Enhancing Engagement and Immersion The Promise of Ready Player One

Hello everyone. Uh, thank you so much for coming to enhancing engagement and immersion, the promise of Ready Player One. Uh, my name is Stephanie Sketa. I produce events for Coin Market Cap. And prior to Coin Market Cap, I was at CoinDesk as the head of web3 content for their consensus team.

Uh, I'm going to uh intro, like I said, introduce the session and then let the panel introduce themselves. First uh in this section we're going to be exploring uh the potential of using web3 technology to create more immersive and engaging experiences using Ready Player 1 uh as a reference point. Uh the last two years as the panel before us just spoke about NFTs took the spotlight as a stamp of legitimacy uh ranging from fine arts to using NFTs as a ticketing mechanism. However, in the past few months, the gaming narrative has t taken center stage, and we see that by the amount of money being poured in by investors. Um, and finally, I always thought that the intersection of gaming and crypto made perfect sense.

And so, I'm excited to be having this discussion about the benefits of it. Um, and then lastly, you know, the metaverse may be virtual, but the impact will be very real. Um, and so without further ado, I'll let the rest of the panel introduce themselves. Hey everybody. Uh I'm Liz Cuka, VP of oper business operations at Chainsafe Systems.

Uh prior to Chainsafe, I was a digital finance group as a principal investor and executive director at Ethereum Classic Labs. Hey everyone, my name is Ethan Nobles, chief financial officer of community gaming. We're an esports tournament platform bridging web 2, web 3 gaming, and hopefully two to five years is simply just called gaming. My background is in traditional finance, working for a New York uh city bank for three years and then working for Treasury Management Asset Firms and doing an IPO back in 2021 and excited to be talking about gaming and metverse. And my name is Greg.

Uh I'm the one of the co-founders and the CPO at Chainsafe. Prior to that, I was CTO and worked on protocol development in Ethereum. Awesome. Thank you for being here. Um so some of you may be wondering why Ready Player 1.

Um, and it's quite simple. Um, science fiction has kind of always led uh innovation. Um, there's a big generational divide between the people who read Snow Crash by Neil Stevenson and now Ready Player One by Ernest Klein. But the ultimate goal is that these books uh really inspired many people to create the technologies that are here today. Um, and so one of my first questions to the panel is how can web3 technology enhance immersive experiences?

Um, anyone can take this. I guess I'll start off. So the real technology at least with our platform is one of the aspects of smart contracts right today in the web two cents people are getting paid out via PayPal and a big struggle that we've seen is it takes 30 60 90 and sometimes never to get paid out from winning first second third place with our tournament platform and using smart contracts like the actual technology behind it as soon as that tournament's over people are getting paid USDC directly right into their wallets as soon as the tournament is ended so really trying streamline that processing payment point of view for for gamers that are competing in tournaments and they're playing in games like Super Smash Bros. EV.io, any other game from both a web 2 side as well as web 3.

So really trying to bridge that communication together. Um, anyone wants to take that on before we move on? Okay. Um, so for those that have read the book, right, how does the concept of Oasis relate to blockchain technology? Right.

And just to give a background, Oasis is the big immersive world in Ready Player 1. And in it, you can use haptic. In the outside world, you use the haptic gloves, right? And then inside world, you can use coins. You have assets, digital assets, and that improves your standing in the game, which affects real life.

So curious if any anyone's um take on that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So that's So my understanding of Oasis is this idea that it's like um like a blank canvas. Would you describe it that way? Yeah. Okay. Okay.

Okay. Okay, just level setting. So if we think of blockchain similarly as like a blank canvas, um I'm going to take a boring perspective, which is that it's like the governance of gaming. So if you think of if you if you take a step back and look at web two gaming today and you were going to rebuild it, what would you do differently? And so what I would do differently as somebody who's played games and spent a lot of money on games is when I'm playing, I've spent $100, $200, whatever it is, why can't I take my assets with me?

Why can't I take the skins, the weapons, the whatever the vehicles and and and put them on my phone and my wallet and and take it to the next game thereafter? Um why do I have to rent when I play a game? Why do I have to license when I play a game? And so hopefully we get to a a point in this conversation where we can talk about IP and how IP has been a real disservice in my opinion um to anything in the digital space. And this is where I think blockchain's really important.

Yeah. And to really add on that, you know, I myself, I was a big League of Legends player back in, you know, 200 2009, 2010. I think I probably spent over $1,000 in in that game alone. And kind of like understanding that you're in a locked market and just using digital assets as a way to kind of free up in terms of the inventory, you know, transferring different games, different funds. And another use case that we've, you know, been are touching on and just in general is, you know, say you're playing in a in a tournament similar to Reddit Gold, right?

