[alanfalcon]

CryptoKitties is a lot of fun, for what it is. It's super deep and while it's more of a sandbox than a typical game, I became obsessed with it when it came out, though not for monetary reasons (if it has one huge drawback as a game, it's always been how much it costs IMO).

Became so obsessed that I ended up hired by Dapper Labs and working on the CryptoKitties team, later helped design and launch NBA Top Shot on Flow. Now that we have (the markedly cheaper and easier) Flow and lots and lots of lessons learned from building NFT products, I'm excited for us to bring the next generation of CryptoKitties to life.

If you want to check out a fun crypto game that just recently launched from another developer, I urge you to check out dimensionxnft.com with an open mind.

[Chabsff]

You cannot have a conversation about "crypto games" without addressing how crypto makes the game better. For the sake of this conversation, it doesn't particularly matter how fun CryptoKitties is. What matters is how does the blockchain integration make the game better than it would otherwise have been.

From my point of view so far, even the best crypto game out there would have been better if it wasn't for the crypto aspect of it.

If this ecosystem is to provide value beyond the potential for making money, then what is it? It's hard to be excited about something that only has downsides.

[alanfalcon]

So I've been thinking about this and working on this for years, so I have a different perspective. Is everything fully better for having blockchain integration? Clearly no. Are the benefits worth the trade-offs? I'd argue yes, on the whole.

1. The global worldwide market place. While this introduces commerce/real money, which come with very real downsides, it also makes the game high stakes (meaning most people play to the best of their ability). WoW and other games showed how much a vibrant marketplace can add to a game experience for some players, and having everything trading for essentially real money doesn't change that underlying level of engagement.

2. Permissionless development. While there are many examples of attempts at building on top of CryptoKitties fizzling out, there are also success stories, especially around "WCK"—a fungible token created by an unaffiliated third party developer that essentially created a worldwide "Give a Kitty, Take a Kitty" pool that let you send away any cat you didn't want and get back one that you preferred. And because it's on the blockchain and uses blockchain standards, it can also be used as liquidity and barter, both of which add to the experience. I don't believe I've ever seen something like this built on top of a non-blockchain game... certainly it wouldn't be quite as easy as this was to build! Some examples of other third party creations include an auto-breeding platform, a Kitty racing game, a Kitty battling game, Kitty cosmetics (your cat NFT can own its own hat NFT!), and a trustless Kitty bounty smart contract.

3. Almost unparalleled transparency. This has all kinds of fun side effects from allowing the community to fully "check the work" of the developer to what amounts to an open-to-everyone API. And what's more, this is a standardized API so that someone who builds tools for CryptoKitties would be able to also use those tools for Cheeze Wizards. Again, there are amazing third party tools built on the backs of APIs of online games all the time, but it's actually cool how much you get "for free" by being on the blockchain. The verified fairness is pretty cool IMO.

4. Immortal assets. I poured a lot into City of Heroes back in the day, and then one day the devs shut down the server, and took all my heroes with it. This is a very common refrain. As long as there are nodes out there running Ethereum, anyone can breed their Kitty NFTs. That's not nothing. (There's a lot of nuance here about art assets, IP rights, user interface, etc., and it's messy and still very much being figured out, but that's how the world works—you build it, then you improve it!)

5. Value capture. Yes, this almost always has evolved into speculation and nonsense valuations and irrational behavior. But still: when you buy a Kitty, you have the right to sell that Kitty. When you breed a new Kitty, you have the right to sell that Kitty. This is enabled by blockchain almost for free! Note this is distinct and different from point 1. WoW has a marketplace, but when you earn a legendary BoP sword, you cannot then capture that value by selling it if that's what you want to do. This point is as often riddled with downsides as it brings upsides, but the unique and novel truth of it makes it better than a non-blockchain game for some people.

Again, this comes from years of being in the space, playing with these toys, building these systems, being a part of these communities. For some of us, this has been incredibly exciting, and fun, because we chose to explore and figure out for ourselves what upsides this new frontier might hold for us.

[Chabsff]

Thank you for the verbose answer, though I disagree with most points.

1) "having everything trading for essentially real money doesn't change that underlying level of engagement." It has been long established that this is absolutely the case. A classic example of this would be Diablo 3's RMAH effectively destroying the game by having the entire economy be driven by real-world profit-seeking grind

2) I consider this to be very misleading. All of these intra-game features are not made available by the blockchain itself, but by the details of the various Smart Contracts involved. In that sense, the set of instructions available to would-be developers to interact with a game is going to be limited by the operations (and the various rules governing them) that are present in the smart contracts. If a game features permission-less development like this, it's because its developers have decided to make the requisite operations available and documented. This is no different than a regular documented public API.

