6 ms·

> What Went Wrong? It's in the title of the article. It's a "Blockchain Game". That's what went wrong. It was a flawed concept from its inception. Blockchains

by mkaic 4y ago

> What Went Wrong? It's in the title of the article. It's a "Blockchain Game". That's what went wrong. It was a flawed concept from its inception. Blockchains are pretty cool from a math/cryptography standpoint, but they really do not provide added value in most areas people try to apply them to. CryptoKitties is a digital trading card game. You get cards, you can "breed" cards together to make new cards, you trade/buy/sell cards. That's it. Nowhere at any point in this "game" is a blockchain necessary. Nowhere at any point does a blockchain add any value whatsoever. In fact, due to transaction fees, I'd argue the blockchain actively detracts from the game. The idea of an artist signing their work in a cryptographically unique way is not new or revolutionary, and it certainly doesn't need a blockchain. There's a reason the general sentiment the art community has towards NFTs is overwhelmingly negative: it's because they literally actively harm us.

reidjs 4y ago
More accurately it can be described as a digital trading card game built on Ethereum.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
saurik 4y ago
In the real world, people play trading card games all the time and a big part of the ecosystem is trading the trading cards. Only, it is really annoying to have to ship around and maintain physical cards, and I want my card collection in the cloud. Some people would thereby prefer to play an online version of, say, Magic: The Gathering, or whatever the Pokémon one is called, etc. The problem now is... how do you do the trading part? You could go to the trouble of yourself building a marketplace for the cards and then integrating all of the payment methods required, and then dealing with all of the trust and fraud issues that result from people sending money via banks or PayPal that they later chargeback or refund, all while dealing with whatever crazy tax implications come up from running a market. But you don't want to do any of that: you want to code a game, and it isn't like Wizards of the Coast is trying to take money off of the aftermarket! They just make money by selling the initial randomized official card packs. Because you went digital now you are doing a ton of extra work and are wasting a ton of time dealing with payment processing issues when none of that is related to your actual business model or product design. And, at the end of the day, doing that giant marketplace is a hard job that other companies specialize in. If I told you eBay provided some kind of digital asset API that let you simply assign tracking numbers to products but then eBay kept track of the ownership as it changed and all your game had to do is ask "what cards does this user still own?" when it opens, I imagine a ton of developers would jump on that bandwagon. Only, eBay doesn't provide that API, and likely would avoid doing so out of concern you would shut down the game on a whim and cause them issues; and, even if they did, now your entire game backend would then be built around a single marketplace that might randomly pull your game for some reason and shut down your entire company in a way where you are SCREWED as your end-to-end ownership pipeline is modeled inside of eBay's database rather than being something you control and can migrate. If only there were some off-the-shelf technology for tracking digital assets that you could trivially add as a dependency to your project, letting you write a few lines of code to define your asset and which had APIs for querying ownership... one which was an open ecosystem controlled by a shared protocol instead of a single company, thereby allowing not just one market but any number of competing markets with different ideas on auctions or escrow to exist. Wouldn't that be amazing?! Well: that's Ethereum; like, that's precisely what Ethereum is doing. If you think collectible trading card games aren't a dumb idea--and even if you hate them and think the premise is bad for gaming, I am going to remind you that these things are SUPER POPULAR and so your opinion doesn't in some sense matter here as you are just ignoring reality--then Ethereum is a GLORIOUS idea that makes it absolutely trivial for game developers to build them and for users to participate.
- yesimahuman 4y ago
  I think the argument that Ethereum/etc provide useful off-the-shelf APIs/services for implementing something like this might be the one point in their favor
- XCSme 4y ago
  > If only there were some off-the-shelf technology for tracking digital assets Isn't this any relational database where you can set the owner_id of an item? > your entire game backend would then be built around a single marketplace that might randomly pull your game for some reason and shut down your entire company Most online games have some sort of digital assets they have to keep track of, and that's one of the trivial things to implement.
  - 8n4vidtmkvmk 4y ago
    i think you missed the part about having to run that service yourself and all the headaches that entails
    - XCSme 4y ago
      But you already have to run yourself a similar infrastructure for the game itself, the digital asset tracking is just a small part that can be integrated within the existing systems.
  - saurik 4y ago
    No: most online games don't maintain a marketplace where users can trade their assets for cash, running auctions or whatever similar to eBay. That is the issue here: people want to be able to sell their cards to other players, and now you need to build a mechanism that supports that correctly without becoming riled in the customer support issues. Also, BTW: part of what makes the physical cards valuable in the long term is that even if the company that sold them goes out of business, the cards don't disappear and they still work to play the game... your dismissive attempt to build this sort of thing using centralized tech is thereby pretty ridiculous on the face of it even if you didn't try to tackle the money issues yourself. What you want is a game that has no backend and preferably is coded using forwards-compatible technologies like HTML/JavaScript that can use these APIs to access their state for the long term... and again, that's Ethereum. (Note: I ran a market for apps for over a decade and before that I was a game developer for almost half a decade; I thereby know what things are and aren't hard.)
everfree 4y ago
> The idea of an artist signing their work in a cryptographically unique way is not new or revolutionary, and it certainly doesn't need a blockchain. It creates a provable, transferable, composable, tamper-proof "ownership" record of the digital signature.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 4y ago
