CHAPTER 8

Social Gaming on the Blockchain

It was a matter of time before decentralized gaming became a hit. Almost immediately after social media, gaming itself started its race toward decentralization. And it’s easy to see why. Like money, games are inherently social.

As the Internet progresses toward its third iteration, blockchains will become more social and that will include more gaming opportunities for serious online gaming enthusiasts. In Steemit’s heyday, one of the most popular applications on the blockchain was the game Splinterlands. Now, Hive users jokingly refer to the Hive blockchain as the “Splinterlands blockchain.”

If social media is a natural extension of the Internet and cryptosocial media a natural extension of blockchains, then it seems to reason that social gaming is a natural extension of both social media and cryptosocial media. In this chapter, we’ll explore the various ways social games are being changed by cryptocurrencies.

The Social Nature of Games

As soon as communities began forming, games provided social interaction, entertainment, and monetization for participants and promoters. Humans love to play games, watch them, and celebrate the winners. It’s in our nature.

Unless throwing a baseball against a pitchback, dealing a hand of Solitaire, or playing a round of tic-tac-toe with an alter ego, whenever a game is played, there is some type of social component because most games involve two or more people. Of course, there are different types of games—strategy games, card games, board games, video games, and the list can go on.

No one knows for sure what the oldest game is, but it’s certain that ancient societies played them. Chess was developed around 600 AD. Go originated in China about 2,000 BC. The Mesopotamians had a board game as early as 2,500 BC. Backgammon dates as far back as 3,000 BC. The Egyptian game of Senet is likely older.¹ Each of these requires at least two players.

It might seem strange, given that games inherently have a social aspect, to refer to a class of games as “social gaming.” We’ll blame that on the Internet.

The development of the World Wide Web since the advent of the first website in 1991 has largely been social. Today, two of the most visited websites in the world are social media websites YouTube and Facebook.²

Three of the five most visited sites by search traffic in January 2021 were social media websites.³ Social media is certainly one of the most important things the Internet has given us.

Like money and games, the Web is inherently social. Social gaming is another byproduct of Tim Berners-Lee’s grand invention. In the last few years, the rise of massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPG) have attracted millions of fans around the world. These games allow players to assume a character, which they control throughout the game. It’s a genre with a lot of diversity.

Until now, MMORPG’s have largely been a cult phenomenon, a way for geeks to pass the time. But the COVID-19 pandemic has given rise to a discussion in the venture capital world about its potential as a mainstream social experience.⁴ Given that discussion is taking place right now, it’s hard to talk about social media without including social gaming.

Blockchains are not separate technologies from the Internet. They are an extension of it. Every blockchain interacts in some way with the World Wide Web. The idea behind blockchain development is to return the Internet to its decentralized roots. There is no place where that possibility has more potential than in the area of social gaming. Other than tournament play, games themselves need no one to control them. Players get together and manage play time together, and as long as everyone follows the rules there is no need for a mediator. In games where there are referees, the referees are not central authorities for all things pertaining to the game. They are there simply to ensure that both teams honor the rules.

With the exception of modern sporting contests, most games are played informally. Sports franchises are businesses and must run as businesses even as the players and fans agree to call them games. But board games, card games, dice games, and other games are more often used as ways to relate to others at the social level rather than as an occupation. Blockchains have the potential to take that amateur social activity and turn it into a profitable enterprise for the average Joe and Jane.

Why Are Online Games So Popular?

In the 1980s, arcade games were all the rage. I wasn’t into them, but I had friends who would walk to the corner convenience store, or head to the mall, and spend hours and several rolls of quarters playing Pac-Man, Asteroids, Donkey Kong, Centipede, Tron, Galaga, and Pole Position.

Okay, full disclosure: I did like Pac-Man and Pole Position.

Later, these games made their way into everyone’s homes when Nintendo, Atari, and Playstation competed for attention. And then they found their way to personal computers. When the Internet came along, game makers discovered a new medium and took their games online.

