Ask Not What Ethereum Can Do For Videogames by Christopher Robison (Devcon5)

hi everyone so the title of this talk is asked not what a theorem can do for video games but asked what video games can do for aetherium so before we begin I'd like to see in on a show of hands who here thinks that putting a theorem in video games is basically like a dumb idea or we reflectively like trying to shove a square peg into a round hole something like this ok so this was actually like very much my impression before I got into the space of working between the intersection of video games and aetherium I really thought that like all of this stuff was really for like serious business only aetherium was meant for disrupting the central authorities of the world it was meant for democratizing financial opportunities I've been in the space for a while and I had like a very high set of ideals in that regard but over time I have kind of come to the conclusion that there actually is a place for aetherium in video games and so that's what I want to explore in this presentation the purpose of this talk is to persuade the wider aetherium community to adopt more seriously a gaming strategy of their own and this is both for the community as a whole and per individual project and I'll demonstrate this by exploring the premise of this talk which is that aetherium really benefits from video game adoption and this is a lot different than what you'll see in most typical talks for advocates of video game adoption most people will talk about all the ways that video games benefit from aetherium and I really think that at the end of the day aetherium has the one that stands more to gain so my name is Chris Robinson and for the last two years I've been with horde which is working to enable true ownership inside of video games using both a theorem and plasma with our free and open source sdk so the agenda for this talk is to provide an outline for what the medium of this experience looks like and that is gaming will continue to explore this theme as we move through three different ways that a theme can benefit from video games and these are by way of marketing through the development lifecycle of daps and through the deployment of devs so starting out with the medium videogames are radically shaping our society and to jump right into the basically happening on a very high level is our society is undergoing a process of hyper gamification nearly every facet of our lives can currently be managed by a piece of software and as anyone here can attest these applications are leveraging multiple elements from games these elements might include notifications achievements tasks and even radical decision modeling so what's the reason that gamification has impacted so much of our personal lives and how did this happen the basic reason is that games have figured out design really well now while some of these designs are more nefarious in natures such as the design of addictive behavior loops others are much more socially beneficial and actually quite enjoyable such as the creation of super effective and pleasant user experience there is a lot of complexity they can exist in any narrative system or aspect of life and what games do really well is they can consolidate and simplifying and contain complexity and really digestible systems so what's happening on a high level is that in the age of information societies become constrained through our own most finite resource which is our time and attention and as a result these gamified mechanisms have risen as a solution sort of as attention rails which guide our expectations for how society should be organized and this isn't a political statement one way or another simply an observation but it could be argued at this point that these gamified systems have now reached the point where they're actually used in a pretty significant capacity to even manage politics on a global scale so if a theory ml of attendance of decentralization that go along with it could integrate into gaming culture very effectively then it really begs the question could they be as influential as any of these other geopolitical systems and elements of gamification could self sovereignty and true ownership become just part of the way we expect society to operate and to answer this question we really need to dive into looking at how the video game market is growing and of aetherium were to successfully integrate with it how it could impact society could video games become the most potent marketing instrument imaginable for aetherium and this brings us to the first way that aetherium can benefit from video games and that's by way of marketing so video games are by far the fastest-growing entertainment industry or a sector of the entertainment industry and although they only generate about half the revenue of television at this time they're growing at about three to five times the rate faster than any other form of entertainment if this trend continues then video games will outpace any other form of entertainment within the next seven eight years so what else can happen in about the next seven to eight years according to videogame economist ed were Castronovo one of the major ways that video games will evolve in the next seven to eight years is that game developers will adopt a new strategy for generating revenue in video games and that is to pay players to play games in 2016 at rakesh anova wrote a fantastic paper called players for hire games and the future of low skill work in which he stated that within ten years by 2026 paying players will become a standard revenue model in the game industry and they're effectively two reasons to understand why this would happen the first is at a macro level games have for the last 