In this Post I would like to share some of my thoughts, to hopefully provoke some of yours. The topic is, how a decentralized cocreated collecting card game could look like. As reference points of existing games I use Magic the Gathering and Hearthstone. But those serve only as examples, you do not need to know, to be part of the conversation.
The Holochain architecture inspired to think about a variety of applications and aside of all these how-to-save-the-world-ideas also ideas like: Why not just make a games. Someone built a decentralized Chess Happ and there has been a discussion about decentralized Fortnite and probably much more. But my impression is that card games with their in a sense incrementally increasing, modular rule sets, that are printed on the cards, are an especially suitable genre. To explain why I would like to start with a small detour into two card games that I am familiar with.
MTG and Hearthstone
[spoiler]
The mother of collecting card games is probably Magic the Gathering. In Magic players alternatingly take turns, in which they play cards into the game, which they can use to attack the opponent in order to reduce their life total to 0 and win the game. When about 20 years later Hearthstone went the step to the digital, those basic elements stayed the same. However, this step not only brought along some downsides and challenges but also opened up new designspace. An unavoidable downside was that some players liked the special feeling of holding physical cards, that one can touch, smell, and whatever you did with your Magic cards. The Hearthstone developers did a good job of graphically retain as much of the feeling of real cards, but in a computer game this is only possible to some degree. An example of a challenge is the following: In Magic there basic game mechainic is a stack when any player plays some effect, it is virtually put on a stack, on which both players may react, by putting more effects on the stack until both are fine and the effects are resolved top to bottom, until a player wants to play more effects or the stack empties, and the game procedes into the next phase of a turn. This offers a lot of potential back and forth, that is in practice rarely used. Instead a player mostly just plays his turn and when the other player wants to intervene they say stop, or return to the point where they wanted to do so. If one had copied this baic mechanic into a computer game, and there are multiple instances that did so, it results in an back and forth of klicking āno i do not want to do anything nowā-Buttons, that can make a game quite lengthy. What Hearthstone did whith this challenge was abandoning the idea of actively interveneing during the opponents turn. Instead players can play their own turn uninterrupted, but with a time limit, which was one thing, that boosted up the experience of the game. In addition, to retain some of the coolness of messing up your opponents turn and leading them into traps, they added Secret cards, which are played face down and have a certain trigger, to resolve an effect during the enemies turn, without requiring an action of the other player.
Most importantly, however, the tranistion into a computer game also brought new opportunities. For example random effects, that browse through all existing cards (e.g. āSummon a random 3-cost Beastā) are a frequently used design option wich players associate with fun. The extensive generation of many tokens and copies of cards is another feature that would have been very cumbersome in a physical card game. There also exist cards that recast all effects of certain kind, that happened since the start of the game. In a physical game this would require to prophilactically take notes about all these events. On top of that recently a card entered the game, that analyses the state of the board and deploys its own Algorithm (presumeably a fixed pre-trained neuronal Network AI) to offer the player āthe perfect cardā in that situation. The design space that opened up by this transition to a computer game is a big part of what made Hearthstone so successful.
[/spoiler]
In this same thinking the step from a centralized to a decentralized computer card game is big and brings along problems, challenges and opportunities.
Problems and Challenges
In this section I mention and count through some Challenges I realized, some of which might be unavoidable problems, similar to the lack of physical touch in the past section.
At first it is worth mentioning, that a single game is played between two players, that can easily connect peer to peer. And if one wants to stick to a central game development that releases the game as well as updates, not much would need to change, to use a framework like Holochain. For the following rather easy challenges I can see a solution already.
[spoiler]
First of all let us consider challenges, that arise with the part of the game, where you basically manage your account and card collection. Afterwards we will look into the challenges during one duell between two players.
Instead of clients connecting to the server, they connect to peers directly. Here some decentralized match making tool needs to be deployed, which is not a trivial thing (C1), but also not a thing, that players have present during their experience of the game. For this solutions exist.
Furthermore in these collecting card games usually not all cards are available from the beginning, instead they need to be earned, collected or bought. Without a central server saving the progress of each account, it has to be stored locally. This offers the ability to hack ones game to unlock all the content and thereby reduce the fun of the game (C2). This can be prevented by the usage of currencies (or current-sees in the Arthur Brock sense of the word). For example with every game played (or won, or every game that took at least this longā¦) the player can earn some currency, that is cryptographically countersigned by its opponent, who does not loose currency, it is not zero-sum, but instead only testifies, that the game took place. But also actions you take that effect your account only, like spending a currency to buy packs of new cards, can be shared in the DHT for data integrity. For things like opening a pack of random cards a provable random function can be used. All these things need to be implemented differently, than with a central game, but Holochain is well equipped for that, and the player wonāt realize the difference.
During a single duel, where two opponents meet, similar tools are required, if for example a player draws a random card from his or her deck. I wonāt count this as a seperate challenge.
A new one however is, if the players loose connection to each other (C3). The game should not end in a draw (nor both win or both loose), because then players could cut their connection on purpose right before they would loose. In this case an indirect connection over peers in their DHT neighbourhood (or the DHT neighbourhood of the games hash) is required. This however might in any case be the easier way to implement e.g. drawing random cards from your deck. For every duel one or several peers are chosen to play the server.
