Just been reading all about the Bitcoin and its impending (or not) crash etc. But lets not start an argument about that! On another game related note - Steam has just stopped accepting bitcoins because of the current volatility and transactions fees.
What I would like to know is your thoughts on if there are any good uses of a “block chain” for games?
I guess its a good method of having digital objects in your games that you can share (maybe swords, or spells, or unique characters) that doesn’t rely on a central server to keep track of.
But I think there should be a better way than having to keep track of a whole history of where a digital object is. There should be a way to throw away this information if its not really needed. Or maybe this would make it not work??
Or is a block chain kind of over engineering for a simple thing like digital objects in an MMOPRG?
(I guess some might argue that bitcoin itself is simply a digital good in the MMOPRG called “Bitcoin Trading”!)
The trouble with blockchain on a mass scale is it becomes expensive to process and someone has to do that processing. If it’s not your server, then it’s the community and that will still cost the community money.
@Steve-Tack it seems that a block chain kind of algorithm might be useful for an MMO where people play local games against other players. Then the block-chains can keep track of everything until they join up with other players etc.
Only problem is, if it was a game like Minecraft, where jewels were buried in the ground to be mined, someone has to create all the keys to begin with. I guess if by playing the game for a long time it is also “mining” for numerical keys. But then you have to check no-one else had the same key which would require some sort of central server… hmmm…
Yeah, on second thoughts I don’t think block chains will be very useful for most games. Unless your game was somehow equivalent to mining for keys which not many games are.
Its a real project, follow some of the links in the article.
Not much of a game. You just collect and breed cats like trading cards that don’t actually do anything, so like real cats.
Its seems like the less you expect from a gamer the more popular it could be, because people are stupid and lazy, so like real cats
No cats were harmed in the making of this post.
I actually like cats.
Yeah I was thinking the same thing, those cats are the opposite of cute.
I’m sure a better artist could have done a better job making cuter cats.
They look like rats.
Nah. No use whatsoever. Blockchain tech has a problem is that it generates ever-growing chunk of data at the moment. You don’t want to have this in your opus magnum.
The only use for it would be if your game interfaces with cryptocurrencies. In which case you’ll be probably run blockchain node that handles the transaction as well.
So, if you’re implementing microtransactiosn (good luck with taxes, though), it can be of use on your server software. Inside the actual game - I’m not seeing it.
It is certainly interesting - in that I wonder from which planet the author comes from.
I get the impression that the author has a drastically different understanding of the terms “game” or “gaming” then I do.
When I think of instances of “game” I think of titles like Baldurs Gate or Mass Effect or Half Life. And I don’t have the faintest idea on how anything in this article relates to such games.
To me the article reads like a random bunch of sentences that have no connection to each other.
Maybe I do miss the Point about Blockchains, but as I understand a Blockchain is essentially a model for decentralized data Organisation. Where is the Connection to the main pillars of gaming experience like gameplay, characters and Story?
I guess it has to do at a minimum with trading digital items or in-game gold/credits like some online games have. I don’t play those types of games either, but like some MMO’s and even some online shooters have virtual goods that are sometimes traded outside of the games themselves. Was it Diablo II where people would trade or even sell items for real money? World of Warcraft has gold farming, etc. Could you use blockchain stuff to help with that sort of thing in some way?
You’re probably right though. It does seem kind of vague and hand waving for now.
There was a massive thread a while ago from some developer who had put together a Unity implementation for block chain technology. The developers of the integration package could not come up with a reason why someone would want to integrate the tech into a game. Their responses basically came down to ‘blockchain is awesome and the way of the future’.
If the tech developers can’t say what its used for in games, I don’t think there is a reason to use it.
I was at a talk about this a couple of months ago, and even there the given uses seemed a bit of a stretch to me.
One example was recording chain-of-title for land rights or other goods in online games. Maybe that would be a good way to do it in a peer-to-peer game with no centralised server? If you did have a centralised server then I’d have thought that a simple database would get the same job done, though.
Another example may have been meta-game character progression under similar circumstances. So, for instance, rather than EA storing the single database with everyone’s Battlefield profiles on it, each time you finish a match your score and progression could be added to a shared block chain. (Though does that eventually make it really time consuming to read?)
I can’t think of any use whatsoever in single player games, because none of the problems that blockchain solves are relevant there.
He wasn’t the developer of Stratis which is partially why that whole thread went south. He couldn’t answer anything in a way that wasn’t a generic answer for blockchain in general. The other part of the reason happened when the other guy, who like the first guy wasn’t part of the actual development team, showed up and gave additional generic answers.
Not games but in a logistics palette tracking system with a visual front end. Don’t think it is not being done. Unity ain’t all about games. Blockchains are not all about a money replacement. It is great for that in that it cannot be counterfeited, kited like a bad cheque, it cannot be shaved like coins, is portable across borders without confiscation or tax and can be stored in the back yard in a jar. The biggest thing money has going for it is trust between trading partners.
What about copy protection, you could create a blockchain and only add new game purchases then each game could check that it is a valid copy in the chain?
The half of that system that uses/manages the blockchain is probably all fine and dandy. Like with all authentication-only protection, however, it becomes useless as soon as the client-side code is modified so it doesn’t do the check any more.
