Despite the promises of "decentralization" and "trustless ownership," the majority of today's crypto games are at best "partially decentralized." Web3 is a branding package, but in reality, most games are still "Web2+." While game assets exist on the blockchain, game logic, state, and storage still reside on centralized servers off-chain.
Why? Simply put, building a fully decentralized game on-chain is not easy. The reason is that blockchain is still far too slow in 2023 to handle the massive transaction volume required for video games. Ludens, CEO of Lattice, told Cointelegraph Magazine:
Building a game entirely on-chain right now is a bit like building a video game on a computer from the 1980s. We don't have complex fully on-chain games yet because blockchain—even Layer 2—is currently not powerful enough.
Furthermore, developers must make significant trade-offs when using blockchain technology to make games accessible to a wider non-crypto audience.
For example, the developers of Aurory created a hybrid inventory system called Syncspace, which allows players to keep their assets in Aurory's custody but transfer them to their Solana wallet if desired.
Julien Pellet, the Infrastructure Tech Lead at Aurory, told the magazine: "Syncspace is Aurory's user experience strategy. Not every player wants to deal with the complexity of crypto wallets. By building Syncspace and allowing certain assets to exist off-chain, we attract more non-crypto native Web2 players, and that's a trade-off we're willing to accept."
But there is a passionate decentralized community interested in a fully on-chain "autonomous world" where players build from scratch. Some have even adapted a game to form a communist collective where everyone "wins" the same amount.
These autonomous worlds face many obstacles, but considering their limitations, early results are impressive.
Web3 Games Origins
Web3 games are striving to address additional challenges brought by the short history of the emerging field. In the previous crypto bull market cycle, most blockchain games attempted to be financial products first and video games second.
This strategy helped propel the play-to-earn gaming sector briefly into the mainstream as token prices surged. However, if the attraction is built on providing financial returns, enthusiasm can quickly fade when token prices plummet.
Games like Axie Infinity, Pegaxy, or Crabada, which once promised huge returns for players, have now fallen off a cliff. For Axie, its unique active wallet count reached around 700,000 in November 2021, but the more common number now is between 80,000 to 100,000 daily. The Metaverse Index (MVI) token, which tracks a basket of major gaming and metaverse tokens, has dropped 95.6% from its all-time high in November 2021.
In response, Web3 games are now abandoning the "play to earn" slogan that helped this sector gain traction and instead embracing phrases like "play and earn" or "play and own," downplaying the importance of profits and focusing more on the benefits of game asset ownership or simply emphasizing the fun of the game.
Jonathan Tang, the Backend Tech Lead at Aurory, told the magazine: "The core focus of a game should be leisure and entertainment, not providing financial returns. As Web3 game developers, our task is to think about how to leverage blockchain technology and what it brings while prioritizing the fun of the game." Some argue that the excessive emphasis on financial returns has damaged the industry's image, partly due to the influx of scammers.
Pellet added: "The last bull market attracted scammers who had various well-crafted strategies, such as cloning websites and fake projects, to defraud millions of dollars from legitimate players and teams. These scams are much harder to pull off in Web2 games."
Entering the Era of Full-Chain Games
Encouragingly, a small community interested in building autonomous worlds is working to bring full-chain minimalism to blockchain games. Compared to Web2.5 counterparts, full-chain games have assets and game logic, state, and storage all on-chain. Game state refers to the current state of the game world, such as a player's progress and owned items, while game logic simply refers to the game rules—how players move, interact, collect, and consume.
Why put everything on-chain? This ensures that the game state remains immutable and transparent on the blockchain. But more importantly, it opens the door to the kind of open composability possible in DeFi, allowing aggregators like 1inch Network to build on top of Uniswap or Curve and integrate with Synthetix for cross-asset swaps.
Composability allows anyone to build second-layer rules on top of the game's original rules. In full-chain games, these second-layer rules exist as smart contracts on top of the core game developers' original smart contracts. They are experienced by all players in the game, unlike third-party mods in traditional games that only change the player's local game experience.
Collective Action
Take, for example, Dark Forest, an on-chain RPG game created by an anonymous creator named Gubsheep in 2019. Dark Forest saw its own DAO (DFDAO) created through an external smart contract, enabling guild systems without permission. Through the guild system, small players could overcome collective action problems in competition with whale players by pooling their own game resources.
As DFDAO stated in its blog:
"Someone needs to take down orden_gg. Orden_gg has won twice in a row and is currently at the top of the leaderboard. If we unite for collective victory, we can defeat the unofficial team boss of Dark Forest."
Toeknee, co-founder of DFDAO, told the magazine: "The Stellar Giants (guilds) are a small game on top of DF contracts, but as far as the DF core contract is concerned, they are just another player. It's not an EOA account like others; it's a smart contract with custom logic that shapes its behavior differently. The contract is immutable and verified, so players can confirm for themselves that we can't change the rules or keep planets after they donate them."
Dark Forest players have also created their own in-game market or even forked the game entirely onto different chains/Layer 2s—Gnosis/Optimism. The new game, Dark Forest Arena, introduces new game modes previously unavailable.
Communist Takeover
Or look at another full-chain game, OPCraft, an experiment in Minecraft-style built on Optimism by the Lattice team. A few weeks after the game's launch, a player named SupremeLeaderOP created a "communist society" where any player who chose to join the guild would give up all their resources and share them with every other player in the society.
These rules are not social commitments between players. They are binding and tied to on-chain smart contracts.