3) I see nothing preventing this from being done without the blockchain.

4) This is the one potentially interesting wrinkle, but I find it to have marginal interest at best. Assets are inherently immortal unless explicit steps are taken by developers to prevent them to be. What is actually at play here is Immortal Entity Ownership, aka Immortal Scarcity. That's very interesting from a revenue-making potential, but not really much more than that.

5) That does not make the game itself better though.

[px43]

#2 is the most important one to me, so I'll address that specifically.

MOST games I've seen don't provide a public API for players to interact with, and even when players do reverse engineer them, they get accused of cheating, hacking, whatever, and often get their accounts banned.

In the world of blockchain gaming, it's trivial to build tools and meta-games around anything, and there's basically nothing that the original developers can do to stop it. I can host a small bit of static HTML that gives users the ability to battle cryptokitties with each other, and capture each other's kitties. Then at the end of the day, the winner can go back to the main cryptokitties site, and breed their new kitties like normal. I don't need to ask anyone's permission, and all I need is a stable place to land some HTML, and maybe deploy some contracts depending on the level of integrations I want to build. I don't need to apply for an API key, or start up an email conversation with anyone at Dapper Labs. I can just build it, and anyone with a web3 capable browser can play along.

This is the magic of "permissionless" systems, and it's the standard across the blockchain gaming ecosystem.

[Chabsff]

Sure, but my point is that the lack of blockchain technology is not what's preventing most games from featuring this, it's only the developer's willingness to do so.

[the_af]

> In the world of blockchain gaming, it's trivial to build tools

It's not trivial, because making fun metagames is hard, because game design is hard, and blockchain is not a shortcut to it.

> I can host a small bit of static HTML that gives users the ability to battle cryptokitties

This is backwards. A game about battling kitties must start with kitty battling gameplay that is fun. This is like discussing the programing language -- who cares? Tell me how your game is fun.

Blockchain won't help you at all there. Nothing about it makes anything "fun".

You are proving the other commenter's point: blockchain is not a special sauce for games. Whether a game is enjoyable or not has nothing to do with blockchain. In fact, it turns to be the opposite: if blockchain is involved, you can almost bet there's very little gameplay at all, because that's not what the developers care about.

[TylerE]

These reads to me as: Haven for asian bot farms.

[swalsh]

Why do anti-crypto people always seem to go into all every conversation with completely bad faith?

It's fun to take something someone else built, and do something new and not planned by the origional devs with it. That's it, it's just not necessary to assume bad faith.

[pcthrowaway]

> 1) "having everything trading for essentially real money doesn't change that underlying level of engagement." It has been long established that this is absolutely the case. A classic example of this would be Diablo 3's RMAH effectively destroying the game by having the entire economy be driven by real-world profit-seeking grind

It doesn't need to be "real" money, just something people value (even if its in-game assets). But having something at stake definitely does alter the gameplay

Try playing poker for "fun" (without real money), and then agin with money at stake. People play a lot more seriously, the psychology of the game changes.

[ohgodplsno]

1/ Making people play to the best of their ability.

People have always been insanely competitive, without bringing in a token in the middle. All you're doing is making it impossible to play (or not lose money) if you're not trying your hardest, all the time.

2/ You're really going to pretend you've never seen communities make their own services on top of a game? The only real difference is that it is fully automated in this case, but service markets have existed forever. Path of Exile has a whole discord with tens of thousands of users just to exchange things.

3/ Only if Cheese Wizards is a carbon copy of CryptoKitties, just changing names. Otherwise, data structures are different behaviours are different, and your work just has to be redone. Like in the current world. But it's true, at least it's open.

4/ You gotta really fucking love your game if you're willing to keep minting (and therefore paying) for NFTs that are worthless and unusable anywhere else

5/ This is an absolute cancer that has made every single game that added real money trading objectively worse. It makes every interaction with your game make you take into account the potential money loss. Like making your kitties spin? Too bad sucker, that's not the optimal money making strat, enjoy feeling ever so slightly bad every time.

The only useful point is the openness of the API. Everything else are things we already do in games (good and bad), but worse. Anyone in this industry not seeing this has either zero experience with games, or destructive tendencies just to make a bit of cash on misery.

