You’ve played trading card games and you’ve always enjoyed yourself. You’ve invested time, overtime, energy and money. Some of these games have taken (or broken) tiny pieces of your heart and soul as they taught you some difficult lessons, like “you’re not important,” “what you think doesn’t matter,” and “this loot is ours. We can do whatever we want with it.”
Unfortunately, like with banking, the corporate model of collectible-based video games requires a high degree of trust on the part of its users. Just like the citizens of a particular government must trust (presume?) that their money is being allocated and held honestly by a national bank, the players of a corporate giant TCG must trust (presume) that the corporation truly holds the best interests of their players in higher regard than the almighty dollar.
What is Blockchain Changing?
The Twitter answer to this question: Everything. Less dramatically and more specifically, blockchains are revolutionizing the way that data is stored, encrypted and transacted. Blockchains can be built for many different purposes, from gaming to real estate, from digital privacy and security to decentralized finance (DEFI).
For many industries, blockchain will soon prove itself the ideal system for the foreseeable future. For other industries, other more suitable systems may be developed, but the bottom line will be the same: We are moving away from systems that require trust to systems that do not. In smart contracts, the requirements for fulfillment are written (coded) into the contract, just like with a real contract. The difference is that the contract is literally smart in ways that a piece of paper could never hope to be. It can enforce itself, even cancel itself if any party is in breach.
I could go on for days about the ways that blockchain and smart contracts are changing the world, but this article is about what blockchains can do for games (especially TCGs).
The Problems
What the founders of Splinterlands saw was similar to what the founders of countless other blockchain projects saw, especially those in the gaming industry. There are several key problems on which I will focus. Then in the next section, I will explain how blockchains present an excellent solution to each one.
The loot that was implied so strongly to belong to the players really only ever belonged to the company.
Many of the digital games of the last 15-20 years have tried to capture some of the nostalgia of the collectible card games that most of us played in the early 90’s. They attempted to cash in on the thing people most often remembered about these cards (MTG, Yu-Gi-Oh, Pokemon, etc.), the collectible value that many of them have retained to this day. They did this by offering all sorts of in-game assets. Gems, Rubies, Diamonds, Ore, Stones, Crystals… Name a thing, and there was probably a Facebook game in which you could farm it.
Of course, none of this loot was real in any sense of the word. Sure, if enough people agree that something has value, then anything can be bought or sold, but a thing does not become an asset just because it is used as a bartering token. Without blockchain, these rewarding games were merely gilded time-wasters whose loot was as imaginary as their players’ delusions of gaming “full time from home.”
Heavily-Invested Communities were Ignored
A game is only as strong, as vibrant, and as creative as its community. This has been one of Splinterlands’ not-so-secret secrets to success: In a pure reward-based-economy like the HIVE blockchain, a powerful, creative and thriving community can be built. The alternative (from which we are escaping) is more grim.
In a classic centralized TCG, things may have started on a small and reasonable level, but at some point, the money probably started making most of the decisions. Some of the games got too big for their own good, being bought out by large corporations that implemented systems to squeeze maximum dollars from the players like the juice of some magical ever-juicing orange. The numbers of players kept growing, and the games kept cranking out new cards, eventually even switching to the realm of the non-physical with their online editions.
The companies always owned the cards. Looking back, that is the one point that will eventually lead to their demise as shiny new blockchain-backed games take their places.
These big-box games stopped listening to their players. All decisions were being made by a small team of developers with seemingly biased intentions. As long as the companies owned the assets that were supposed to belong to the players, this problem would continue to grow.
EVERYTHING Was Owned by the Company
In classic trading card games, especially once they went digital, every single element was rigidly owned by the company that owned the game. This caused these companies to come off as ghoulish to their players, who simply wanted to occasionally share clips, bits, sounds or anything from the game they love.
Unlicensed fan fiction? Forget about it. Do you think the team for that big TCG would share the strategy article you wrote, telling people how to take rewards directly out of their pockets? Nope.
This secrecy and possessiveness extends of course to all software and coding used for the game. It would be unheard of for a game to offer all of that as open-source, right? If you think that’s right, maybe you haven’t fully realized what blockchain can do.
The Solutions
Now I invite you to observe how blockchains solve all of the above problems and more.
Non-Fungible Tokens - Assets that Really Belong to You
The most important problem for gaming that is solved by blockchain is the ownership issue mentioned multiple times above. It was the thing that drove the Splinterlands founders to create the game in the first place. Asset ownership can be written into a blockchain like HIVE, so that your cards, tokens, gems, crystals or whatever are always yours.
With Splinterlands (and most companies that deal in blockchain-backed NFTs), the company does not claim ownership over the cards in the game. Instead, the players actually own them. This means that they can buy or sell assets on peer-to-peer markets, or even do more creative transacting like leasing NFTs to others for a contracted period of time.
On the HIVE blockchain (the home of Splinterlands), transactions are free and nearly instant, taking only three seconds per block. That means that players can transact with their cards as often as they would like, or play with them all day long to earn rewards.
Staking and Shared Interest Create Strong Community
One of the things that new players always notice is the incredible generosity, openness and support of the Splinterlands community, usually in our Telegram or Discord servers, or on Peakd.com at our home blog. This Splinterlands community is our backbone. We have worked with them every step of the way, taking their criticism to heart and turning their feedback into updates and improvements.
Splinterlands is proud of the level of caring and commitment within the community. Such a community of support may only be possible through a reward-economy powerhouse like the HIVE blockchain and a great strategy game like Splinterlands.
It is also possible to transfer Splinterlands cards from in-game to the Ethereum blockchain. So far, this has only been used to list them on markets like OpenSea, but the possibilities for the not-so-distant future are extensive. As other blockchains are added, those possibilities will expand and grow. Imagine a world of third-party-designed Splinterlands spinoff games that allows players from many blockchains to use their Splinterlands cards in new and exciting ways. It’s closer than you may think, thanks to the power of blockchain.
I hope this article has made you aware of some of the problems presented by “classic” TCGs, and more importantly, some of the ways in which blockchain technology solves them.
See you out there.
