The Future of Multiplayer Games
And How it Might be the Future of Military Communication Infrastructure
Thanks to Cameron Porter for his contributions to this piece.
Introduction
Zero knowledge proofs (ZKPs) will enable the future of multiplayer gaming. A zero knowledge proof is a method by which person A (the prover) can prove to person B (the verifier) that a given statement is true without conveying any additional information. With a zero knowledge proof, I can prove to you that I live in the US, without revealing my home address. If you want to understand the math behind ZK proofs, check out this video on showing how you prove you can solve classic problems in computer science without revealing how to do it or what the solution is, with a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.
ZK proofs are a core primitive to next generation Web3 applications. By maintaining privacy in Turing complete blockchain environments (L1 or L2), we can perform anonymous verifiable auctions (remember the failure of ConstitutionDAO) & voting, exchange& settlement of assets, as well as (and most importantly for military applications) battlefield communication on attack resilient networks.
This movement to a ZK future will be started by gaming onboarding the next 100 million+ users to Web3. Already, 49% of all on-chain wallet activity comes from games. In the following, we will establish the three waves of multiplayer gaming (Web 2, Web2.5, and Web3) from what you currently play on your Xbox or PC to a world where not only the in-game assets are on-chain but all of the code too.
Web 2 Games
The vast majority of games fall into this bucket. Some examples include World of Warcraft, Call of Duty, and Elden Ring. In Web 2 multiplayers games, the game studio (or publisher) has ultimate control over the game.
Imagine that you start a new character in World of Warcraft. You download the game client from Blizzard servers. You boot up the game, it connects to Blizzard’s servers and you create a new character. Your sword, your character, your armor, your in-game currency isn’t actually yours. You only have access to them. Blizzard owns the database containing all your stuff, and can shut it down or delete it on a whim. Blizzard owns all code, and it is closed source.
Selling in-game items for real money is a breach of the game’s terms of service, and they will permanently ban you if they find out. This has not stopped robust online marketplaces from selling World of Warcraft gold and accounts. However, these practices limit true value accrual to the players.
Game studios routinely shut down multiplayer games for a plethora of reasons. When players bought the game, they expected to be able to play them as advertised. Game developers can change their agreement with the user after the fact with impunity. Game historians cannot create a permanent library of multiplayer games due to this. Ultimately, not only do the game studios decide the rules of the game but also the rules of how you, the owner, can interact with something you should own.
Web 2.5 Games
Most of the crypto games you’ve heard of fall into this bucket. Axie Infinity is the most well known, with games like Shrapnel and Ascenders on the way. In Web 2.5 multiplayer games, the game studio almost has ultimate control of the game.
Developers still control multiplayer servers, game logic, and game clients. The key difference is that your character, items, and in-game currency are stored on-chain as non-fungible or fungible tokens. The game developer cannot delete your stuff, and doesn’t own it. But this is not a panacea.
You can swap your in-game currency for BTC, ETH, stablecoins, or fiat currency. You can use your ultra-rare, high value armor as collateral for a DeFi loan. You can loan your armor out to other players for a fee, permissionlessly. Value accrues to the player as long as the developers don’t shut down the game. The developers own 99% of the code, and it is closed source. This is where the problems begin.
Every game dies someday. After a shutdown, you own your NFTs, but there is no demand for them because they can’t be used for anything. Another development team can come along and make a new game, leveraging the old game’s NFTs, but the likelihood of this happening is extremely small. They would have to re-architect and re-engineer the entire codebase from scratch. This is a waste of time and money, disincentivizing studios from building on former hit games despite the massive value that could be unlocked.
Web 3 Games
This is a nascent but rapidly growing space that will only be fueled by more scalable L1s and L2s like Avalanche and StarkNet. Games like Dark Forest, Exgracia, and Age Of Eykar make up this bucket. In Web 3 games, the players own everything. All code is forever publicly hosted on the blockchain and is immutable.
Every single game asset and all game logic exists on-chain. The game can never disappear or be shut down. All code is open-source and composable. Your in-game assets will only lose value if the game is no longer holding player interest. Anyone can build their own game using the original as a starting point, thus addressing the core issue with Web 2.5 games.
Anyone can build a custom game client for different use cases. Imagine you own a lot of land in a metaverse game. Instead of the character level POV view, you want a high-level, management style view. This view will differ greatly from what a player running around killing monsters and gathering resources wants and looks more like what real estate brokers might create in Excel. Players will not only be able to build these views, but also switch seamlessly between according to what best meets their objectives at the time (business vs. pleasure in this case).
Games like Minecraft and Skyrim really took of due to their strong modding culture (user generated levels, events, etc.). Children learning to code and professional software engineers alike create new maps, weapons, and spells for the game, releasing this content for free. Game developers currently need to build tooling to allow modders to create new content. Thanks to Web3, this does not need to be the case.
With fully on-chain games, game developers don’t need to create and release modding tools. Modding comes for free, because all the code is on-chain forever, and callable by anyone else. Even if the original developers move on, the community can pick up the project and keep it going. In this future a game never fully dies. It can be revived by new mods and new updates at any time without losing the work done and value created by the players and engineers that came before. This is the future of gaming (and so much more).
Zero Knowledge is Necessary
Entire genres of on-chain games cannot exist without zero knowledge. Most popular blockchains today are public. Anyone can see which NFTs you have, how much ETH you have, and your entire transaction history. This doesn’t work for games that require information hiding.
Poker, StarCraft, and Minecraft are all impossible to do entirely on-chain without zero knowledge. Without zero knowledge, anyone can see your poker hand or know exactly where your units are. Procedural map generation is computationally expensive, and is used extensively in games like Minecraft. Computationally expensive operations use too much gas to be feasible on blockchains. However, these algorithms can be put on-chain using zero knowledge (zk-SNARKs & zk-STARKs).
If you expand your thinking, you can see how these primitives will provide valuable tools in the real world (beyond just gaming). Successful military and defense operations depend on reliable, anonymous, and private communications and mapping infrastructure. As gaming pushes us to solve these technical challenges with zero knowledge, forward thinking governments will leverage these same tools to use public blockchains to perform in operation communication and asset mapping on a network that is more robust than anything ever created before (public blockchains).
Conclusion
We’re approaching an extremely exciting time in gaming (and beyond). Completely player owned game economies will flourish in the next 5 years. New developer infrastructure and tools are currently being built to facilitate Web 3 games.
StarkNet is a permissionless decentralized ZK-Rollup and Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution that is seeing early traction for fully on-chain games.
Matchbox DAO is building out game tooling that allows game developers to build their games on top of StarkNet, among many other tools.
Follow 0xPARC to keep up with the latest in fully on-chain games.
As always, please reach out to jonwalch@gmail.com with any questions.
Appendix
Wallet activity stat (slide 45) => https://a16z.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/state-of-
Zero knowledge proof explainer video:
zk-SNARKs => https://z.cash/technology/zksnarks/