People use Reddit gold as a stamp of approval or a stamp of hey like this is something noteworthy where we want to create a a space and hey if I come first place in you know 100 tournaments you know creating like an NFT in some space both on our website but as well as in different areas just in general to kind of showcase a lot of that achievement that gamers specifically work very hard on. Okay Greg, this one's for you. What are some of the technical considerations of implementation blockchain solutions in gaming? Yeah. Um, let's like do a timeline of like build of like a user interaction, right?

So like the onboarding obviously is like the biggest one. I don't think we can win any sort of market journey win if we do traditional onboarding. This is like pretty normal stuff, but I think we have to stick to like social law social login. One of the like more challenging one is when it comes to the type of game that you want to build and whether or not we can actually do this on chain efficiently. Uh you know an FPS game where that we're traditionally used to requires a lot of like server communication between you know if if if this individual here is like actually in front of me when let's say like a shot has happened.

This server has to like coordinate that and like you can't make every single action on chain. So that's one of the biggest ones. The other one honestly is like actually how you design your game economy and we saw in 2022 how play to earn is not how you want to do that. Um so from like how you use the technology like those are probably like the big three. I mean I could trail on for Okay.

Um and then to follow up on that uh what are ethical considerations you have to take as you're building blockchain games? play to earn style I think is like ethically wrong. I think and I heard someone else say this and I spoke about it earlier. It's like if you are launching your if let's say you like have NFTs that's like your basis whatever it's a card game. Um if you're using that purely an acquisition model it's just like morally wrong because you're never going to keep anybody.

You're just going to force speculation to your game and then you're going to remove the actual like desire to play. uh versus like having a retention model where it's like you know the reason why people are buying these NFTs or skins or whatever it is um is because like it helps them like it it helps them advance within the actual game play and make the gameplay more enjoyable so on and so forth. you the morally you have to remove speculation so you have to like have a lot of careful thought around econ economics of game design and I could probably add a little bit on that you know I'm from a non-technical background so talking about gaming the ethics just in general I think a lot of it is also misinformation or empty promises from you know different products or assets or NFTs whatever it may be from a gaming perspective overall I think you know on the gaming side which what will really make a game stick and the economy stick is really game itself and making sure utmost that's that's fun like we go through a process in terms of our platform where you know our team will play test the games make sure that you know there isn't anything you know malicious going on or from e ethics view but I really do think from the billing part of it is just really providing the community and people with upfront and real information that way you know down the line um you know there's it's clear and transparent I think that's what we kind of need more of in just building more of this gaming community awesome Um, I want to go to that point you brought up earlier about IP. I would love for you to elaborate on that. Like I want the audience to know.

Yeah. So, when I was growing up playing Nintendo, you know, I'd go I'd go and buy a game. I'd play it for however long and then in San Jose Campbell, California, where I'm from, there's like a store where you can go and take the cartridge and you could sell it and I'd get eight bucks for it or whatever it is. And like kind of like records today. and I could either take the money or I could buy a new game with it or like put it towards a new game.

And you can't do that with online games. Like you you're renting it or you're licensing it and all of the IP is it's a good thing in that it's helping a creator have some kind of protection, but the people it's tends to really protect are massive corporations that are just gating more and more and more from from the rest of us and we're just permanent renters. So, it's a secondary market issue like this reselling issue that's happening in the digital space that I think blockchain can disrupt because with NFTs specifically and with digital assets specifically, they're they're unique and so it's not going into the realm of a security. It's not going into the realm of like um copying because it's unique. And so, I think there's a lot of opportunity there um from an IP perspective.

then it's time for all of us to kind of like take take a little bit power of power back instead of just becoming permanent renters and licensers. Awesome. Yeah. Um Ethan, I want to go back to something that community gaming does really well. I think it's really fun.

And then I know um you guys are going to implement your upcoming conference come June. Um your questing system. Um can you talk a little bit more about that because I think that's probably as far as I know one of the closest things that really uh is anal analogous to like Ready Player One. Yeah. So, Questic is a product that we actually launched in late October of 2022.

And basically, it's a way for gamers to monetize their gaming habits, right? So, for example, as I mentioned before, I play a lot of League of Legends back in the day, 2010, where we want to take, you know, simple actions for people playing, you know, the games that they love, whether it be web 2, web 3, hopefully just gaming in general, and, you know, actually monetize a little bit on that. And really what that actually is, at least on the game publisher side, it's a UA tool, right? If you're either a game publisher or just an advertiser and just trying to drive more traffic, you know, we incentivize users by either playing the games, you know, imagine, hey, enter in five Call of Duty tournaments and you you earn a quest for, you know, $5 or a dollar. We actually did an activation with uh Coinbase Wallet where we we had folks play uh Eevee.

io. It was a $10,000 tournament and then for the first thousand people they got five USDC's into their wallet. When they created a coinbased wallet and linked it to the community gaming account through a smart contract they got paid out instantaneously. So this is something that we're doing you know real active today. Um and it's just really about you know taking the aspects of monetizing gaming habits getting people excited about you know different games that are coming out and just adding the tech of blockchain technology on top of it.

