Gaming on Ethereum

Dark Forces Gather

I happily played World of Warcraft during 2007-2010, but one day Blizzard removed the damage component from my beloved warlock's Siphon Life spell. I cried myself to sleep, and on that day I realized what horrors centralized services can bring.

• Vitalik Buterin

A New Hope

With the fate of online gaming hanging in the balance a bright young player forges a new path. A path that will take him on an adventure of great invention. A path that will lead young Vitalik to conceive of a trustless & open game server where anyone can play free from these centralized horrors. This world game server would come to be known as Ethereum and balance was restored to online games. Kind of.

The Ethereum white paper built upon Satoshi's bitcoin idea with smart contracts and generalized programming language that greatly expanded the crypto design space and ushered in a variety of decentralized applications but few outside of the financial type have found much user adoption.

Defi get a gold star

If we think of Ethereum as a web of value that operates with digital tokens. Tokens that can be traded for dollars then it's easy to see why stablecoins and defi applications have been the killer app on Ethereum.

While Ethereum matures the design space comes to focus

With the advent of a smart contracts on blockchains the crypto design space has grown to more than financial app. The steady flow of EIP upgrades along with a growing L2 ecosystem has kept Ethereum on track if not always on time. Work on privacy, identity usability and other key areas are ongoing but as time goes by the application design space narrows to those use cases that can gain adoption and the financialization or tokenization is hard to ignore. Where is the fun in that?

LFG & Play Ball

What about the state of play on Ethereum? Isn't games why Vitalik got into blockchains in the first place? To find the answers let's first answer the questionn, What constitutes a Crypto game? Here we can see different degrees of on-chain games from keeping some game assets on-chain to having all game assest as well as the game logic on-chain. These early on-chain games are just that "early" and will need time to find what works best but one key advantage of decentralized games is the composability with other games and on-chain services. The Loot project is a good example of this where loot owners esentialy own a list of words registered on-chain that can be integrated into any game for actual in game assets. For example the word "sword" that can be used or composed into any crypto game for swashbuckling fun and swishy sound effects.

Which way to the metaverse

There have been some game of note in the space. CriptoKitties, God's Unchained and Dark Forest to name a few and Axie Infinity with their pioneering Play to Earn model but there again is the financial apect. Which brings me to the point that some outside of crypto derail the idea of bringing crypto. I would agree with the general premise that play and pay don't mix "well" but can. Poker would be a bore without money and this argument will fade as the space matures and of course there's the metaverse where games and play seem ready to take a leading roll.

Financialization luvs Gamification

Overall my general sense is that finance might not be the only killer use case for blockchains but with the ease of integrating financial incentives into any use case I can see it being a big part of most crypto projects. Receintly CCP the maker of the giant online game EVE have started building on the blockchain along with the NBA top Shots and others traditional companies that are already in the space. Quality games will take time to build out and with new L2 comming online and transaction fees comming down we should see more experimenting more games and more play.

This was my first post for the Ethereum Writers Cohort. For members of the Ethereum.org community looking to publish their writing, establish their online voice, and create new opportunities. Feedback is always welcome. Thanks for reading :)

• GJ