Such games were around long before the Internet, and even before arcade games. In the early 1960s, a timesharing system called PLATO was developed at the University of Illinois.⁵ The first two-player game on PLATO was coded in the late 1960s. In the 1970s, PLATO allowed students at different locations to play educational games and out of that came multiplayer computer games. Social gaming had its genesis.

The 1970s also gave rise to several different gaming systems on computers. One widespread gaming system was called MUD, an acronym for Multi-User Dungeon.⁶

In 1973, a game called Maze introduced the first shootout game for personal computers.⁷ By 1974, the two-player game became an eight-player game and could be played over the ARPANET.

Over time, as computer graphics got better, computer gaming grew more sophisticated. It was only natural that these games would find their way to the Internet.

In 1984, CompuServe created a game called Islands of Kesmai.⁸ Many people consider it the first multiplayer online role playing game (MORPG). Nintendo, Sega, and PlayStation all got into the MORPG genre and video game makers spit out role playing games for these systems left and right. By the end of the 1990s, some of the most popular games were MORPGs. It didn’t take long for these games to migrate online.

In 1991, America Online (AOL) partnered with TSR, publisher of the popular Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game, to create Neverwinter Nights, the first MMORPG to display sophisticated graphics.⁹ The game became so popular that AOL had to pull the plug on it after a few years and subsequently created its own gaming culture.

Ultima Online released in 1997 and became the fastest-growing MMORPG to date¹⁰ with hundreds of thousands of game players around the world eventually adopting the game. Lineage was the first MMORPG to reach 1 million users, but it was mostly popular in South Korea.¹¹ Second Life launched in 2003, but it isn’t so much an MMORPG as a virtual world where players create avatars and live an online life that may or may not involve conflict. Still, its popularity is indisputable.¹² World of Warcraft launched in 2004 and had one of the first breakout successes in the United States, ultimately reaching 12 million subscribers by 2012.¹³

What’s interesting about Second Life is it’s not so much a game as an experience. Players create characters called avatars and make them do anything a real person can do in real life. They can build houses, start businesses, carry on relationships with other avatars, create art, conduct religious activities, trade virtual properties, commit crimes, and buy and sell using the in-world currency called Linden Dollar.

Second Life is an important case study for cryptoeconomics because in having its own currency it had its own internal economic system. That economy led to Second Life’s GDP reaching $64 million by September 2006.¹⁴

Players in Second Life can’t trade Linden Dollars for real currency with game creator Linden Lab, but they can request a refund through PayPal if they generate surplus income through their in-game business activities. Second Life has created at least one millionaire through in-game business activities.¹⁵

Figure 8.1 Alphaville Herald started as a virtual newspaper reporting on activities within Second Life but expanded into much more. Its last reported story was in 2016

Credit: Screenshot

Second Life has had its share of controversies (Figures 8.1), including litigation. Among these include a Ponzi scheme related to illegal gambling activities,¹⁶ technical issues, security breaches, copyright infringement challenges,¹⁷ bans and account deletions,¹⁸ false DMCA notices,¹⁹ virtual riots,²⁰ and questionable sexual activities.²¹ In a word, Second Life represents the best and the worst of human nature, really what one would expect of such a virtual gaming environment. It also illustrates what’s so enticing about social gaming.

People love social games because they are able to immerse themselves in the story of the virtual world. Much like reading a novel or engaging with one’s favorite musical artist, social gaming appeals to the creative center of our brains. They allow us to identify with others, in very deep ways, in an environment where we can explore our better selves and those parts of us we may not want to express in the real world. We can become that which we wish we could be in real life and express that which we may fear expressing to our closest friends and harshest critics. Social games and virtual worlds allow us to live out our fantasies with immunity, and perhaps with fewer, and lesser, consequences.

The Growth of Blockchain Games

Late in 2017, a small volcano erupted on the Ethereum blockchain when a collectible card game called CryptoKitties came to light. Rolled out publicly in October, in December the game congested the Ethereum network due to its outrageous popularity.²²

In a matter of months, Ethereum blockchain users spent $4.5 million for the privilege of owning these digital breeding pets. On December 2, 2017, the highest selling cryptokitty was a digital collectible named Genesis. It sold for the equivalent of $114,481 U.S. dollars at that time.²³ The buyer paid with ether.

