is not limited by this world," Baer said.
In addition to trying to prove new game modes, the experience built on MUD is also pushing the boundaries of blockchain technology. The creators of Ethereum initially promised a "world computer" that could run anything on the decentralized network that drives the system, including games. This would provide an alternative to centralized cloud computing and prevent services from being shut down.
However, the downside is that this model is currently slow and expensive to run on existing blockchains. OPCraft uses a technology called "rollup" to merge many transactions together and periodically package and submit them to the blockchain.
Lattice collaborated with a startup called OP Labs, which develops rollup technology, to conduct demonstrations of OPCraft. The game had over a hundred players online simultaneously, which was a "stress test conducted at the most realistic but also most innovative level," said Annie Ke, Head of Protocol Partnerships at OP Labs. She hopes that blockchain games can showcase how rollup technology can make blockchain cheaper and easier to use, making mainstream decentralized financial services and even more general applications, such as blockchain-based organizations, more feasible.