[the_af]

Agreed, plus it raises this question: why would any gaming company cooperate with an API that effectively removes their control over their assets and enables competitors and third parties from building on top of them without requiring authorization?

I can only see the "open API" benefit for free open source games. So it wouldn't have helped Vitalik and his famed WoW sword.

Then again, making fun games is hard, and there's no escaping it. So maybe it wouldn't help free games either.

[the_af]

> 4. Immortal assets. I poured a lot into City of Heroes back in the day, and then one day the devs shut down the server, and took all my heroes with it.

Had City of Heroes implemented their heroes "on blockchain", this would have gotten you nowhere.

CoH's heroes would have been useless outside their servers, blockchain or not. They mean nothing if you don't have the game's engine to make then do fun things.

NFTs only work when they are the meaning in themselves, but this can only happen when the "game" is fundamentally trivial and uninteresting, like CryptoKitties. Real games require an engine to run them, and if the engine shuts down, your "assets" become meaningless.

Gameplay is what matters. Making a server open-source is more meaningful than running the assets on blockchain.

[Kiro]

HyperDragons. Someone made a game where you bred dragons that could eat CryptoKitties to absorb their attributes. The composability and interoperability of the blockchain means anyone can extend your game and build mechanics with your assets, without your permission. It's truly an open API.

[pdntspa]

And what here does the blockchain offer that a database table doesn't? Other than the ability to monetize.

[Kiro]

The fact that I can build upon CryptoKitties with no obstacle. If CryptoKitties was on a private database I would need to get access to their API and also trust them with the ownership/management of the assets. Now I can just build it on the blockchain and have people destroy CryptoKitties in my smart contract to get benefits in my game. No API functionality or permission from CryptoKitties needed.

[lottin]

So how does this open API works? Every time you use it you have to pay a third party?

[lmm]

You submit the action you want to do, anywhere in the ethereum network, and if it's valid (e.g. if you're running an operation that destroys a kitty then you'd better include a digital signature showing that you own that kitty) then it will be accepted and published. You have to pay a "gas fee" which in theory a) should be pretty small and b) is what pays for the running of that ethereum network. In practice under the current implementation those fees got to be big enough that they kind of killed cryptokitties, but this might be fixable.

[xboxnolifes]

What do you mean? All of the data is on the chain. It's a global "third-party" that everyone is a part of.

[JeremyNT]

Even "the ability to monetize" is hardly unique - it would also be trivial to monetize that database table (see: Diablo 3).

[LawTalkingGuy]

That the two projects both shared the same DB.

[anotherman554]

Unless the intellectual property assets (art and character designs) have been licensed putting them on a blockchain does not make them legal to use.

[Kiro]

What do you mean? HyperDragons is just interacting with the CryptoKitties smart contract. They are not using any art or other IP from CryptoKitties.

[anotherman554]

So cyptokitties are not cartoon characters like Pokemon?

All I'm saying is, if Nintendo made a Pokemon NFT, another company such as Ubisoft would not be able to add Pikachu to their blockchain based game without an intellectual property license by Nintendo. This would seemingly make a Pokemon NFT rather pointless.

[Kiro]

I would still be able to build applications utilizing the Pokemon NFT, and use it in my game, without infringing on the copyright. The NFT itself is just an ID with some meta data and doesn't contain any IP. The IP is in Nintendo's own front-end for the NFT.

[landryraccoon]

Couldn’t that have been done equally well with a centralized ledger? Lots of games have “high stakes pvp”, such as eve online. They don’t have a blockchain, and yet you can still steal stuff permanently from other players if that’s how you want to play the game.

[Kiro]

Let's say I want to build a game where you can destroy your EVE Online spaceships to get bonuses in my game. How would that work? That's what happened with CryptoKitties and HyperDragons.

Just to clarify: someone who owns a CryptoKitty decides to send it to the HyperDragons smart contract that handles the absorption. It's not about stealing anything. You use your assets in CryptoKitties to boost your dragon in HyperDragons.

[Chabsff]

This is not inherently made possible by the blockchain itself though.

The mechanisms to transfer a Kitty to the HyperDragons lie within the CryptoKitty Smart Contract. This is not particularly different than a regular API, where the available operations have been chosen, specified, and made available to the public at large by the developers.

The only real difference with a public-facing documented traditional API is that said API will outlive the original product. But that doesn't make CryptoKitties a better game, since Cripto Kitties won't be a thing anymore when that comes into play.

