Conference Report: DevConnect'24 Istanbul 🇹🇷

Although diverse in topics, the theme for me was Fully On-Chain Games ⛓️🎮 & Autonomous Worlds. I went to nine(!) events on the subject, as it is increasingly capturing mindshare.

Here's what I learned and who I met 👇 It started strong with "Autonomous Arcade and Mass Adoption" by @IOSG

Here @Kooshaba give a talk about Runescape's wouldbe gas consumption (over 2m per second for just the first room!)

This topic is dear to my heart, and I have written extensively on it

medium.com/alliancedao/un…

Here is the list of project I know (or at least know of) that are currently building in the field of on-chain games. Please DM me if you want to add more to the list.

I've included the person I would talk to if I needed to know more (they are welcome to add their teams below). Project: @MithraeumIO
Description: Medieval grand strategy game
Contact: @TheLastTriarius

If you are interested in the ways that @paradigm's Gradual Dutch Auction's can be implemented in games, allow me to point you towards a classic Power Grid.

In order to simulate the effects of supply and demand on a market, the game decided to implement a GDA.

🧵👇 The game takes place during the electrification of Germany in the 20th century. Players compete in auctions to purchase power plants. Some are renewable, but most require the expenditure of resources to produce energy.

1/ Fully on-chain games are stepping up as *THE* narrative we needed to tide us over until the merge.

@paradigm_ctf 's 0xMonaco

@0xPARC 's @darkforest_eth + @latticexyz

And this banger article I just wrote 😜
link.medium.com/8UHmnQGUKsb

You can also read it here 🧵👇 Francis Tresham was a brilliant, if oft forgotten, designer who pioneered the 4X genre and introduced the game pattern “technology trees.” Sid Meier’s Civilization (1991), despite its auteurist title, was actually an adaptation of Tresham’s board game, Civilization (1980).

1/51 ⛓🎮
Games designers use "patterns," techniques discovered through trial & error that yield fun.

I've gathered those suited to having their state on-chain.

We can design in scalable ways without engineering miracles.

Read here: medium.com/defi-alliance/…

Or here 🧵👇 Assuming a successful game has 20,000 concurrent users who change the game state every two seconds, on-chain games become woefully constrained. No blockchain can support those requirements.
To play games on chain, we need to rethink their design. The tail must wag the dog.

1/51 ⛓🎮
Games designers use "patterns," techniques discovered through trial & error that yield fun.

I've gathered those suited to having their state on-chain.

We can design in scalable ways without engineering miracles.

Read here: medium.com/defi-alliance/…

Or here 🧵👇 Assuming a successful game has 20,000 concurrent users who change the game state every two seconds, on-chain games become woefully constrained. No blockchain can support those requirements.
To play games on chain, we need to rethink their design. The tail must wag the dog.

In DeFi, composability is about layering the utility of different protocols to do more.

But with games, composability is doubly meaningful because you can also DO LESS!

After all, game design is about cleverly hindering players.

Below are examples and ramifications 🧵 Believe it or not, most games are Rock, Paper, Scissors with additional steps.

You secretly strategize, your opponent picks their plan of action and then on reveal you find out who wins.

That's left game designers revitalizing RPS with extra steps. For instance:

1/20 Every medium has its own affordances and constraints. As a game designer, I am always looking to maximize the best parts of the materials I am using.

This is particularly important for on-chain games. 👾⛓

🧵👇 Think of it this way, Chess, Angry Birds, Skyrim, and Fortnite are totally different and yet still excellent because they leverage the power of table tops, mobile phones, desktop computers and the internet respectively.

1/33 Since its inception, people have joked that crypto is a solution looking for a problem.

And I don’t disagree, because the sea-change that crypto threatens to bring us is frankly unintelligible.

Imagine discovering electricity, but having nothing to do with it. 💡🤔

🧵👇 While 19th century electrical current simultaneously useless, it promises never before seen utility.

One’s first impulse might be to replace candles, but given enough time we get to build novel structures like the internet.

1/33 @SkyMavisHQ & @AxieInfinity's community are rebuilding their economy towards a sustainable model. It's a process that they're trail-blazing, but will likely become canonical in GameFi 2.0

They're deploying a game design principle known as Power Creep 💪🕷
🧵 The rise of uncontrolled inflation in web3 games came from trying to satisfy two mutually competing forces:

“The Desire to Collect” 👌
AND
“The Desire to Build” 🛠

Last fall, @AxieInfinity had incredibly valuable NFTs creating lucrative tokens. Then, as the number of Axies ballooned against the player growth, the entire economic model death-spiraled. Now that we have witnessed that catastrophic price drop, game devs are looking to create sounder economic models. Every VC worth their salt is asking them how they will handle the inflation inherent in their pyramid scheme.