CryptoKitties falls into a category called nonfungible tokens (NFT). These are special cryptocurrencies that are unique. Each cryptokitty has a digital signature that makes it unlike any other cryptokitty. This special character makes each cryptokitty a collectible in its own right. And with that built-in scarcity, each cryptokitty has the potential to be worth an indeterminable amount more than it was at creation as demand for each cryptokitty grows.

CryptoKitties were not the first NFTs. Bitcoin had colored coins and Counterparty had Pepe the Frog.²⁴ Ethereum had CryptoPunks. However, CryptoKitties are the first NFTs to have breakout mainstream acceptance.

Being an NFT, each cryptokitty can be classified as digital art, a cryptocollectible, a digital asset, and a cryptocurrency. A token, by definition, is a cryptocurrency created on top of an existing blockchain on which it isn’t native. Ether is the native cryptocurrency—a coin—on the Ethereum network. Everything else on Ethereum is a token.

There are two primary types of tokens on the Ethereum blockchain. ERC-20s are the most common type and have special rules in place for how they interact with other tokens, and with ether, on the blockchain. The ERC-20 protocol, however, has a weakness. It isn’t good for creating tokens where each asset has its own unique digital signature. For that purpose, the ERC-721 protocol was created. CryptoKitties was the first NFT created using that protocol.²⁵

Another unique aspect of the ERC-721 protocol is that it is designed to track the movement of each individual asset on the blockchain. For instance, if Zack creates an NFT called Ethereum Blob and sells it to Miriam, the blockchain will track that single asset from Zack’s wallet to Miriam’s. A year later, if Miriam trades it for a CryptoKitty, then the Ethereum Blob will be tracked to the new owner’s wallet. Everywhere it goes, it can be traced. This is important for several reasons:

• Ownership—Since there is only one Ethereum Blob, it’s important to track who owns it.

• Provenance—In the art and high-value collectibles worlds, provenance is the science of analyzing an asset to determine its authenticity. If a collector has a rare Van Gogh painting and decides to sell it, the buyer will want to know if it is an authentic Van Gogh and if it is the original painting and not a print. Provenance makes that determination possible.

• Value determination—Because the ERC-721 protocol tracks the digital asset wherever it goes, it can show when it was created, how many times it has changed hands, and who has owned it. That could be tremendously valuable information for a buyer. If, for instance, it was determined that a celebrity had his hands on it for a brief period, then that could increase the value of the asset. Someone might see it as more valuable if they knew that Mark Cuban once owned the same unique digital asset.

In March 2018, CryptoKitties spun off as a separate company called Dapper Labs and raised $15 million.²⁶ Two months later, one of the digital assets sold for $140,000.²⁷ That same month, the company launched a celebrity-branded version of its digital asset but suspended the deal due to legal troubles.²⁸

CryptoKitties isn’t a game in the traditional sense. It’s a set of digital collectibles. Collectors purchase virtual cats, breed them, and sell them. That’s it in a nutshell. But its launch set in motion a new way to look at cryptocurrencies, social communities, and gaming on blockchains.

Decentraland

In February 2020, a Second Life-like virtual world came to the Ethereum blockchain in the form of a game called Decentraland.²⁹ Players create avatars and use them to buy land, build businesses, create art, and more. All of this while earning ether.

What’s different about Decentraland from Second Life is that players are participating in a decentralized autonomous organization and, by virtue of being players, have the right to vote on the inner workings of the world. That takes the concept of decentralization to a whole new level. It also essentially changes the nature of online social communities.

Decentraland’s makers call it “the world’s first-ever virtual world owned by its users.”

As users acquire land, they build on it. And there are no zoning laws, so users can build space colonies, baseball parks, industrial red light districts, medieval mazes, or whatever they can imagine. Players can build anything they want using the in-game software development kit (SDK). If they want to manufacture clothing, they can. If they want to set up a gambling casino, they can. If they want to build a church and invite other in-game participants to join a worship service, they can do that too.