From my experience, you know, I entered the space, you know, kind of late in terms of the blockchain crypto space of 2018 and like I said, my background was more traditional finance. And once I saw like the peer-to-peer payment and the actual like use cases, this is where I really think, you know, building that is going to come. And we kind actually mentioned we're actually making a more public announcement of our web 3 gaming conference in LA June 8th and June 9th where we're actually going to be highlighting a lot of these game developers who spent a lot of time actually building core games and getting controllers into people's hands. We're actually doing a game demo two booths back there with the game seven booth and really just having people try out the games and actually see it's a lot of fun. So I think really at the core end of it is having fun taking the technology that is built on the blockchain and really utilizing it both for the consumer as well as like game publishers and advertisers.

Awesome. Yeah, that's a great segue. So uh when Greg answered my ethical question, right? U one of the first things was like the play to earn which was kind of like the rise of quote unquote gamefi. I know we're rebranding now.

Um you know how do we get to a point where web 3 games, right? One that we wouldn't even call them web three games. just games, right? Because that's that's another issue, the fact that we have to categorize them as separate. You know, what are the types of things we need to see from developers, from the community for games to just be fun?

Because in Ready Player One, it's it's and granted it's a bit dystopian, so I will say that. Um, you know, you do everything in that world, right? You you go to school in that world, you work in that world. You know, how do we create a reality where games are fun for this uh, you know, for this generation? Yeah, I think it's so I think the problem is like in gaming we have like a huge we've got like a very it's like very wide spectrum of stuff.

We've seen a lot of like not fun games which are like landbased games like within like metaverse and really that's just just like NFT sales when it comes down to like we need like real game developers like building games that people get like unfortunately like there's there's got to be a hook. Not like it doesn't have to be negative. It's just like you need that like drive to want to come back which is like what you need from like you know one of the like top studios to like come in and like build those games. Um, and they need to have like real like traditional like game mechanics. Like yes, we can get like these like crazy on onchain games that like people have like Dark Forest.

Dark Forest. Yeah, Dark Forest. Um, which are fun, but like there's a huge barrier there. You need to be technical to play it. Um, but it's just like not totally reinventing everything, you know?

Like there's like proven methods that work for building games. Yeah, I think to add on that, you know, we we talked to several both on the web two, web three side of game developers, it takes about, you know, four to six years to really create a really standard out of the box really good game. And I think a lot of people, at least on the blockchain side, have been building, you know, since 2020. And I really do think in this year, next year, we're already seeing some really good beta builds and alpha builds. And I really do think in the next year or two we'll start seeing more emergence of hey this is actually a good game and that just has the added tech on top of it.

So I can imagine like you know some of the games are imagine a you know CSGO equivalent and it's you know you're not playing the game because there's NFTTS digital assets or you know it it's web 3 enabled. You're playing the game because it's fun there's a community. it's competitive and the tech on top of it is just icing on the cake, right? And and that's where really, you know, I I really emphasize a lot of the fun in gaming and using the tech to really amplify it and because from the tech side, I think it is really impressive of what we can do just in general as an industry. I I think to add to that, just to echo what everyone's saying is to be patient and I think it is just another year or two out before web 3 gaming, whether we call it that or not, is here.

Um, for example, how many aspects within a game do you want to put on chain? Every time a transaction goes on chain, it it costs money. It takes time. It slows down the player experience. And so, figuring that out and figuring out that game logic is still being done as we are all sitting here.

And so, it's just a matter of time. And I think it's it's pretty close. I would even say like, you know, generally around some of the booths here, there are some game demos going on. I myself been walking around and trying some test games very pre-alpha build and and really giving it another two, three years. I could really see it just being a fun game.

Um, like I mentioned in the Game7 booth, they have about 20 games that we're kind of demoing out. Um, you know, we're not the game developers. We're actually just looking for fun games that we want to push to our ecosystem to build those competitive environments and that's really where kind of we're coming from. Awesome. I feel like you can't look on crypto Twitter without seeing something about AI nowadays.

