Project Awakening, Third-Party Development, And The Blockchain

I possibly found the CEO of CCP Games Hilmar Veigar Pétursson's interview with folks from a16z a bit more interesting than most gamers. I believe as someone who plays video games I was supposed to just automatically write off the interview as blockchain/web3 nonsense and ride off grumbling about out-of-touch people with way too much money in their pockets. But I also write about video games, so when I hear a use-case for the blockchain in video games that doesn't involve real money trading, I sit up and take notice.

EVE Online relies on a community of third-party developers to add functionality to the game that CCP doesn't provide, or didn't until recently. Everything from maps and skill planners to the tools to manage EVE's huge player-run corporations and alliances. When Hilmar refers to the EVE infrastructure written by thousands of coders found on GitHub in the interview, those are the types of projects he referred to. While the ability to charge a real world monetary fee to use a jump bridge network makes headlines, the out-of-game infrastructure that makes EVE playable is of greater value.

The answer I found most intriguing in the interview was Hilmar's answer to the question, "...how does leveraging blockchain technology actually make for a better game?" The first part of the answer made reference to third-party development in EVE Online. If Project Awakening is actually EVE 3.0, as Hilmar implies, then we have a new use-case for the blockchain in gaming. I've transcribed Hilmar's answer below (Some editing has been done to make the answer more readable in text form).

There are a few elements where I could hand-to-heart say it’s a better substrate to do certain things. Number one, there’s a lot of third-party development around EVE Online. It largely takes place through an API gateway. So we have a database which is our persistent storage. Then we have the ability to access that persistent storage through an API gateway which is kind of controlled by keys. And if you have the keys you can sort of execute on behalf of another person and you can kind of get through the API and get through to the data and compose the data, etc. 

Currently we don’t really allow many reads through this system. It’s really only rights and the reason why we are kind of at that level is the pattern is quite powerful. But it does have limitations like metering the amount of executions it can do, etc, etc. So smart contract blockchains actually are a pretty good model where people could create third-party code that runs coexisting with other third-party code under the gas economy that exists on blockchains. That helps with kind of people writing messy code that just costs too many opcodes and things like that. 

So pay for your own execution is actually a useful construct to meter third-party development in an open way in a large persistent storage. This combined with the memory interaction model between smart contracts and the underlying kind of state. I mean it’s a little bit problematic for blockchains in a public way because it just doesn’t scale very well. But there are many tricks we have learned through the development of EVE Online which map very well onto the concept of sharding as people have been using it in a blockchain. So we think we can get a little bit easily around the scalability problem by kind of leaning into sharding as a method to do that. 

Then you have the ability for players themselves to compose elements of the world through writing smart contracts, uploading them, and creating infrastructure for the rest to do as EVE players have already done. You can go to EVE on GitHub. You will see amazing amount of infrastructure created by thousands of people over the past 20 years and that’s amazing. So this is another amazing way to do similar things. so that’s number one.

I included some links to topics I wasn't too sure about. Hilmar tends to talk in buzzwords, which is fine for investors looking to be impressed. But I want knowledge, even if the presentation is meant to attract more funding and investment into a cryptocurrency.

After listening to the presentation a few times now, the question arises. Is the possibility of compensating third-party developers for their efforts a good thing? Over the years, CCP has struggled with ways to let these player-developers monetize their work. At first glance, the idea has promise.

But then I can see a downside. Will players then have to pay real money (or cryptocurreny) to join a player-run organization like a corporation or alliance? These organizations are the social glue that keeps players involved in the game, oftentimes long after the player loses interest in the game itself. Harm player social interaction, harm the game.

We are still in early stages with Project Awakening. Since a lot of people just want to naysay and demonize the concept, I think I have a lot less competition on the subject than I normally would. Admittedly, I have problems figuring out how web3 and blockchain technology is a net positive for MMORPGs. Then again, until Genshin Impact came along, who thought gacha games would become popular in the West?