  doesn't gpg do a pretty decent job of that? i guess it's not transferable but... why do you need that?
  - everfree 4y ago
    I'm getting voted down for talking about the value-add here, but I'll give it another shot. I hope I get some replies this time if people find anything unclear. Transferability is useful for key rotation. If you can't transfer your ownership to a new key, then if the old key becomes compromised, you can't prove ownership anymore because anyone else can sign using your key. To fix this you have to rely on the original signer to provide you with a revocation and an updated signature, which they may not be willing or able to do (and what if they themselves have rotated their key?) Basically, to get key rotation to work properly you have to get revocation to work, which means ultimately you have to recreate a trustworthy timestamping service for digitally signed events, which is what a blockchain definitionally does. Either that, or everyone has to agree on a third party to keep track of revocations, much like with OCSP or the MIT key server. Then, trust that third party not to tamper with the timestamps, and trust them to continue providing their timestamping service far into the future.
    - gjulianm 4y ago
      But irrevocability is a problem for this use case, right? Someone is bound to get hacked, lose keys or whatever, and then there's no way to actually prove, inside the blockchain, that it wasn't a legitimate transfer. Anyways, I think the bigger problem is that neither GPG nor blockchain actually solve the "ownership" problem of digital assets. These can be copied without any problem, so proving which ones are original and which ones aren't is impossible without some kind of DRM or verification service, and that's not something that can be done with the blockchain.
hypomanic 4y ago
How would you have a digital collectible without blockchain? The alternative is just a private database somewhere that depends on the whims of a company/individual for its continued existence.
- anonymousab 4y ago
  > that depends on the whims of a company/individual for its continued existence As do most things so it's really neither relevant nor a drawback worth discussing.
  - yreg 4y ago
    This argument is non-sensical. >Why does ${PROJECT} use ${TECHNOLOGY}? >So it doesn't have ${DRAWBACK}. >Most other things have ${DRAWBACK}, so it's really neither relevant nor worth discussing.
- betwixthewires 4y ago
  People that are fans of NFTs and crypto gaming imagine a world where someone has a token contract with the hash of a public key that corresponds to a private key that only they have somewhere in it registering their ownership of a hash of a file with art in it cryptographically signed by an artist, and that system proving that they alone own the original version of the art. But these are fictions, just as copyright is fiction, a legal fiction but fiction all the same, and all any of this does is demonstrate it, make it more plain. And I'm happy about that, art is useless if it isn't on a wall, and art on a wall looks just as pretty printed. Who owns a picture doesn't matter to me, or to anyone really, if I find it pleasant I'll hang it up, and if it's digital art then mine will look just as nice as the print hanging on the wall of the person who paid 36 ether for the privilege of doing so.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  We are talking about a toy game about breeding cats, not archiving humanities greatest knowledge. No one will care if if 10 years it’s all deleted.
- Doxin 4y ago
animal531 4y ago
Also as Morty would say, it just seems like a pyramid scheme with extra steps.
- mkaic 4y ago
  Pyramid Scheme Pro Max Plus Ultra 2022 v2.0: Electric Boogaloo
LoveMortuus 4y ago
I know the blockchain has been kind of tainted by the way it's been used for the past few years, but I do believe that there can be valid uses for it. Lately I've been thinking if it would be possible to have an MMORPG game where instead of a server all the data would be saved in a blockchain/linked list. The biggest concern I have though is the latency and speed. Could blockchains be fast enough or in some other way protected from malicious actors to allow actual real time game play? Like World of Warcraft, or would it just be too slow. I've been thinking about this, because servers are expensive and doing it this way you would have, kind of, solved the problem of scalability - no queues. There would be no coins or NFTs or anything like that. Just a decentralised MMORPG server/game thus saving the developers from the server costs.
- pavel_lishin 4y ago
  > Lately I've been thinking if it would be possible to have an MMORPG game where instead of a server all the data would be saved in a blockchain/linked list. What for? What advantage would this have over storing data on a server? > I've been thinking about this, because servers are expensive and doing it this way you would have, kind of, solved the problem of scalability - no queues. You're just offloading the cost onto the players, and offloading the queuing mechanic onto the blockchain. I'm sorry to be rude, but this is another comment desperately trying to find a use for the blockchain, casting out a rod into infinite idea space, and pulling out a boot.
  - LoveMortuus 4y ago
    >What for? What advantage would this have over storing data on a server? Mostly because I'm kinda poor and can't even think about buying it renting servers. That's why I thought that such a solution would allow me to keep developing my game while the players could still play the game. If it would be possible, which from replies to my comment, I'm guessing isn't, it would also mean that even if I died, people could still play because the "servers" wouldn't shutdown. >You're just offloading the cost onto the players, and offloading the queuing mechanic onto the blockchain. That's kind of the point, MMORPG are, from what I understand, quite expensive to run. Thus if they were run by the community it would be cheaper for the developers and those resources could be further used to work on the game. >I'm sorry to be rude, but this is another comment desperately trying to find a use for the blockchain, casting out a rod into infinite idea space, and pulling out a boot I am surprised by the negativity that the HN crowd has poured onto me. Since it would solve one of the biggest issues with MMORPGs, which is - servers shutting down. I love MMOs and it breaks my heart knowing that I'll probably never ever again be able to play Tera and many other MMOs...

