Author: Raf, 1kxnetwork; Translation: Golden Finance xiaozou

Bots are seen as villains—exploiters, tricksters who infiltrate systems built for humans. But is that the whole story?

In real life, bots are the unsung heroes of games, working constantly in the background to make the system more dynamic and engaging. They may not be heroes in the traditional sense, but their contributions are too important to ignore. Most importantly, they become even more attractive when combined with blockchain's permissionless deployment and data availability.

At their core, a robot is just a set of automated processes. In theory, they can handle tasks that humans can do themselves, but their scale and efficiency are unmatched. Most robots are far from autonomous agents. They are just scripts that react to specific input data, adjusting based on state changes or data flows. They are tools: they are only as good as the people who use them.

Consider Googlebot, the ubiquitous web crawler that doesn’t exploit any websites. It works as a silent worker, indexing the internet and keeping our search results relevant. Similarly, spam filters that scan emails or arbitrage algorithms that keep financial markets running efficiently are hardly criticized. While it’s possible to check your inbox and delete spam or flag a website in a long list, it’s not something people do on a daily basis.

Many people don't fully realize the existence of bots in games. For example, they can provide services within the game. NPCs in single-player games are essentially bots. Whether they are quest givers, enemies, or allies, they greatly enrich the game world and provide content that players can interact with. Think of games like Zelda or Dark Souls. Without bots, these virtual worlds would seem particularly empty.

They can also pretend to be humans and fill in the lobby during matchmaking, ensuring that games can start quickly. More importantly, they can also serve as cannon fodder for less skilled players. In Fortnite, for example, most of the players in any given match are bots, and they exist to balance the game's difficulty and ensure that real players feel good when they defeat their opponents (whether they are real or bots). Other games, such as Clash Royale or Marvel Snap, use the same approach.

However, when bots transition from facilitators to direct competitors to human players, the “hammer of bans” is called. The problem is not with the bots themselves, but with the environment in which they operate. First, they are unrestricted from exploiting unique advantages over humans, namely speed and endurance. They can react to game state changes in milliseconds and can stay focused without sleeping or doing anything else. Second, they are also competing with humans for some form of scarce rewards. No one complains about the sparring bots in Fortnite being unresponsive, and no one complains about why the super-efficient Googlebot doesn’t care about what humans care about, they are just performing a very boring task for our benefit. And when these two features coexist, bots steal our “fun”.

Blockchain Robot

Let’s look at MEV bots (Maximum Extractable Value bots) in the context of blockchain. These bots operate in a competitive decentralized finance system, using their ability to read memory pools and execute trades faster than humans to generate profits.

But here’s the thing: MEV bots aren’t breaking the rules. They exist precisely because of the rules — the scarcity of block space, the visibility of transactions in the memory pool, and the prioritization of transactions through gas fees. They’re just playing the game as it was designed. When bots suddenly appear to take advantage of opportunities that humans want, people may feel cheated, just like factory workers who feel replaced by machines, but the bots are just taking advantage of the existing system more efficiently. The bots are better suited to the task — faster, more consistent — but they operate within a framework created by humans.

If we look closely at the core mechanics of the game, we can clearly see the tension between humans and bots. Games are built around a goal, challenge, and reward loop (called an OCR loop in game design terms). Players need to complete tasks, overcome challenges, and then receive a certain reward. Often, players focus more on the reward itself - experience points, gold, loot - rather than the challenge. But the real fun comes from overcoming challenges, even if players don't always think about it that way at the time.

Depending on how the challenge is structured and how the player's abilities are structured, it may be easy for a bot to bypass the challenge and go straight to the reward. This conflicts with the interests of the real player, who is currently working hard to complete the game's challenges. Take, for example, coin-collecting bots in MMOs. These bots will perform repetitive tasks to collect in-game currency, which can be sold to other players. While this does not directly harm other players, it can disrupt the game economy, bypass the game loop, and cause headaches for game developers.

Robots as content

However, a real missed opportunity is that bots — especially in blockchain games — can become content in their own right. By thinking carefully about how we design our games, we can turn bots from exploiters into targets — players can compete with bots for resources, outsmart them strategically, and even collaborate with them in new and creative ways. The problem isn’t that bots are efficient, but that the systems they inhabit haven’t adapted to see them as part of the fun.

Let's take an MMO game where players gather resources at certain locations and convert them into items that can be used to attack other entities (players). This is a very common system and we see it in different forms (hero fantasy, pirates, spaceships, etc.) with varying degrees of complexity. My point is that bots can be game content if there are basic rules that constrain and limit the system. At the end of the game, they are constrained by the same rules as human players, so the challenge is to make rules that only leave room for fragile and interesting automation. In this sense, these are what I think are the most basic principles. There are probably more rules, but these are the more obvious ones.

● Vulnerability and Ownership: A wallet (or entity) can lose what it holds because its health is at zero. This means any bot is a possible target and can be robbed of loot. If they carry a reward, they can become a worthwhile challenge.

● Geographical restrictions: A wallet (or entity) will be tied to a certain location and can only interact with elements in adjacent locations. This creates a huge limitation that the bot must move around to interact with different game elements.

● Inventory Limitations: Wallets (or entities) have certain limits on the assets they can carry. This also limits the impact of the bot, and when combined with geographic restrictions, a choice needs to be made.

● Energy consumption: The wallet (or entity) must consume energy to perform operations. This is another choice that must be made, and most importantly, involves a shift in priorities. As energy becomes less and less, it takes priority over the bot’s original goals, forcing it to change its behavior and adapt.

This isn't a recipe for a perfect game that will solve all bot problems and create a whole new kind of UGC. These are just some ideas for rules that can counter the overwhelming advantages of bots, making bots an alternative way to play. Rather than designing rules that aim to weaken or eliminate bots, we should focus on creating systems that encourage human players to interact with them - whether through combat, trading, or cooperation.

As for the age-old question of “why develop games on the blockchain?”, bots could become a key feature of games, becoming a natural part of the game world, adding complexity, challenge, and fun. They may not be heroes in the traditional sense, but they can still play a vital role – whether as targets, opponents, or allies – making the game more dynamic and more engaging for human players.

At the end of the day, bots are created by us humans. They can be faceless competitors that exploit vulnerabilities and frustrate human players, or they can be integrated into game systems, providing content and creating new opportunities for interaction. Especially in blockchain games, this shift in perspective could turn bots from a nuisance to a powerful innovation tool that unlocks greater fun.