The idea of unique adventures in gaming is an age old one. From choose your own adventure books to text scrollers on word processors to collecting cards to opening rare loot boxes, there’s always been some form of custom experience for the user. Beyond personalization and frills, it becomes harder and harder to create large scoped games with multiple paths and endings.
From a mathematical standpoint, within four splits we’ve created 30 different outcomes, causing a huge spike in production or asset cost and design. This is unsustainable in the long run, creating possibilities of meaningless outcomes, random outcomes, or simply taxing the production team too high.
Designers can create the illusion of choice by offering a limited variety of choices only to return the user to a single track experience overall. The epitome of this was Mass Effect with its infamous colored ending, leaving fans extremely disappointed after a long journey, in turn causing the studio to respond creatively.
Going back to the Did You Know Video about Pokémon, the designers intended there to be thousands of unique versions of the game, all based on the player’s trainer ID. As mentioned before, scaling this size of a project requires a lot of scope management. The video goes over procedurally generated maps, which is one process of massive diversity. When needing to create thousands of variations, simply make variations smaller and easier to produce. Make variations minimal, yet have tangible impacts to the experience. While Pokémon did not pull this off due to scope and timing, we have developed technologies over the years that makes this process easier than ever.
Enter the blockchain. This technology is very similar to Pokémon’s trainer ID system. Everything can be catalogued and every receipt is permanent and accurate. This allows for verifiably unique experiences no matter how large the scope of the project becomes. Unfortunately that’s really as far as blockchain and video game technology have merged. There are numerous crypto projects that have Pokémon style qualities, from battling to breeding to trading and selling. but their scope of gameplay remains limited. That is not to blame crypto game developers, as having a visual be unique and having gaming content be unique are totally different things, as mentioned above with cosmetics, personalization, and frills. Typically, crypto games that pride themselves on their scope shy away from bragging about their game design.
I’ve brainstormed a few ideas on how to create completely unique gaming experiences that scale upwards correctly. Games like Role Playing Games or Trading Card Games lend themselves to being better blockchain games, but face serious scaling problems nonetheless. Without incredible designer foresight or intervention, completely unique and random mechanics can scale in extremely non-intuitive and unexpected ways, leading to dissatisfying gameplay. There are hundreds of versions of the Branch and Bottleneck problem and there are hundreds of versions of cosmetics that provide the illusion of choice. In a future post, I’ll breakdown foresight design and tools inherent to blockchain that may help overcome the original trainer ID problem.
Leadership, Design, Writing 