[Podcast #3] David on Playmint and onchain games

On the Hylé podcast, we talk about cool applications that leverage cryptography in general and zero-knowledge technology in particular, with a new guest for every episode.

David is the co-founder and CEO at Playmint, a team that builds decentralized games and recently introduced the concept of playerchains to make onchain gaming smoother than ever before. We had so much to talk about that this is going to be a double episode, with part 2 out in January!

If you prefer the written format, you can read the highlights below!

Buzz, innovation, and user-generated content

We were making PlayStation games for Sony, and I remember once going up to see Sony to know what was going to be our next piece of work that we did for them. And they said, « Oh, we got a bunch of music clips. Maybe you could turn that into a quiz game. » And I was thinking, « Oh god, well, you know, we need the work… But a quiz game, that's not even a proper game. That's not a game, by my definition. » And then we started to think, well, you know, we need the work. So, what are we going to build this into? And we got into it, and it ended up being… you know, we really put our heart and soul into it.

Buzz ended up being the biggest game that I'd ever worked on, and people loved it. And, yeah, it was a series of games, which was… to anyone that doesn't know, it was a PlayStation 2 game that came with plastic buzzers, and it was just a lot of fun. It was designed for people to play when they were drunk and just having a good time. 

The moral of that story is that there's always something new that you can build that people have yet to see, and being narrow-minded as to what a game is can often limit the kind of things that you can build. Since then, I've been careful to expand my understanding of what a game can be. 

That also taught me the power of user-generated content. 

We did 5,000 questions in each Buzz game, and we've made at least ten Buzz games. So there were 5,000 questions that we'd written. When we introduced that feature where you could write your quiz questions, 50,000 questions were written in a weekend. And you know, you realize when millions of people are playing that game or anything, then the power of user-generated content is huge.

And that's a story that we've seen a lot since then.

Minecraft, Roblox, and Fortnite are all powered by user-generated content, and I think a lot about this when it comes to decentralized games.

How can we put the power into the hands of the people creating the content?

Games where content is created by the players, not the game maker, are more popular. This is true of media in general: TikTok's content comes from the people using the platform. But the people who create that content aren't the ones who really benefit. It's the platforms that benefit, you know, me making PlayStation games where all the content was coming from user-generated questions.

Loot, The Crypt, and cross-game assets

Loot was an NFT project of 8,000 loot bags, exactly like how you would get them in a fantasy game.

You had a sword, boots, cloaks, and weapons, but the particularity of Loot was that there were 8,000 loot bags. It was a time when we had a lot of profile pic images: the meta had already been created for NFTs, but the loot bags were just eight strings of text. 

It created two reactions, I think: on the one end, people going, « I'm not buying a string on the blockchain. » And the second is, « Oh my God, this is absolutely brilliant. »

The Crypt was a relatively simple game that involved collaborating with other people who held Loot NFTs to beat our dungeons. A lot of the gameplay involved finding people on the internet who had loot bags that you could form a team around and then compete.

I'm attracted to new ideas in the games industry. And, as you said, you can have two reactions.

You can say, « Why on earth would I pay to buy a black square with white text on it? »

The idea is much more interesting: you can buy something that can be used across a number of games and experiences. And that's not a thing in the traditional games industry. You don't buy a character that then you can use in Crash Bandicoot and FIFA! 

You can buy things in those games, but they sort of go down… You don't have a concept of owning an asset and then going up. That is a new idea for the games industry, and I think that interesting things often happen in the games industry when new ideas are introduced.

An asset that can be used across different experiences is exciting. I think a lot of people would just say, «Oh, you know, I can't take my gun from Fortnite and use it in Minecraft, and I accept that, » and I don't think you want to do that, but… equally, I don't want to cut that idea short.

I don't like the idea that all these games are in silos. Let's imagine a possibility where these games overlap in some way. Isn’t that more interesting?

There's something there. It feels like my job in the games industry may be to do these things and figure out what new kind of experiences we can build, whether it's Loot and interoperability or other ideas. 

There was a new set of ideas in fully onchain games, but those come around less frequently. Every five years in the games industry, there are some new ideas with which to build a new kind of experience. And particularly with fully onchain games, there were three or four that were all worth investigating.

The road to Downstream and permissionless composability

After that, we ended up making a game called Dawnseekers. In fact, I made the mistake of building a game that was too big. We were trying to build this huge, very graphically rich world, and we lost track of what was important.

Permissionless composability

Then we made Downstream, which shared much of Dawnseekers' DNA but was very focused on some interesting aspects.

Can you build a digital world that anybody can take part in?

It's like an MMO; it's a shared world. But an interesting attribute of that was that the players could extend the functionality of the world so that they could introduce features through smart contracts. 

That's what we call permissionless composability. The idea is that anybody can permissionlessly extend the game provided that it adheres to the rules of the world. 

We're very familiar with games that are known to and operated by companies. That's the predominant model. But is there a type of game that you can create that is owned and operated by the people playing it instead? Downstream was a very primitive version of that, and it shows that that kind of experience is possible.

