[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.

[dmitriid]

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

It's not bad faith. It's reality. It's also spotting logical and technological holes the size of Jupiter in any of the proposals from clueless[1] crypto maximalists.

[1] Many of them are not clueless, just grifters

[psd1]

I'd add, someone can have a master's in math and be a phenomenal software engineer and still clueless vis-á-vis crypto.

It's like Dunning-Kruger, except the bar for "doesn't know enough to know he doesn't know enough" is right at the ceiling

[dmitriid]

You don't have to be a master in math or a phenomenal software engineer to use common sense and logic. And common sense is more than enough to deal with crypto.

[TylerE]

Because the world they seem to be advocating for is a dystopian hellhole.

[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.