Web3 unlocks limitless game design innovation
New player experiences that don't crash your economy
In the existential doubt periods of blockchain gaming, we wonder aloud why game items should be on-chain. The OG digital goods, game items rake in tens of billions of dollars using fiat and private servers. Interoperability seems challenging, digital ownership isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Why, then, web3 games?
Beyond the facts that 1) ownership is an advantage, 2) interoperability is possible, 3) chains support trust that isn’t achievable off-chain, and 4) web3 as a technology allows for things that are simply harder using web2 infrastructure alone, I focus on what the on-chain world offers in new creative opportunities for developers. Which means fun for players. I’ve already alluded to the types of metagames that developers can employ, but there are a bunch of innovative game designs and mechanics that are possible.
I’ll dive into a few, but this is the tip of the iceberg. And, as always, remember that games should be made knowing that not every player will want to engage with all of the web3-ness.
Extra-game quests and activity
The public ledger of the blockchain lets developers consider truly any kind of ownership and on-chain activity to be a potential game mechanic. This is revolutionary. When you can see the entirety of a user’s journey and actions, it allows for interesting possibilities:
Some could be totally mundane: maybe because I own a soul-bound token (SBT) achievement for completing a similar game, I’ll have the option to skip the annoying tutorial.
Others could be more community driven: in a shooter game, teams could be divided by owners of rival PFP collections.
Want to give someone a special new-player package because of items they own from other games or collections? Easy.
But developers can get super experimental, too, and this has me very excited. In one of my favorite mobile games, Sword and Sworcery, the phase of the IRL moon needed to be just right to unlock two game events, which was a cool mechanic. But savvy gamers realized they could cheat it by manually changing the date on their phone. As a player, I thought it was so neat that there was something outside my game that could influence something within it, and the fact that I could influence it myself was even cooler.
With the blockchain, device APIs aren’t the only thing that can trigger in-game events. A sequence of actions that are written to the chain—be they trades, items acquired, currency swaps, whatever—can be recognized and rewarded. Gamers can be sent on entire questing journeys, following breadcrumbs through a maze of different experiences.
Theoretically, a game could be built solely around actions taken in other games.
Let that sink in.
Unlike Sword and Sworcery, because the chain is indelible and immutable, the actions can’t be hacked and the timing can’t be faked.
EA, across all its game franchises, could create a meta-fantasy-sports management game based on players owned and games won in EA Sports FC, Madden, and Need for Speed, and the sports manager career track in the Sims. They’ll call it Sports Tycoon. The performance of items in the game could be informed by changes in activity and prices around Sorare’s Football, Mythical’s NFL Rivals, etc. I hate sports games and I might play it.
Developers can use other chain activity to impact items, with in-game implications.
An outfit’s cleanliness and state could be influenced by the number of times it’s traded: As a debonair spy, I might need a spiffy new suit for the high-stakes Casino Royale poker table, but want that suit in tatters to stealthily blend into the crowd at the bazaar. Finding—or making—that dynamic NFT rag on the secondary market becomes an adventure itself.
The chain also allows for fun collaborative shenanigans. Two developers can incentivize some cross-pollination of audiences by letting a quest completed in one game impact an outcome in the other.
When the global universe of blockchain items and activity become potential 1) progressing features and 2) game pieces, the answer to “why web3?” is limited only to a developer’s creativity.
Collectible Side Games
Even without extra-game hijinks, web3 lets developers create multiple tiers of gamification much more easily, and lets gamers choose their willingness to participate. Collectibility is part of that.
A lot of early NFT collections, especially PFPs, focused on the idea of collectibility—based on artificial rarity—because they didn’t have anything else to rally interest around. Game items do double duty: they’re useful first, but can be collectible second. Regardless of other mechanics that developers build around utility items or skins, collectibility design and gamification is worth considering as a bonus for players.
Collectibility can be driven single attributes:
Degradation: i.e. an item’s appearance changes with use. The more battle scars, perhaps the more coveted by some people, while others want shiny and new.
Print count: e.g. an ERC1155 with a print of 1/20,000 could signal OG status compared to 19,999/20,000.
Rarity: e.g. limited edition skins or attributes of items.
Misprints: similar to other forms of rarity, but a purposeful (or unintended) mistake (like a card artwork where the centaur has two heads instead of one).
Provenance: gamers might be jazzed to own the exact item once used by Ninja to slay the final BR opponent.
All of the above I’d consider examples of collectible intrinsic value (this being different than original intrinsic value, which is the item’s utility in-game). Gamers will decide whether and how much cash value to ascribe to each, and the properties will never change the item’s benefits in core gameplay. As a general rule, I don’t believe developers should tout the collectibility of some items over others in a top-down, explicit way.
[As a watch collector myself, manufactures almost never discuss collectibility, and I decide whether a brand-new, limited edition James Bond Seamaster is cooler than a vintage Explorer II ref. 16570 with patinated, degraded tritium dial markers made in my birth year. Both rare, one new, one old and beat up, where the imperfection is what makes it cool to me, but uninteresting to someone else. The consensus of collectors and the market will drive what I end up paying for either, not the brand. It’s why collectors are paying 3x more for steel, time-only watches from indie watchmakers than they are for gold timepieces with 10 complications. The brands still reap the benefits the secondary market aura casts on their new models. (In web3, that comes with royalties, too.)]
But that doesn’t mean devs are powerless to breathe new fun and benefits into collectible items. For example:
Leaderboards built around owning the most low-print count items, where rankers are rewarded with special badges of honor (but no in-game edge).
Bounties for finding misprints, like getting early access to the next season’s launch.
Secondary trading card games; pitting my battle-hardened avatar against yours.
Items can grant extra features or mod status to players in Discord or other communities, taking community management burden off the team and reinforcing it through gameplay and aftermarket movement.
It’s not impossible to create these kinds of secondary experiences off-chain, but web3 lets gamers take the reins in their trading and have trust in transactions, and it takes extra development burden off devs in creating secondary marketplaces. It also gives developers a chance to recapture or keep-engaged users with waning playtime, but who love new side games and chases. And, finally, with UGC tooling becoming easier and easier, players could create their own secondary games or clubs for certain items.
If done with the right foresight, collectibility can be established so new players aren’t priced out of having fun in the game, and longer term players get to feel like the extrinsic value of their older items aren’t being diluted thanks to other benefits.
Ultimately, developers can choose how much or little these sorts of mechanics get integrated. But the chain makes it easy (no time getting two private servers to talk to each other, no wasted partnership conversations) and feasible to do things with game design that have never been allowed before. That, to me, is one of the biggest promises of this technology. For gamers who remain skeptical, all I can say is ask your developers how they’re innovating for you today.