20 to 30 years become progressively more affordable for the casual player for a long time the dominant model was to charge players a large sum maybe 60 dollars to buy a game and they could go on and play it forever then games were able to connect to the internet and it gave game developers an opportunity to charge a much smaller amount but on an ongoing basis in a subscription type model in which payers paid for only as long as they played now the most dominant model is the free-to-play model and this is largely enabled by the ubiquity of mobile casual devices like our cell phones now players only pay if they want to become something of a more serious hardcore gamer by way of in-game purchases so each one of these stages has made gaming more affordable for the casual player and they've each been enabled by the emergence of new technology so how can the pendulum swing even further in favour of players to become more affordable for the casual player games can't get much cheaper than free so the only thing that is better for players from a financial standpoint would be to get paid to begin playing games and this is enabled of course by the newest technology which would be blockchain on a micro level though this can all be explained by a simple fact that than a quarter of a percent of all players are responsible for more than 50% of all in-game purchases these whales only make purchases because they are paint because other players are playing the game the psychology behind whale purchases is an interesting one it basically only make purchases for two reasons one to differentiate themselves from other players by way of vanity items and to dominate other players to win through pay to pay pop pay to win power-ups for the game developer the strategy then becomes quite simple they're looking to bootstrap communities that then become attractive enough that they'll attract whales into the community to go ahead and begin spending in the game game developers therefore can justify paying players casual players to play their games and the method of paying players can really be anything it can be stable money cryptocurrency in-game currency and even collectible items all of which are currently already supported by etherium and this is one model that is almost undeniable to justify the integration of a theorem into video games and the cool thing is is that a theorem can be integrated pretty natively and this is much more than we said for a television or movies or music these are very passive forms of entertainment while video games are very active and the theorem is designed to reward people who are active participants so if etherion can't integrate so well who will even care at the end of the day will the integration with video games fall upon deaf ears I don't think so if twitch were a US television network it would be the absolute largest by daily viewership more people would watch aetherium transactions taking place and backgrounds of players playing their games by way of the streaming media then would watch Fox News or MSNBC and that doesn't even take into account the number of people who would be actually making aetherium transactions in the background of their games steam alone has more engagement than all of these media outlets combined by tenfold so I can all of this translate can how can all of this attention translate into real change there's an excellent quote in manufacturing consent by Noam Chomsky that states mass media serves as a system to inculcate individuals with values beliefs codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of larger society if aetherium wants to become an institutional structure of the larger society then we should take this statement very seriously after all the world governments currently do in 2017 WikiLeaks published a series of documents revealing that the Pentagon and CIA have attempted to successfully influence the narratives of more than 1,800 TV shows movies and television networks including Oprah BBC and nearly every Marvel and DC movie this is the game that's being fought in the entertainment industry governments do it we call it propaganda when when I'm suggesting that if Tyrion does it I'm just going to refer to it as marketing the only difference is that I haven't caught wind of any government's trying to influence video game developers yet so that is our opportunity the second way that a theorem can benefit from video games is by way of development through the DAP and protocol lifecycle video games can be used as a sandbox for innovation and when I say a sandbox I mean that games are a place a play area intended specifically for fun it sounds really simple but the concept of fun is actually rooted in economics and this is something that we should examine that requests Renova defines fun as the pleasant experiences associated with the co activation of motivational systems which promote survival in the context of the person's choices and decisions and environment which they know to be a game in other words video games are fun because they trigger our survival instincts while we remain in the safe place and while there are many environmental factors we which can trigger a person's survival instincts there is one in particular which we are no strangers to here in crypto and that scarcity in video games there's tons of artificial scarcity such as the amount of land available in the game or the number of valuable swords that are available in circulation but these are just made up by the game developers they don't really mean anything there are however real and naturally scarce resources that occur in video games these are attention computation and content these are the economic waters in which video games women and they were the ones