Recently, I saw an announcement on X about a new blockchain game.
I wasn't particularly interested in that project itself.
What caught my attention was the reaction to it.
There have already been a lot of blockchain games. Some have shut down, while others seem much quieter than they once were.
So when another new blockchain game appeared, many of the reactions I saw were fairly cynical.
Something along the lines of:
Another blockchain game?
But that made me think about something else.
What exactly is a blockchain game?
I'm not an expert on blockchain games.
But from the ones I've seen, there is usually a coin or token, NFTs, a marketplace, and sometimes some form of Play-to-Earn.
There is nothing inherently wrong with any of that.
Still, sometimes the order feels backwards to me.
Instead of starting with a game that needs blockchain in order to work, it can look more like this:
There are coins and NFTs, and the game is where they get used.
That led to another question.
Does the game actually need the blockchain?
Owning characters.
Trading items.
Creating scarce items.
Receiving rewards for playing.
Transferring a character you raised to another player.
It seems like all of those things can also be built with a normal server and database.
The same applies to Play-to-Earn.
Giving players something with real value as a reward for playing doesn't seem to require blockchain by itself.
So I started wondering:
Are there blockchain games where removing the blockchain would actually break the game itself?
That made me want to try thinking about the problem in the opposite direction.
Forget the coin for now.
Forget NFTs.
Forget Play-to-Earn.
Forget marketplaces, prices, and speculation.
Forget starting a game by asking the player to connect a wallet.
Take away the things that are commonly associated with blockchain games and leave only two things:
Blockchain + Game
Then start from there.
Instead of adding blockchain to a game, could a game be designed so that removing the blockchain would also remove something fundamental to the game itself?
Could I make something where, when someone asks:
Why not just use a normal database?
there is actually a good answer?
Maybe this is partly a small counterpoint to the usual idea of a blockchain game.
I've started exploring that question by trying to design a game from the opposite direction.
There isn't really a game yet.
That's intentional.
The first problem is simply this:
Can a game be designed that has a real reason to use blockchain at all?
I'm going to document the process from the beginning, including the ideas that don't survive.
The next question is harder:
Is there actually any kind of game that cannot be meaningfully replaced with a normal database?
