Author: William M. Peaster, Bankless; Translated by: Tao Zhu, Golden Finance
Fully on-chain games put everything (assets, logic, rules, and state) directly on the underlying blockchain.
In this new gaming realm, every action is ultimately recorded on-chain.
As such, this dynamic offers various benefits, such as transparency and the possibility of novel gaming economies around it.
However, these products have also attracted an extremely efficient player: robots.
Can humans be competitive in on-chain games?
Dan Elitzer, co-founder of venture capital firm Nascent, recently asked on Twitter, “Is it possible to make a game that is fully on-chain, where unassisted human players can compete against each other?”
Elitzer asked this question in a post by plotchy, a security researcher at Nascent Security who has become a leading force behind Kamigotchi, a new fully on-chain RPG that I recently profiled in Metaversal.
Although Kamigotchi’s early testnet smart contracts were unverified and closed-source, plotchy managed to reverse engineer the game’s architecture and create an indexer to parse its data.
With access to detailed game information, including the location and health of Kami pets, plotchy then wrote a bot to hunt down other Kamis and quickly began dominating the game's leaderboards.
Following this impressive performance, Plotchy has been in discussions with the Kamigotchi team, who have been iterating on the game. Players have also adapted their playstyles to optimize survival, and a new quest has been introduced to guide players through extensive coordination against Plotchy's pet army.
Still, the specter of the plot — and the robots in on-chain games — remain.
Lethe, one of the creators of Kamigotchi, noted in a retrospective thread that on-chain games must accept bots as part of their user base due to their open nature, and the challenge is to adjust the game design to balance this dynamic.
That being said, the ultimate goal is to create a gaming environment where human and bot players can coexist in a way that is still fun and not overwhelming for human players. So, what does the future of on-chain gaming look like when it comes to threading this balance?
As for mitigating users who deploy many bots to manipulate the game through groups of automated accounts, anti-sybil measures will likely be increasingly adopted.
To be sure, Sybil attacks remain an open problem in crypto, so there is no perfect solution here. However, some combination of proof-of-personality techniques, such as through social media registration, community reporting programs, and AI analysis, could help curb bot swarms in on-chain games.
On the other hand, another strategy to combat bots is to fight them head-on. As my former colleague Ben Giove recently said, “The best defense against bots in on-chain games is to join a guild.”
Ben knows this too, as he is the founder of WASD, the largest on-chain gaming guild in crypto. When you have a large group of human players working closely together, you have a fighting force that can begin to rival or even better the bot players.
Of course, if you can't beat them, join them. Ben also predicts that "the use of bots will become democratized, and non-skilled players will be able to use them." Think of things like game plugins or services that allow anyone to easily optimize their gameplay. At the very least, this approach helps level the playing field!
On-chain gaming is still at the forefront, so it’s no surprise that the space is now grappling with bots. I encounter bots when I play mainstream games like Fall Guys or Overwatch, which run on more closed tracks. Bots are just one example of what’s happening in modern gaming.
But I don’t think this dynamic will relegate on-chain gaming to a niche forever. As this scene matures, advancements and innovation will help curb the dominance of bot players so that human players can still thrive. There are still many challenges ahead, but I’m personally optimistic about the future.