effect of its community. That is interesting. We don’t have many examples of that. We mostly have countries and currencies that have some degree of autonomy. And I guess you could say the US dollar has autonomy beyond its borders, maybe the Euro, maybe the Pound to some extent, but for sure the Dollar. I think if the US were to disappear, the dollar might remain. Maybe not. But you could say that about Bitcoin. It has existed for 13 years and it’s autonomous from its creator. You could argue about its centralisation, decentralisation, or the miner coalitions, or the core dev team - those are interesting aspects, but any attempts to end it have not been very successful, so it has a degree of resilience and it has autonomy beyond its community. And it is a form of decentralisation that brings that. You could call the technology that enables it quite primitive. And it is. I mean, it’s largely cryptography from the 90s, with a pretty good innovation when it comes to this consensus idea, which is pretty neat.
What about the advocates for blockchain that cite greater ownership and fewer gatekeepers as benefits? There are people in the blockchain space that are deeply, genuinely, trying to do something valuable and meaningful for the evolution of the human condition. And a great amount of them, by the way. But they’re hidden under a froth of people that just see profit opportunities. It takes a fair amount of interrogation to see their motivation. It maybe takes less if you have been doing this for 20 years, like myself. So, people use a lot of these kinds of second-hand phrases, phrases they have heard, like ‘gatekeepers’, ‘ownership’, some of these kinds of things, and while in isolation these things are true, maybe they are not what is important about this. Or at least maybe not in the context of what they are preaching, which might just be a rationalisation for their own motivations to make a profit. Which I’m not against either. I mean, it’s fine. It’s the game design we live in, but often it is some post rationalisation of a different core motivation.
What needs to happen for blockchain gaming to be adopted by the mainstream? I think what needs to happen is a killer app that people care about, beyond the monetary value of it. And I think that’s largely true for anything really, if you look at this as a platform - it isn’t really, it’s more like a protocol than a platform - then you need a killer app that people care about and are inspired by. And I think everyone is kind of waiting for something like that to emerge. And I think eventually it will happen.
So it’s inevitable would you say? I wouldn’t say it’s inevitable. I think it’s possible. The technology in its current incarnation is relatively primitive. We did have games built on top of Bitcoin before there were games built on top of smart contract chains. And the games that are built on top of Etherium, or Etherium clones, are richer than the Bitcoin games. The Bitcoin games were very primitive, but there were some cool bits to them, just like mods before there were 2D MMOs before they were 3D MMOs. There might be more core innovation needed, at the base level, before we see something truly inspiring arise from it. But I think you can do quite interesting things already that are extremely hard to do. I mean, the reason why there’s only one EVE
Online is because this is just an extremely hard topic to grapple with. And a lot of that has to do with the human condition, not so much with technology; like community governance, third party development, all these things we’ve been doing for 20 years. This is hard stuff. And there is no panacea of just ‘we use web3 methods and voila, now it’s easy’. No, it just becomes harder. It’s actually harder to do it web3-style then do it web 2.0-style. Show me the web3/blockchain project that is doing governance, third party development, autonomy at EVE Online levels, and you have shown me something I haven’t found. Most of the Web3 kids I meet aspire to be something like EVE Online.
Can you give an example of a blockchain benefit to a game that doesn’t currently exist? Okay, I’ll give you a use case, which is somewhat inspired, as always, by EVE players. So we’ve had massive warfare in EVE Online over the past two years. It kind of started in the lockdown and raged on until everyone won, in their own words. And the warfare was largely funded by the issuance of war bonds. So EVE alliances were raising [in-game] money, mostly from their own alliance members, to fund their coffers, to build weapons of war, to fuel their warfare. They used the trust dynamic that exists between leadership of an alliance and its members to fund their efforts, under the promise that if they won, they would share in the outcome. Classic war bonds. In a fictional world, we could imagine an alliance, not just going to its members, but going to crypto investors and speculators and saying, ‘I am raising funds to increase our territory, which will bring us investable returns. So hey, you web3 investor community, come and invest in my alliance for world domination, rather than speculating on these simple little tokens that nobody cares about.’
56 | MCV/DEVELOP July 2022
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