Summary of the Decentralized Gaming Working Group 6th May 2020
By: Blockchain Game Alliance
Tags: Decentralized, Gaming, News, Blockchain, Resources

This post summarises the video presentation shown on 6th May 2020, our first montly meeting for Decentralized Gaming Workgroup happening on

You can also view the Presentation Slides online

It was the first presentation from the Decentralized Gaming Working Group run by Edward Thomson from the Web3 Foundation and involving several member companies from the Blockchain Game Alliance: Xaya, Planetarium, Cartesi, and Ethernal.

This working group is interested in discussing decentralised gaming technology. The emphasis is on games that aim to be fully decentralised. It is worth pointing out that fully decentralised blockchain games can have a variety of different architectures and that a monolithic architecture where the entire game resides on-chain is just one option. In the presentation we presented an overview of the different architectures available to highlight that game developers have multiple options available.

The presentation is split into two halves. In the first half, we introduced a simple definition of a decentralised blockchain game, provided the advantages of this approach, and gave a quick overview of the different architectures. In the second half, we had live demos from the featured teams.

Introduction

Timestamp (11:09)

The introductory section provides a brief summary of what is meant by decentralisation. This ‘definition’ was taken from Wikipedia, so hopefully there is no contention there. Taking this as a working definition along with the notion of a game we can inductively reason what is meant by a decentralised game.

The use of blockchain technology within the tech stack of a decentralised game is to provide a base layer of trust that can enforce the properties of decentralisation. The video features a brief working definition of a blockchain plus a highlight of the key problem that Bitcoin solved: the Byzantine Generals Problem, which is essentially a problem of trust and agreement in a hostile environment. If Bitcoin is anti-cheating for money, then we suggest there is a way for blockchain to be anti-cheating for gaming.

Advantages

Timestamp (18:17)

Building a fully decentralised game is a tough challenge and one that requires solving additional problems that traditional game developers wouldn’t have to think about. In this section, the intention is to convince you that the additional challenges bring a set of advantages.

There is a reason that blockchain has attracted a lot of value in such a short space of time. The technology solves a very hard problem of trust. Blockchain technology allows such value to be transferred and stored in a trustless manner.

This is why we can see a single transfer of $1 billion on a decentralised network, but nothing even comparable in a centralised online game. Players will be able to truly own their assets with a decentralised game, that they can trade when they desire, and have no fear of them being confiscated by the developers.

Of course, it can be possible that players lose items during gameplay such as via PVP or dying during combat against a tough monster such as a dragon. However, all players are agreeing on a set of rules in the code. No one can break those rules, not even the game developers.

A summary of the advantages are as follows:

True Ownership

Fault-Tolerant (Anti-Cheating)

Provably fair gameplay

Fair item trading and acquisition

Trustless

Censorship Resistant / Permissionless

Transparent Economics

Unstoppable / Autonomous

No Centralised Servers

Architecture

Timestamp (29:33)

Probably the boring part of the presentation, but it is worth diving into a little detail here to explain how the different decentralised blockchain games compare in the back-end. Essentially, this section outlines the various architectures. We denoted them as:

Monolithic

Layered, and

Hybrid

Demos

Timestamp (44:20)

The demos featured in this video were:

Soccer Manage Elite

A soccer manager real-time multiplayer game, utilising blockchain technology, giving you true realism, ownership and total control. SME runs on the Xaya blockchain.

Creepts

First Fully Decentralized Tower Defense DApp. Proofs of the game moves are stored on Ethereum.

Ethernal

A multiplayer dungeon game that’s generated & owned by the players. Still in Alpha and running on an Ethereum sidechain.

Taurion

A fully decentralised MMO that is a new twist on the Real-Time Strategy genre. Taurion runs on the Xaya blockchain.

Xaya ships

Xayaships is a blockchain version of the classic naval warfare Battleship game. It uses game channel (state channel) technology which allows for real-time, decentralised trustless gameplay and runs on the Xaya blockchain.