[stale2002]

> This is not inherently made possible by the blockchain itself though.

It basically is. This is impossible on Eve, if you don't have permission from the people who make Eve.

But, with something on the blockchain, you don't need permission from the person who made the original asset, on the blockchain.

The asset is on the blockchain, and it is much more difficult to stop me from using that asset, compared to a centralized Eve database.

[bcrosby95]

I view crypto as a good way to create an ecosystem rather than just a single game. But to create an ecosystem requires multiple games, by multiple companies. At the center of it all, you probably need a selfless company with tons of money to bootstrap the core IP, that simultaneously cares very much about its IP but also doesn't care too much so they let indies and amateurs experiment with it.

I can see the "end game" and it looks nice. But I don't know how to get there. I don't know if its even possible to get there given the hurdles involved - some of the required attributes from the involved actors feels contradictory.

[sumeno]

Color me surprised that the person claiming to have enjoyed a crypto game is trying to shill a different crypto game

[midislack]

OK but WHAT IS THE GAME? What do you DO with CryptoKitties?

[JeremyNT]

Disclaimer: I haven't played it, but I read this article.

It looks like a pet breeding game. You "own" cartoon cats - visual representations of distinctive bundles of characteristics contained in a NFT. You generate more NFTs by "breeding" two existing cats (executing the smart contract), which results in random combinations of their characteristics in offspring.

What to do with them? Speculate on their value, same as any NFT.

As a "game" this sounds incredibly unsophisticated compared to normal video games - something that might have passed during the flash era of gaming, or maybe today on itch.io as a weekend project. The only "hook" outside of this is the speculation / potential to earn (and I imagine if you're in on the scam, earning is a lot of fun).

[Sohcahtoa82]

There's a free mobile game called Clusterduck which is basically the same idea but without the crypto nonsense.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pikpok.wtd...

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/clusterduck/id1531250914

You basically don't do anything except watch what weird mutations come out from the breeding. In Clusterduck, you can only have up to 30 ducks, so once you hit the limit, you have to throw a duck into the pit to sacrifice it. Sometimes when sacrificing a duck, a large monster spawns from the pit, and if you tap it enough times, it'll spawn a duck with a "cursed" trait of some sort.

[alanfalcon]

Breeding is a complex and nuanced game mechanic, which when coupled with the worldwide marketplace unlocks a dizzying rabbit hole. Once you understand the mechanics, you realize just why a Gen 1 Tendertears would be a grail collectible to own.

I called it more of a sandbox than a game, but there are also Fancy Chases, events where a specific limited-time breeding goal is introduced and it's a race to be among the first to achieve this goal and breed a Fancy Kitty.

Not saying it's for everyone, but it's definitely something that thousands of people found and find pretty darn fun (again: if expensive).

[opyate]

Sounds like gacha, where folks feverishly "collect" pointless pieces of little plastic. All these things (hoarding, compulsive buying, gambling) go hand-in-hand [0], and ends up emptying pockets and possibly devastating lives.

0: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3181956/

[Tao3300]

> it's definitely something that thousands of people found and find pretty darn fun (again: if expensive).

But do they? They could just as easily be compulsively chasing some chance to cash out big.

[ohgodplsno]

CK's breeding mechanics are about as complex as Pokemon Gen1's breeding mechanics, and simpler than Gen3. Congratulations on passing the GameBoy bar. Additionally, all of the talk about openness is now out the window since the breeding code is closed source.

Congratulations on also doing limited time events, welcome to the year 2000 of online gaming!

[alanfalcon]

Just because it's tradition to not let "someone being wrong on the internet" stand: https://www.cryptokitties.co/blog/post/learn-how-our-last-my...

[ohgodplsno]

Thanks! Now there's improvement, from "we're not sure just how simplistic those mechanics are" to "well fuck me that's some first year in college simple mechanics".

[secretsatan]

I knew someone who described slot machines like that

He ended up declaring bankruptcy

[DonHopkins]

Maybe it's just fun to spend money you don't need, or stole, or swindled, or need to launder.

[Tao3300]

You know how they call the lottery "a game"?

[reidjs]

You can trade them, or breed them with other cryptokitties.

[digitaLandscape]

You breed them. It reminded me of horse breeding games my girlfriend used to play. Kind of fun. Not worth the ongoing cost though.

[midislack]

For me it's the Mary Kate and Ashley horse breeding game on the Game Boy Color.