The Decentraland Marketplace features goods created by players in the game. Players can purchase these in-game assets created by other players and use them in the game or resell them for a profit, if they wish. The marketplace features wearables, land parcels and estates, and names (including takes on real-world brand names such as dunkindonuts and tsla). The currency of Decentraland is called MANA.

While Decentraland launched in 2020, it was conceived in 2017, just before the CryptoKitties craze. The company raised $20 million in MANA, or 68,000 ETH, through an initial coin offering (ICO). In the first land auction in December 2017, the company sold $15 million in land. In September 2018, a whale on the platform called Nessie bought up a bunch of land driving up the values. In December the same year, the company raised another $6.6 million in a second land sale.³⁰ On November 14, 2021, the value of MANA was $5.24, and its market cap was $9.5 billion, making it the 23rd ranked cryptocurrency by market cap³¹.

Land is conceivably the chief asset in Decentraland. One of the drivers of value of that land is built-in scarcity. Land, not including districts, is fixed at 45,000 private parcels. Of course, just like in the real world, location and infrastructure can determine value and demand.

Decentraland will continue to improve over time. It has had its challenges regarding graphics and tools for players, but those will eventually iron out. If not, I suspect there will be another concept close to it to pick up where Decentraland leaves off.

Other Ethereum Games

By the end of 2018, there were more than 40 games on the Ethereum blockchain.³² Not all of them were MMORPGs. Some were card games or dice games and some were role playing games. But it shows how fast CryptoKitties influenced a new genre of blockchain activity. In each case, players earn all in-game assets they acquire, have the ability to earn cryptocurrency while playing, can convert that cryptocurrency to real-world money fairly easily, and, in many cases, can use in-game assets and characters in other games on the Ethereum blockchain.

Ethereum games include:

• CryptoAlchemy—In CryptoAlchemy, players purchase a chemical element from the periodic table. As they acquire more elements, they can experiment with them and create interesting combinations.

• CryptoAssault—CryptoAssault is a massively multiplayer online war game (MMOWG). Players build armies, claim territories, win or lose battles, mine for resources, and join alliances with other players.

• Dissolution—Dissolution is a shooter RPG set in the dystopian future. Players collect assets and play for OMEN, the in-game cryptocurrency.

• Dragonereum—Dragonereum is a cryptocollectible card game where players purchase dragons, breed them, fight them, and trade them with other players.

• Gods Unchained—In this popular game, players collect digital trading cards and battle other players. Cards can be traded on an open market and players enter tournaments to win prizes.

• Lordless—In this fantasy game, players can play a tavern owner or a bounty hunter. If they play a tavern owner, they can recruit bounty hunters, send them on quests, and earn rewards. As a bounty hunter, they complete quests and earn rewards.

• Project Genesis—In Project Genesis, players assume an artificial intelligence identity and uncover secrets as they attempt to transport cryogenically frozen humans to another planet. Players acquire assets they can take with them into other Ethereum-based games.

• War Riders—Another MMOWG, War Riders allows players to buy cars and equip them with munitions. They can customize their vehicles with logos and messages, attack their enemies, expand garage locations, build and buy better weapons, and even offer protection to other players for a price. Players earn ether during play.

• World of Ether—Players collect creatures called Etherians and breed them like CryptoKitties. Unlike CryptoKitties, they can battle their Etherians against other Etherians and earn experience points. As they power up, players can breed and battle rarer and more powerful monsters.

The assets players acquire in these games are ERC-721 tokens minted on the Ethereum blockchain. As tokens, they become valuable assets to the players that they can trade or sell on an open market. From collecting cute creatures to blasting enemies in war games, players can have fun and earn rewards that have monetary value. There is even a fantasy baseball-like game called MLB Crypto Baseball.

Splinterlands

A couple of months after joining Steemit, I heard about this new startup game called Steem Monsters when another Steemit participant gave me a card for answering a trivia question correctly. That transaction took place in April 2018.

The game hadn’t launched yet. Game makers were creating cards and sponsoring fiction writing contests. Entrants wrote stories based on character monsters featured in the game. Winners won game cards. After winning several contests, I was invited to join teams that created, in competition, backstories for the game lore. Later that year, the game officially launched and players could enter tournaments where their monster collectible cards dueled against another team for points.

