Why hasn’t there been a phenomenon-level product in the realm of fully on-chain gaming? Is it because the industry is still developing or because the fundamental logic doesn’t fit the market? The research team at MetaCat believes that fully on-chain gaming can provide a “real game experience” and has unique advantages.
Table of Contents:
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What is fully on-chain gaming?
Why hasn’t fully on-chain gaming taken off?
What did Dark Forest do right?
Digital physics laws
Asymmetric information games
Dark Forest cleverly creates a real asymmetric information game
Future development of fully on-chain gaming
Fully on-chain gaming refers to games where most of the game logic is executed on the blockchain network, including not only the ownership of game assets such as game props but also information such as player location, status, and game results, all recorded on the blockchain. This makes the overall game more decentralized and gives players more control.
However, because all information needs to be recorded on the blockchain, it inevitably leads to increased costs and inconvenience in operation. It is also limited by performance issues. However, these are all technical problems that can be solved in the future by using higher-performance networks and intent-oriented technologies.
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There are other key factors that need to be discussed in the realm of fully on-chain gaming. Besides these technical issues, what other factors need to be considered?
The fully on-chain gaming field has yet to produce a true killer application or paradigm. What improvements and advantages does fully on-chain gaming have over existing games? Is this the direction that all teams should consider and pursue?
MetaCat believes that at this stage, fully on-chain gaming is still experimenting and has not found its unique advantages to attract players, resulting in a lack of phenomenon-level applications. It is not just a technical architecture problem (although there is room for improvement).
However, they believe that the design of the progenitor of fully on-chain gaming, “Dark Forest,” is very interesting and can be used as a reference. In Dark Forest, players search for other players’ planets and attack them to plunder resources. During the process, players must calculate hash values to discover other planets, resulting in a lot of uncertainty and information asymmetry for players in each round.
Behind the simple game mechanism, Dark Forest actually combines two major innovations:
– Digital physics laws built on the immutability of the blockchain
– Asymmetric information games based on zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP)
The decentralized nature of the blockchain means that data cannot be modified or deleted, which may be an important starting point for exploring the ideal form of fully on-chain gaming since currently, the blockchain is the only carrier that can establish “immutable digital physics laws” in the digital world—no one can violate the principles of things.
Fully on-chain gaming can achieve a game experience where the game outcome and direction cannot be influenced by any third party (including developers), which is an experience that traditional games cannot provide— the “digital physics laws.”
Fully on-chain gaming must provide something that traditional games do not have (new experiences) in order to truly win the favor of players.
Asymmetric information games are very common in the physical world and traditional games, such as business negotiations, closed auctions, poker, mahjong, and real-time strategy games like StarCraft.
Asymmetric information games provide players with a richer gaming experience because the typically incomplete information largely needs to be judged by the players themselves or supplemented by imagination, bringing stimulation through players’ mental activities.
In the real world, asymmetric information games are usually realized through artificial rules, while in traditional games, centralized rules are generally used, which easily leads to the risk of a single point of failure, such as cheating that bypasses server rules.
Dark Forest, on the other hand, uses zero-knowledge proofs to achieve a more perfect mechanism for asymmetric information games, making it difficult for users to easily bypass the rules.
Dark Forest combines “digital physics laws” and “asymmetric information games,” greatly increasing the realism of the game, bringing a real game experience to the virtual world.
The gaming experience brought by asymmetric information games is protected by digital physics laws, ensuring the immutability of the game’s rules and eliminating the possibility of rule-breaking.
From a first-principles perspective, since only fully on-chain gaming can achieve the combination of these features, Dark Forest, in a way, also validates that players have a corresponding demand for this experience. Perhaps the further fusion of these two aspects may be the path to the “Holy Grail” of fully on-chain gaming.
MetaCat believes that the “real game experience brought by the combination of digital physics laws and asymmetric information games” will be the unique advantage of fully on-chain gaming and a future direction worth exploring.
Effectively utilizing existing features becomes an advantage, rather than blindly imitating existing games, in order to carve out its own niche. The Dark Forest team deeply understands this essence and has succeeded.
Dark Forest
GameFi
Fully on-chain gaming
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