[/spoiler]
We can go further and transcend a central game development. How would a game look like, that is decentrally cocreated by its players?
If we would require the players to build everything ā¦ we would be done. That is not what we want.
The other extreme is constituting all the rules, leaving the players only with visual customization. Definetly something that enhances their personal playing experience, but also something, that is theoretically possible with centralized games already. Where I see the sweet spot, that makes card games especially suitable for this is, that the game comes with a general set of rules, that is unchanged, and on top of that cards extend those rules with their card texts. This offers an opportunity, to let the major part of the game be created by the players. The general rules of the game would be constituted by us, the central game designers, in a way that they are intended to remain unchanged over the course of time. Then it would be released onto the public, which can expand the game by creating cards on their own.
Thus instead of centrally released new expansions the players (or more precisely, those types of players, who enjoy and shine at those activities) would introduce new cards, and thereby keep the game experience fresh. It is an activity, that many card game enthusiasts do already without ever seeing implementation. And it reminds me of the many fan developed maps of Super Mario Maker. Furthermore this states an invitation to the players, to make the game ātheir gameā (one point Mark Rosewater a Magic game designer states as critical for good game design, in a presentation called āTwenty years, twenty lessons learnedā.
This idea opens a door widely for a new type of game. But how should that work out? Lets go to the more serious challenges. There are technical and authorizational problems.
Technical Challenges
[spoiler]
The players not only need to think of a new card, but also implement it correctly. Suppose those cards, that are not correctly implemented will be simply seen as ābad card designsā, and therefore soon sorted out, by some mechanisms we think about in another section. To support this one could flag cards that do not work as intended, and report the but to the creator, to fix. There still is a big problem: (C4) With the endless design space, it is likely, that the program code that implements card A perfectly fine, causes some bugs in the interaction with card B. How should this collision be a) detected and b) resolved? If the framework is too rigid (something like every card has a number of points depending on its cost, that can be spend on predefined and therefore non-conflicting effects or stats the card has, and thats it) the result would be the equivalent of a game that just has a lot of boring cards, of which most are never played.
Can we have a framework for possible card creation, that leaves open enough space for effects, that have never been thought of, by us, while at the same time being rigid enough to prevent these collisions? Maybe the general game rules, like the structure of the players turns, can be chosen in a way, that prevents some conflicts from the card implementation. Similar to how the chose of hearthstone, that cards can be played only during ones own turns prevented the turmoil of the back-and-forth do nothings.
Or do we alternatively try to resolve bugs between conflicting cards in some other manner?
[/spoiler]
Authorizational Challenges
[spoiler]
It would not be a fun game to play, if players could simply create their own overpowered cards and play with them to win every game. Thus some curation is required, before a card fully enters the game, whatever that means. And even more, similar to conflicts in the program code of cards, two cards developed by different people might be fun on their own, but be unbearably, brokenly strong in combination. In such cases curation is needed to remove cards from the game again, or at least make sure, that overpowered combinations of cards are not available in the same game format.
How could that happen (C5)?
Such a curation can be done by other players, who serve as neutral judges or referees and can be rewarded for this activity. In the Game League of Legends there was a time, when the conviction of players, that have been reported for intolerable social behavior was outsourced to the player community similarily in an institution called the Tribunal.
The description so far suggests, that there is some global consensus about which cards are a part of the game and which are not. Such a consensus would reeintroduce the problems that come along with a global consensus and that people in the blockchain world are familiar with (C6). In especially it would need to find a way to deal with a sybil attack.
Another even more innovative road would be to solve this without a consensus. In such a game every player could have their own state of the game, including which cards exist. Why should it be forbidden to play a card, that both players are fine with? This however introduces a big problem. When do the players decide which cards they are fine with? When a match between two opponents is assigned, do they first need to look through every card of their opponents deck and say yes to it? That is not only annoying, but also looses the fun component of not knowing what your opponents strategy is. If on the other hand you need to publish a list of all the cards you agree to, and get an opponent assigned on that basis, how do you even get the chance of allowing cards, someone somewhere created, that you do not know (C7)?
To me this looks like the most interesting approach I have thought of so far:
When you are looking for an opponent, you open an invitation, that includes a list of the cards that you want to play in that match. Before, you do so, you not only need to create your own deck, but also a list of cards you accept as ācards that exist in your gameā. The matchmaking algorithm will then only assign to you opponents that play only cards, that you accepted. Suggestions for this list of cards are offered to you on the basis of what other players are playing (or wishing to play). In the sense of āIf you say Yes to this cards, there are X more possible opponents you could connect toā. If you create your own cards (an additional kickstarter might be required, butā¦) and want to play with them, this makes them appear in the suggestion list for other players. By the way, browsing through possible new cards to accept, while searching for an opponent with the matchmaking algorithm not only increases their chance of finding opponents, it also gives the players something enjoyable to do instead of just waiting.
[/spoiler]
So thats it. My thoughts on distributed collecting card games. Just wanted to put them out there, in case of the unlikely event that someone wants to jump on it. Any thoughts welcome.
) as multiple people have expressed interest in this.