by mkaic 4y ago

reidjs 4y ago

More accurately it can be described as a digital trading card game built on Ethereum.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

saurik 4y ago

In the real world, people play trading card games all the time and a big part of the ecosystem is trading the trading cards. Only, it is really annoying to have to ship around and maintain physical cards, and I want my card collection in the cloud. Some people would thereby prefer to play an online version of, say, Magic: The Gathering, or whatever the Pokémon one is called, etc. The problem now is... how do you do the trading part? You could go to the trouble of yourself building a marketplace for the cards and then integrating all of the payment methods required, and then dealing with all of the trust and fraud issues that result from people sending money via banks or PayPal that they later chargeback or refund, all while dealing with whatever crazy tax implications come up from running a market. But you don't want to do any of that: you want to code a game, and it isn't like Wizards of the Coast is trying to take money off of the aftermarket! They just make money by selling the initial randomized official card packs. Because you went digital now you are doing a ton of extra work and are wasting a ton of time dealing with payment processing issues when none of that is related to your actual business model or product design. And, at the end of the day, doing that giant marketplace is a hard job that other companies specialize in. If I told you eBay provided some kind of digital asset API that let you simply assign tracking numbers to products but then eBay kept track of the ownership as it changed and all your game had to do is ask "what cards does this user still own?" when it opens, I imagine a ton of developers would jump on that bandwagon. Only, eBay doesn't provide that API, and likely would avoid doing so out of concern you would shut down the game on a whim and cause them issues; and, even if they did, now your entire game backend would then be built around a single marketplace that might randomly pull your game for some reason and shut down your entire company in a way where you are SCREWED as your end-to-end ownership pipeline is modeled inside of eBay's database rather than being something you control and can migrate. If only there were some off-the-shelf technology for tracking digital assets that you could trivially add as a dependency to your project, letting you write a few lines of code to define your asset and which had APIs for querying ownership... one which was an open ecosystem controlled by a shared protocol instead of a single company, thereby allowing not just one market but any number of competing markets with different ideas on auctions or escrow to exist. Wouldn't that be amazing?! Well: that's Ethereum; like, that's precisely what Ethereum is doing. If you think collectible trading card games aren't a dumb idea--and even if you hate them and think the premise is bad for gaming, I am going to remind you that these things are SUPER POPULAR and so your opinion doesn't in some sense matter here as you are just ignoring reality--then Ethereum is a GLORIOUS idea that makes it absolutely trivial for game developers to build them and for users to participate.