So, I'd love to just get your each of your thoughts on like how do you think AI can potentially, you know, hurt or improve uh the web 3 gaming s um ecosystem. I have my personal take on AI. Um I think it's very helpful in some cases but in the preference of subjectivity right where I find a certain game really fun you know that may not work for the broad basis or for my other peers but in some other objective aspects of like building a game you know that's where I could potentially see AI helping out but I personally don't you know utilize AI from a subjectivity point of view of you know what looks cool what is fun but more on the structural side of hey we were mentioning you know gas fees and transactions maybe how to optimize certain things um from a tech side but in terms of the subjectivity of making it fun that's where probably I would remove AI and use AI to actually build itself philosophically speaking I think the biggest problem will be within respect to onchain games and the only way it can really impact I think is in onchain games and the reason I say that you have have a philosophical question of is Is it cheating to use AI to beat to be better than somebody in an onchain perspective because you just don't know who they are and you don't have an account, right? Like if you put out if you put like put a bot up on chess.com and you go and play people, there's like relatively I'm pretty sure they run like a cheat engine there to like know that you're probably not a grandmaster.

Um, and so philosophically like can you stop people from winning and and bot like botting to that? Like can we get anti-che true anti-che on chain to solve those problems? I don't know. And I I I think that's where it's going to run into a problem. I don't think people have like thought of that.

Um, maybe there just has to be a lot of subjective components that you can't I don't know. Um, segueing off that, right? The most exciting pieces of technology when it comes to gaming as of late, right? AR, MR, AI, obviously, you know, which of those three or maybe one that I haven't mentioned is the most exciting to you as gamers, as people who work in the space, and how do you think that's going to just level up web 3 gaming? Um, I'm I'm fairly excited about Metaverse.

Like, I I tried Decentraland. like it's pretty it's pretty much the only one that I've spent time like any time in. I I I think it has potential. I think it's interesting and fun. It reminds me of like it's it's it's like a rebranded reinvented concept that we all had before where you could see a bunch of different games in one setting and play and actually see real people while you're playing with their characters.

So like I I think it's interesting to bring like the real world to the digital world and like just kind of refresh it. So I I find it fun. I mean I I like it. It's still a little bit glitchy and like Greg was saying, you don't really know if it's like a real person half the time or not or if it's just like a standin kind of sitting around. So, I mean that's unfortunate, but I I'm I'm hopeful.

I have a very strong opinion on AR. uh meaning back in 2015 2016 there was a big phenomenon that happened called Pokémon Go where my father who was 60 at the time my grandmother who was like 80 took out bought phones and started walking all over the place capturing walking around the parks and having a blast with AR. Um, and I really do think it's very powerful because, you know, at the time, uh, one of my friends, he owned a restaurant. Um, he was very old school in like how he managed his business. He didn't really believe in social media or marketing or or any of that aspect.

And when Pokemon Go came out, he he came to me, he's like, Ethan, how do I get a Pokétop at my restaurant? And I found that like very interesting. Um, so from an AR perspective, I I do think, you know, driving in-person um, you know, habits both from a virtual space as well as in person is going to be very important. I and I think the tech is getting there. From a VR side, uh, I'm a little bit not as, you know, positive on it.

Mostly from a hardware side. Um, I played I love the game Beat Saber, but I can only have, you know, an Oculus on my face for, you know, 20, 30 minutes. when the the hardware gets a point where it's like my glasses, you know, I'll be a little bit more optimistic of it, but I'm a big believer in uh AR tech. All right, I'll be the contrarian. I'm short like open worlds and stuff like that.

Um I haven't seen anything like valuable being driven from there. I think the general concept is really cool, don't get me wrong. Um, but I haven't seen anybody drive any like good value. And I'm I'm I'm kind of short the experience there. Um, when it's too abstract, it needs to be focused.

We need like a tailored experience. Um, and right now it's just like go buy land in this finite world that's not finite and you can fork. Um, VR, if we're talking about like true true gaming, like like video games, then yeah, VR is like I think not quite there just because of the boundaries that are required. Um, but if we talk about like VR in terms of like, you know, people use Unity for like you can use VR Unity for like shopping, right? So, you can have like a so that's that's there like Metal Worlds makes sense for their curated experience.

Um I think AR like spoke mentioned is like probably the golden child out of the three. Um especially with ownership becoming a thing now. You know the ability to actually like see what you own in your space I think is probably a niche that will get picked up quite well by and be appreciated by users. You know, if like you have a bunch of trading cards and you can see like that card like it's a Pokemon card and you can see like Pikachu hopping around your room because you own this like rainbow Pikachu. I think that's like pretty awesome and I think that's where AR has a really nice like application because you can get people sitting on their phone for like five minutes a day just being like, "Haha, he's on my dresser."

You know, like I think that's pretty cool. I hear you. I mean, I don't know if you guys remember Yu-Gi-Oh, but when he had like the thing on his hand. Yeah, the dual disc and you just put like in the in the show you put it on and it was like I wanted that to be real so bad. Um, unfortunately, we've run out of time.

Uh, I think we might be the last session, but one last question if I could get it in and get away with it. Nope. Told me we can't get away with it. All right. Thank you so much everyone for being on the panel.

Thank you for the audience. Enjoyed it. Thank you.