In April 2019, Steem Monsters rebranded to Splinterlands and made the game available on the TRON blockchain.³³ In August that year, the game registered $1 million in player transactions within the game.³⁴ In January 2020, they made Splinterlands assets available on the Ethereum blockchain.³⁵ In June 2020, after the Steem/Hive hard fork, Splinterlands moved off the Steem blockchain and onto the Hive blockchain.³⁶

By the time Splinterlands moved to Hive, it was the most played blockchain game. Millions of players from all over the world buy, sell, and trade Splinterlands cards as NFTs every day. The game also has some unique features.

One of the exciting things about Splinterlands is its world lore. The makers of the game crowdsourced the backstory, history, nonplayer characters, and regions within the game. Players can play by creating a free account, but if they want to earn tokens, they’ll have to spend $10 on the Summoner’s Spellbook.

Players can buy land, potions, skins, and Dark Energy Crystals (DEC), the in-game currency. There is also an open market where players can buy, sell, and trade the collectible trading cards with each other. And they can enter tournaments where they have the opportunity to win prizes. DEC has its own CoinMarketCap listing and is tradeable on open crypto markets, though it’s nowhere near as high in the rankings as Decentraland’s MANA.

The cards come in a variety of types and rarities including gold foil. There are seven splinters—Fire, Earth, Water, Life, Death, Dragon, and Neutral. Each splinter has at least one summoner and the rest are all monsters.

There are several editions of cards based on when they were introduced. The first variation were Alpha cards, but all of them are in circulation now. The second variation was Beta. There are also Promo, Reward, and Untamed cards. The game features a set of cards called Dice.

Players power up their monsters by combining NFTs. This creates more scarcity and drives up the value of remaining cards, a brilliant aspect of value-added game play.

One interesting feature of the game is that players can join guilds, which are special teams players can belong to that allow them to borrow cards from one another for game play. This is a nice touch as a new player on a guild can borrow cards from more powerful players to engage in more challenging battles and win bigger prizes. Players can also enter raffles and win prizes.

Splinterlands has taken blockchain social gaming to a new level. In 2021, game creators announced the introduction of a Splinterlands governance token³⁷, turning the game itself into a community-owned asset.

HashCraft by Ubisoft

Minecraft entered its alpha phase of testing in 2009 and launched publicly in 2011. By 2020, it had become the best-selling video game of all time with 200,000,000 copies sold.³⁸ In 2018, Ubisoft showcased a prototype of a blockchain-based game patterned after Minecraft called HashCraft.³⁹

Players explore an island and hunt for treasure. They can team up with other players or compete against them, create communities, and manipulate the environment any way they wish. But Ubisoft doesn’t plan to release the game to the public.

For Ubisoft, the game was an experiment with new technology. The company is one of the largest video game makers in the world. The fact that they’re experimenting with blockchain technology on a game they don’t intend to release to the public is a testament to the importance of decentralized game playing.

Ubisoft may very well decide to create a blockchain-based social game. Only time will tell.

Enjin

Enjin is a unique application on the Ethereum blockchain. Described as an ecosystem of interconnected blockchain-based gaming products,⁴⁰ it’s really a game-building platform. Game developers can create websites, communities, chat with each other, and create and host virtual items in the Enjin marketplace.

The backbone of the Enjin ecosystem is Enjin Coin, an ERC-20 token. More than one billion assets are backed by the token.

The network launched in June 2018 and several social games have already been created for the platform.

One unique aspect of Enjin as a game development platform is that game developers can create games without coding. Enjin’s SDK and other game development tools allow for maximum creativity while ensuring game makers maintain control over their creations. In-game assets are decentralized, games have advanced economies that allow players to earn valuable cryptocurrencies, game makers can monetize their games fairly and transparently, virtual assets are trackable but not hackable, and they are backed by real-world value.

Enjin represents the future of gaming, and it will be social in every sense of the word.