yesimahuman 4y ago
I think the argument that Ethereum/etc provide useful off-the-shelf APIs/services for implementing something like this might be the one point in their favor
XCSme 4y ago
> If only there were some off-the-shelf technology for tracking digital assets Isn't this any relational database where you can set the owner_id of an item? > your entire game backend would then be built around a single marketplace that might randomly pull your game for some reason and shut down your entire company Most online games have some sort of digital assets they have to keep track of, and that's one of the trivial things to implement.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 4y ago
  i think you missed the part about having to run that service yourself and all the headaches that entails
  - XCSme 4y ago
    But you already have to run yourself a similar infrastructure for the game itself, the digital asset tracking is just a small part that can be integrated within the existing systems.
- saurik 4y ago
  No: most online games don't maintain a marketplace where users can trade their assets for cash, running auctions or whatever similar to eBay. That is the issue here: people want to be able to sell their cards to other players, and now you need to build a mechanism that supports that correctly without becoming riled in the customer support issues. Also, BTW: part of what makes the physical cards valuable in the long term is that even if the company that sold them goes out of business, the cards don't disappear and they still work to play the game... your dismissive attempt to build this sort of thing using centralized tech is thereby pretty ridiculous on the face of it even if you didn't try to tackle the money issues yourself. What you want is a game that has no backend and preferably is coded using forwards-compatible technologies like HTML/JavaScript that can use these APIs to access their state for the long term... and again, that's Ethereum. (Note: I ran a market for apps for over a decade and before that I was a game developer for almost half a decade; I thereby know what things are and aren't hard.)

everfree 4y ago

> The idea of an artist signing their work in a cryptographically unique way is not new or revolutionary, and it certainly doesn't need a blockchain. It creates a provable, transferable, composable, tamper-proof "ownership" record of the digital signature.

8n4vidtmkvmk 4y ago
doesn't gpg do a pretty decent job of that? i guess it's not transferable but... why do you need that?
- everfree 4y ago
  I'm getting voted down for talking about the value-add here, but I'll give it another shot. I hope I get some replies this time if people find anything unclear. Transferability is useful for key rotation. If you can't transfer your ownership to a new key, then if the old key becomes compromised, you can't prove ownership anymore because anyone else can sign using your key. To fix this you have to rely on the original signer to provide you with a revocation and an updated signature, which they may not be willing or able to do (and what if they themselves have rotated their key?) Basically, to get key rotation to work properly you have to get revocation to work, which means ultimately you have to recreate a trustworthy timestamping service for digitally signed events, which is what a blockchain definitionally does. Either that, or everyone has to agree on a third party to keep track of revocations, much like with OCSP or the MIT key server. Then, trust that third party not to tamper with the timestamps, and trust them to continue providing their timestamping service far into the future.
  - gjulianm 4y ago
    But irrevocability is a problem for this use case, right? Someone is bound to get hacked, lose keys or whatever, and then there's no way to actually prove, inside the blockchain, that it wasn't a legitimate transfer. Anyways, I think the bigger problem is that neither GPG nor blockchain actually solve the "ownership" problem of digital assets. These can be copied without any problem, so proving which ones are original and which ones aren't is impossible without some kind of DRM or verification service, and that's not something that can be done with the blockchain.