SupremeLeaderOP cannot retract his commitment to players or bend the rules of his communist guild even if he wanted to. Some players saw the guild as a quirky and fun experiment and immediately pledged allegiance to the communist republic, giving up all their in-game resources in exchange for collective ownership within the guild's treasury. As documented in Lattice's blog:
"Once a player becomes a comrade, they are able to mine materials for the government treasury and build with treasury materials on government-owned land, all through smart contracts deployed by the Supreme Leader. This republic even has a 'social credit' system to prevent lazy comrades from spending more treasury materials than they contribute. Lazy comrades are not allowed to build again until they 'repair their social credit' by contributing labor."
In full-chain games, players can achieve innovative changes without waiting for core developers to introduce updates through centralized patches. It is a level of bottom-up spontaneous creative expression that goes far beyond our traditional thinking of video games, but in the Web2 world, experimenting with custom game mods eventually gave birth to billion-dollar game franchises like Dota and Counter-Strike. Dota was first created as a mod on Blizzard's "Warcraft III" game without permission, and Counter-Strike originated as a mod on Valve's "Half-Life" game.
Full-chain games are still in their early stages, and builders in this space refer to full-chain games in very different ways. The common label of autonomous worlds was coined by Lattice Labs, but other builders refer to this concept as eternal games, infinite games, or on-chain realty.
While the terminology may differ, the common denominator behind these games is the hard-coded permanence on the blockchain. Just as smart contracts and tokens exist permanently on-chain, full-chain games remain fully uncensorable and vibrant even after game studios abandon them.
The cost? Most current crypto full-chain games resemble early turn-based board games, with simple game loops like Space Invaders and Pac-Man.
Various Limitations
When creating the on-chain racing game Rhauscau, creator Stokarz told the magazine that he had to make many necessary trade-offs in game design due to cost limitations.
"Most full-chain games follow traditional board game design and minimal game logic because executing it on-chain is very low-cost. At the smart contract level, it's one-dimensional gameplay, and agents simply change the positioning of gameplay," Stokarz said.
Despite being deployed on Arbitrum Nova, a Layer 2 with throughput speeds far higher than the Ethereum mainnet, the game is still limited to simple game loops lasting a maximum of 5 minutes.
Stokarz added, "The first trade-off in Rhauscau game design is that it had to focus on a simple game loop. A game that is too complex means more transaction speed, which would make it too costly for users. It's a bit like the early mobile game Cut the Rope."
Partially decentralized Web2.5 games do not face the same trade-offs as full-chain games, as the only crypto aspect in their games is the assets existing in the form of NFTs. However, they make significant sacrifices in another aspect: the open composability of the game.
The Future of Full-Chain Games
No one denies that full-chain games face an uphill battle, and scalability is not the only issue.
Ludens emphasizes that the immaturity of full-chain games is also due to game designers lacking a coherent set of blockchain game design principles. "Game designers should put more effort into thinking about how to unlock the full value of the blockchain ledger in game design."
But the problem lies in the blockchain and software infrastructure.
"Like with old video games, we first saw simple text adventure games. As computers got faster, FPS games like Doom followed. When blockchain computing power increases, it will further expand what we can do in game design."
"Ramping up the chain infrastructure to higher throughput would obviously greatly help scale full-chain games. It would allow for sharding and execution of game states across multiple chains simultaneously," Ludens said.
On the software side, he wonders what game engines like Lattice's MUD will look like in a few years.
"With our ongoing progress, can MUD be written into powerful applications?"
Today's video game market is dominated by game engines like Unreal and Unity. Commercial game engines like Unreal didn't appear until 1998 after decades of experimentation. Today, they provide game developers with a software framework to create games more efficiently and with lower technical complexity.
MUD aims to achieve a similar goal for blockchain game developers. The software stack simplifies the task of building EVM applications using various development tools like on-chain databases.
Full-Chain Games and ZK Rollups
Ethereum's roadmap is built on the foundation of scalability through ZK Rollups, and various Layer 2s provide significant opportunities for game designers to leverage faster and cheaper transactions. The zero-knowledge proofs on Starknet, a Layer 2 native architecture, make it more feasible to scale a full-chain game, and some builders on Starknet have strong faith in this view.
Cartridge is building its game engine Dojo and development tools for other Starknet game developers. Tarrance van As, the founder of Cartridge, believes that Starknet is the only blockchain with a chance of eventually scaling to thousands of users.
"With Dojo, game developers can leverage the foundational capabilities of this framework because everything here can be proven," he told the magazine.
"In the future, your game is not even a Layer 2 anymore; it's a Layer 3 or Layer 4 built on top of Starknet. But he added that ZK proofs could even be generated on the client-side running the game.
With ZK proofs, you can even compute logic on the client-side itself. We might even have the ability to run the game on local devices and simply provide proofs that it was correctly completed, thanks to the mathematical integrity of ZK technology.
Van As sees enormous opportunities and believes that full-chain games will drive better evolution of blockchain in the next few years, rather than traditional AAA games.
"Full-chain games break free from the limitations of traditional game publishers, such as financial support, development cycles, and their closed nature. They are more like Ethereum, in a sense, evolving from a spontaneous, bottom-up culture."
Original article by @donovanchoy, BanklessDAO Researcher
Translated to Chinese by @hicaptainz for the Chinese community
Original article link: https://cointelegraph.com/magazine/blockchain-games-decentralized-lattice-starknet-cartridge/