EOS Games

EOS is another blockchain that has given birth to social gaming. Like Steem, EOS employs the delegated proof-of-stake (DPOS) consensus protocol. The benefit is that DPOS transactions take place faster than those on proof-of-work or proof-of-stake blockchains. However, they are more centralized since stakers vote on delegates to make decisions rather than every person with stake voting on decisions.

• Blankos—Blankos are digital toys players can build or buy. Players engage in block parties as they collect NFTs.

• Elemental Battles—This game is a Splinterlands-like game on the EOS blockchain.

• EOS Knights—EOS Knights is the first mobile-based game on the EOS blockchain. Players adopt pets, craft items, and collect materials to trade in an open market.

• pixEOS—Artists create digital art and monetize it through promotion and tokenized ownership.

• Prospectors—This game is a massively multiplayer online real-time strategy game on the EOS blockchain. Players build gold prospector characters and fit them with tools to do their jobs. As they acquire wealth, players can buy land, build mines and factories, make products, and buy, sell, and trade with other prospectors playing the game.

• Sand Hero—An EOS-based MMORPG where players attack monsters, craft and merge items, and buy and sell assets.

• Upland—Upland is a Monopoly-like game that allows players to buy virtual land based on real neighborhoods. Recently, developers made land development a key aspect of the game, which is adding a new dynamic to game play. Upland has a strong community of players looking forward to future developments.

I suspect EOS social gaming is just getting started.

TRON Games

Like Steem and EOS, TRON uses the DPOS consensus protocol. Here are some of the social games available on this blockchain.

• Blocklords—Players create a hero and amass an army to conquer the world. As they gather resources, players can forge items for personal use in the game or for trading with other players. They can also build alliances with other players.

• Eggies World—Launched in 2019, players own unique monsters and earn TRX tokens through game play. As players rise in rank, they have access to new monsters and can earn more tokens.

• Epic Dragons—A multiuser dungeon, players choose one of three classes of character with varying powers and attributes. Players try to kill a dragon and earn TRX tokens if successful.

• Traps—Traps is the first multiplayer versus player game on the TRON network. Players play cells that eat other cells. Players get TRX from the other players they eat.

• TronKingdom—A multiplayer strategy game, players play kingdom rulers who try to defeat other kingdom rulers.

GALA Games

GALA Games is another new entrant to the cryptosocial gaming ecosystem. The platform allows users to build games and earn GALA, the native cryptocurrency, playing games and creating games. It’s already produced several popular games.

Participants can also buy a GALA node and earn additional cryptocurrency and NFTs. As more people buy nodes, the price goes up.

Other Cryptosocial Games

Not all blockchain-based games are social games. Like video games such as Tetris and a variety of other Facebook and mobile games, some games allow players to play by themselves or against a computer program. Social gaming has the unique quality of being a game that facilitates social interaction.

Some games that begin on one blockchain migrate to another, which makes them cross-chain games. Players can play on either blockchain and sometimes interact with each other across blockchains.

The Future of Decentralized Social Gaming

I expect the decentralized social gaming space to grow exponentially. We’re at the beginning of this phenomenon. Currently, Splinterlands is the most popular social game on any of the blockchains. Though it started on Steem, it can be played today on Hive, Ethereum, or TRON. It’s also integrated with the WAX blockchain. It may migrate to other blockchains in the future.

Social games have the unique ability to create assets that players can use to earn real income. This income is in the form of cryptocurrencies, but they can quite often be sold for real-world dollars. This aspect of social gaming is attractive to many players and could catch on in the mainstream gaming world, as well. It’s likely that we’ll see more popular mainstream games adopt blockchain technology to create profitable opportunities for players without having to redesign their games for blockchain technology. With that ability, mainstream games could simply provide in-game NFTs that players can buy, sell, or trade on a variety of blockchains.

Social gaming isn’t new, but it is getting better.

Summary

Some of the most popular blockchains today have attracted many users on the basis of blockchain social games. From Splinterlands to the Enjin Coin, blockchain technology has moved beyond its initial application of peer-to-peer money transactions into peer-to-peer social interaction, and that includes gaming. The added benefit is that social game players can earn cryptocurrencies while they play their favorite games. This takes online gaming to a whole new level, and we’re just getting started.

 

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