hypomanic 4y ago

How would you have a digital collectible without blockchain? The alternative is just a private database somewhere that depends on the whims of a company/individual for its continued existence.

anonymousab 4y ago
> that depends on the whims of a company/individual for its continued existence As do most things so it's really neither relevant nor a drawback worth discussing.
- yreg 4y ago
  This argument is non-sensical. >Why does ${PROJECT} use ${TECHNOLOGY}? >So it doesn't have ${DRAWBACK}. >Most other things have ${DRAWBACK}, so it's really neither relevant nor worth discussing.
betwixthewires 4y ago
People that are fans of NFTs and crypto gaming imagine a world where someone has a token contract with the hash of a public key that corresponds to a private key that only they have somewhere in it registering their ownership of a hash of a file with art in it cryptographically signed by an artist, and that system proving that they alone own the original version of the art. But these are fictions, just as copyright is fiction, a legal fiction but fiction all the same, and all any of this does is demonstrate it, make it more plain. And I'm happy about that, art is useless if it isn't on a wall, and art on a wall looks just as pretty printed. Who owns a picture doesn't matter to me, or to anyone really, if I find it pleasant I'll hang it up, and if it's digital art then mine will look just as nice as the print hanging on the wall of the person who paid 36 ether for the privilege of doing so.
Gigachad 4y ago
We are talking about a toy game about breeding cats, not archiving humanities greatest knowledge. No one will care if if 10 years it’s all deleted.
Doxin 4y ago

animal531 4y ago

Also as Morty would say, it just seems like a pyramid scheme with extra steps.

mkaic 4y ago
Pyramid Scheme Pro Max Plus Ultra 2022 v2.0: Electric Boogaloo

LoveMortuus 4y ago

I know the blockchain has been kind of tainted by the way it's been used for the past few years, but I do believe that there can be valid uses for it. Lately I've been thinking if it would be possible to have an MMORPG game where instead of a server all the data would be saved in a blockchain/linked list. The biggest concern I have though is the latency and speed. Could blockchains be fast enough or in some other way protected from malicious actors to allow actual real time game play? Like World of Warcraft, or would it just be too slow. I've been thinking about this, because servers are expensive and doing it this way you would have, kind of, solved the problem of scalability - no queues. There would be no coins or NFTs or anything like that. Just a decentralised MMORPG server/game thus saving the developers from the server costs.

pavel_lishin 4y ago
> Lately I've been thinking if it would be possible to have an MMORPG game where instead of a server all the data would be saved in a blockchain/linked list. What for? What advantage would this have over storing data on a server? > I've been thinking about this, because servers are expensive and doing it this way you would have, kind of, solved the problem of scalability - no queues. You're just offloading the cost onto the players, and offloading the queuing mechanic onto the blockchain. I'm sorry to be rude, but this is another comment desperately trying to find a use for the blockchain, casting out a rod into infinite idea space, and pulling out a boot.
- LoveMortuus 4y ago
  >What for? What advantage would this have over storing data on a server? Mostly because I'm kinda poor and can't even think about buying it renting servers. That's why I thought that such a solution would allow me to keep developing my game while the players could still play the game. If it would be possible, which from replies to my comment, I'm guessing isn't, it would also mean that even if I died, people could still play because the "servers" wouldn't shutdown. >You're just offloading the cost onto the players, and offloading the queuing mechanic onto the blockchain. That's kind of the point, MMORPG are, from what I understand, quite expensive to run. Thus if they were run by the community it would be cheaper for the developers and those resources could be further used to work on the game. >I'm sorry to be rude, but this is another comment desperately trying to find a use for the blockchain, casting out a rod into infinite idea space, and pulling out a boot I am surprised by the negativity that the HN crowd has poured onto me. Since it would solve one of the biggest issues with MMORPGs, which is - servers shutting down. I love MMOs and it breaks my heart knowing that I'll probably never ever again be able to play Tera and many other MMOs...