Other questions started to emerge.

Digital physics

How do you permit an open environment where people can build without allowing them to do things that fundamentally break the game or unbalance the game? 

Our solution to that, which is generally called digital physics, is to ensure that people shouldn’t make a sword with a million damage.

Our solution was that the world emitted resources, and items built in the game needed to be made from those resources. So yes, you could create a sword that deals a million damage, but it would take you 10 years to make one of them because you would have to collect all the resources from the world. And it only emits resources at a fixed rate. So that was our way of restraining what was possible to be built.

The resources that were emitted into the world had different attributes, and those attributes would make their way into the things that were built. So certainly that, and we did that in a primitive sense, in as far as you could have attack, health, and durability, I think, but you can imagine some things might affect the speed or all sorts of things that could come from the world. So it's a fascinating new design thought to consider.

How do you allow people to build whatever they want while still restraining it in a way that doesn't break the game? Our digital physics system worked well.

Comparing Downstream to curated, centralized games

They also lead to outcomes different from those of heavily curated worlds like Roblox. 

You create an environment where I, as the person who made Downstream, cannot control what happens in Downstream. I suspect that it's different from the kind of results that you would expect in a curated environment. And that's more a feature than a bug for me.

But it presents some new problems: we've created a world that is censorship-resistant by design.

What happens if people are creating things in that world that you dislike or are illegal, or if they find some way of breaking the game? It makes a new set of challenges. But we found solutions to all of them.

It takes you on a different path than a traditional game, with different design constraints and considerations.

Playmint: a problem-solving company 

We've spent more time than any other company talking about how to solve these problems.

Building a fully onchain game, an autonomous world, really feels like you have to develop a lot of things from scratch. And not just about game design, but also about economy and technology and about legalities like that.

There's a whole new set of things to consider when building this kind of game, so we spent a lot more time talking about it. We spend most of our Thursdays talking about this.

What’s holding back onchain gaming right now?

There are many technological challenges. Blockchains are not really designed to run video games, so building a game out of a set of smart contracts is nontrivial. 

The main challenge for many crypto games is that they need to find their audience.

Some interesting games exist in Web3 games, but they're not finding millions of players. The games industry is 3 billion players. We're just not seeing the footfall in fully onchain games or other Web3 games.

Although some interesting ideas exist without a sufficient number of players, today’s biggest challenge is that the games aren't good enough yet.

We released a primitive version of Downstream, and I understand why we don't have millions of players in that yet. It's very rudimentary. It’s a slow-paced experience if you're used to seeing games run with the fluidity that you expect in FIFA.

And then you have another challenge with other games in the Web3 gaming category: their differentiating features aren’t interesting enough. We need to bring games to parity with those in the traditional gaming industry while introducing some of these new ideas that seem exciting to us.

Making a game that's « good enough » is nontrivial. It takes a lot of work to make a great game. Then, you have the additional challenge of building it with some new technology and trying out new ideas. 

The frame of reference might be Off the Grid, a game that has found some traction. People are playing it because it's a good game — it's great, and it’s finding an audience — but not because it's doing anything different.

What I'd like to see happen is a game that introduces some new ideas at a polish and production level that is enough to draw in audiences.

When it was first released, Minecraft was not a high-production-value game, but it introduced some new ideas. Players may have looked past blocky graphics because it had some fun new ideas. That's possible with decentralized games, but we have yet to get there. No game has gotten there yet; otherwise, we'd be seeing a bigger audience.

Playerchains

In Downstream, as you move your character around the map, it moves very slowly, and you don't have the sort of interaction between other players that you expect. It's there, but there's no sense of combat because you're moving so slowly.

It’s possible to create strategy games or board game-type experiences, but they're not particularly popular. 

Another challenge that we found is that just by building something that lives on a public blockchain with assets that are available in a public blockchain, it draws in an audience that expects to be able to speculate on the game. The other 3 billion players, the traditional game players, see blockchain games with some amount of suspicion, assuming that they're going to be speculation games.

There are two problems there. The first is speculation. The other is that the kind of game experience that you can build is limited if you're building on a public blockchain.

So we asked ourselves whether there was a different approach that we could take.

Our solution was to create a blockchain from the people playing the game rather than run on a public blockchain.

We realized that fully onchain games follow a client-server model where the clients are the players and the server is the blockchain.

Instead, we decided to build a peer-to-peer blockchain between the group of players. In doing so, we can avoid gas fees and have very fast transaction times because it's just sending inputs between players.

We created a game, Substream, that proves that this system works: there are different ways of approaching decentralization that don't involve a public blockchain.

That's a more suitable approach for games because it reintroduces a level of performance that players expect and removes gas fees, which can be confusing.

One thing we found missing in the EVM ecosystem was a tick. You build games around this, and in traditional games, the absence of a tick causes a lot of headaches in game design and how we built Downstream.

We had to use several hacks to solve something that is considered part of the system in a traditional game.

That's it for part one of the Hylé podcast with David Amor from Playmint. We'll see you in January for the second half of this conversation!