that aetherium should merge itself in to leverage the development lifes to development to leverage video games for the development lifecycle Oh Mesa go has a gaming strategy in which they leverage attention golem has one to leverage computation and colony for content so last year Horde and Alisa go partner together to battle test plasma board created a 2d platformer called plasma dog whereby every coin that was collected by plasma dog triggered an on chain transaction on the plasma network and this was used to successfully test plasma when we say go need the attention of thousands of users distributed everywhere making continuously the same actions over and over to make sure that what they built actually worked tasks their community to say their computer and repeatedly click to transact over and over and over would be a tough proposition but playing a game became an impressively useful hack to test their development we hit more than 2,000 daily active users and more than 35,000 daily transactions gollum leverages computation as a scarce resource and just a few months ago they partnered with forward to create a better mesh computing network by leveraging the video game industry it's a fact that in the gaming industry both developers and players have pretty powerful computers it's a necessity for developing and creating games we collaborated then to develop a tool to allow game developers leverage gollum unlimited to subway game developers could collectively compile each other's code while the others were passively working in the background and this would reduce wasted time while at work now while this is only leveraging what is happening on the game developer side you could imagine the same thing being leveraged from the players side a player could be playing their favorite game while contributing spared computation to the developers who are creating the sequel to that favorite game : a has also approached Ford with an enthusiastic device an enthusiastic desire to develop their own gaming strategy to create a framework for players to create on chain guilds when players have true ownership of the items in their game they can open smart contracts influence behavior even outside the bounds of the rules that the game developers created creating new rules is a type of content and it's what call any needs to generate more of in order to develop bigger and better Dow's to understand how people are really going to use these things scarcity and games is what allows these sandbox has to become hubs of innovation and should be part of more gaming of more projects gaming strategies and this brings us to the third way in which games can help aetherium and this is through the phase of deployment the moment of truth when dabs go to main that the thing to keep in mind here is that video games are adversarial by nature returning to Edward castronovo squat video games are fun because they trigger our survival instincts and survival instincts are when we are overcoming adverse circumstances in video games our adversaries or other players in etherium we have our own adversaries we have the money monopolies the governance monopolies and the data monopolies and we're trying to fight them head-on with defy dows and privacy protocols in some ways this is like a bunch of civilians trying to run headfirst in the storming area 51 it's unbelievably exciting but it is also dangerous and when anyone takes this danger into honest consideration they face a decision if they decide to build something do they go the safe route down a path where they know they can make some decent tech money or do they create the things that are really going to challenge these powerful adversarial agents and end up like Edward Snowden or Julian Assange do they create the things that really will make a world of difference it's a difficult decision and so I'd like to offer a simple solution that is to develop a gaming strategy if your tech is so radically subversive that you would genuinely fear it's dangerous to deploy want it for gamers in the context of gaming a mixer or any other anonymous by default protocol is a necessity a necessary piece of infrastructure if players can see what's happening on the other players wallets and see what they're doing on chain the game mechanisms break down and unfair advantages or had the game is no longer fun but because any subversive tech that's developed for gaming is on the same platform as the rest of the etherium community it means anyone can begin using it however they like video games become a type of black box where real conflict can be shielded by simulated conflict of course not all deployments with a gaming strategy need to be subversive even something like compound could be used it could be leveraged to use the money that's locked up in players wallets to add lending liquidity to the market the possibilities are really pretty endless and so this brings us to our call to action project projects in the etherium space should adopt a video game strategy they should work with gaming projects they should continue to contribute to open source SDKs in the gaming industry they should invite game developer friends into this community and they should openly discuss what their gaming strategies are of course in this process we'd like you to consider horde we have been bridging the gap between the gaming industry and aetherium for the last two years and today we're proud to announce a new partnership between a prominent gaming company a studio out in Warsaw called farm 51 they will be integrating aetherium and plasma into two noble light which is their latest game so thank you so much if you'd like to get in contact please follow us at word exchange and I am at see Bob Robison [Applause] you