1/26 📊 Investment Advice 👨🏼‍🏫:

If you are new to web3,
it is ❌IMPOSSIBLE❌ for you to make smart investments by doing your own
🔬RESEARCH🔬 (DYOR) in a week, a month or even a year.

There are 2 reasons:
👇🧵 Crypto is 🤷UNINTUITIVE🤷

You should really take at least 18 months to get a grasp of what his technology can bring. And, more importantly, what it CANNOT bring.

1/ After reviewing (and sometimes rewriting 🤦) 24 Demo Day scripts last week, here is my advice for anyone crafting a 2-minute pitch.

🧵 2/ say "Hi, I'm Will and I co-founded Klamporth, a decentralized organ transplant auction house"

^ can't get anywhere without first your name, credential, name of project, what it does.

1/ Had @jadler0 speak to our cohort yesterday about rollups. He busted a ton of myths.

I decided to write down some notes for y'all.

Tl;dr:
We will need to trade composability for scalability if we want to keep decentralization. This means game-specific L2s.

🧵 2/ the major blocker for scalability is not bandwidth, but state growth. If you let people make as many txs as they want, the data to compute on gets too large for normie laptops to validate.

If they can't validate, we lose decentralization and the point of crypto goes away.

1/4 In Game Studies, there is a well known concept called "Playbour." Some games depend on the labour of players to grow and provide value to other players.

Play-to-earn is really about Playbour-to-earn.

🧵 2/ The players who produce the most value for the game will be able to receive the most earnings because this will be sustainable practice.

P2E is not always about Ponzi, it is about recognizing that some players contribute value that was previously exploited out of them.

1/9 while studying game design during my doctorate, I ran into a fascinating concept called "procedural rhetoric".

Here, you create a simulation with some incentives in order to have players learn your perspective on the world.

There are very few games that do this well:🧵 2/ My go to example is always "Passage", a five minute game by @jasonrohrer about the tension between family and ambition.

Another is Cutthroat Capitalism about Somali piracy. Still another is Fate of the World about fighting climate change (don't research cold fusion).

1/The economics of Play 2 Earn is comparable to Bitcoin mining.

Rewards are issued to those who perform a proof of work.

There are some differences as well. A comparative analysis can lead to some interesting thoughts 🧵 2/ Pressure is placed on lowering the cost of work and thus increasing profits.

For $BTC this means opening mines in cold climates with stranded hydroelectricity.

For something like $SLP it means finding players ready to grind for fewer rewards.

1/21 The way to learn game design is to play lots of games critically.

Because videogames overload their mechanisms with story, art, music, etc, boardgames present a simpler and clearer path. Best part: you need to download the rules into your brain to play. Here are 20:
🧵 2/ Saboteur: Hidden identity and deduction.

boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/9220…

1/ The value proposition of web3 games is entirely different and totally unintuitive when compared to web2.

If you want build in this space, you obviously need a good game in the short term, but extend your vision for the long term. Here are some sample ancillary value-adds:
🧵 2/ Produce "Sybil resistance": in permissionless web3 we want to count each human once, while still allowing everyone to have unlimited addresses. Hard problem to solve, but doing so helps immensely with productive air drops and governance. e.g. @rabbithole_gg

1/12 One of the most common questions I get is: what protocol should I build on?

Well one of my tasks at @defialliance has been to partner with L1s and L2s that we felt had the right mix of signal and offering for founders building on them.

Here is the list and my take on them: 2/12 But first, whatever L1 or L2 you choose, know that bridges are growing in availability and that blockchain architectures are malleable over the long haul. This means that the best blockchains are the ones with the best memes and the strongest engineers supporting them.

For those who missed @defialliance demo day, ngmi.

jk, wagmi, here is my take on all the teams who presented and the clip of their presentation. 🧵

Also, join us for our long-form tear down tomorrow:
twitter.com/i/spaces/1lPJq… @aiarena_crypto is experimenting with NFTs of AIs proving that these can be rented or hired for services. In the guise of a toy example with a 2D Fighter style game, AI Arena threatens to disrupt the entire blockchain tech stack. Video: