A successful crypto game is first a virtual Community in which individuals can express themselves, own virtual goods and freely exchange virtual items in a virtual Economy, all on top of a censorship resistant platform.

We can define a virtual community as a group of people that share a common interest on one or more topics, exchanging ideas and experiences in a digital or virtual environment using electronic devices.

The first use of the term virtual community appeared in an article by Gene Youngblood written in 1984 but published in 1986 about Electronic Café (1984), an art project by artists Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz.

Electronic Café linked public locations in five different Los Angeles neighborhoods: South-Central (now called South LA), East LA, Koreatown, Venice Beach, and Downtown LA. Each site in this “telecollaborative network” was equipped with an array of communication devices that were futuristic for the time:

• a computer messaging system,

• searchable text and pictorial databases,

• image-exchange and audio-conferencing equipment,

• slow-scan television cameras, digital writing and drawing tablets,

• and high-resolution printers—all made available to local residents.

Visitors could post text and images, participate in conversations, appropriate and manipulate material from both mainstream media and users at other café sites, record and archive memories, histories, and encounters, and search and retrieve contributions from the expanding database. This ambitious project was part of the Olympic Arts Festival, a citywide multicultural celebration of “international brotherhood” meant to exemplify the spirit of the Olympic Games, hosted by Los Angeles that year.

Operating six hours a day for seven weeks, the project encouraged participants to use telecommunication technologies to critically engage the material and immaterial connections and divisions that existed across this notoriously sprawling and fragmented city.

Mobile Image, Electronic Café, Gumbo House site (South LA), 1984 (artwork © Kit Galloway; photograph provided by the Sherrie Rabinowitz and Kit Galloway Archive, Piñon Hills, CA)

Mobile Image, announcement card for Electronic Café, 1984 (announcement © Kit Galloway; scan provided by the Sherrie Rabinowitz and Kit Galloway Archive, Piñon Hills, CA)

Mobile Image, Electronic Café, Ana Maria site (East LA), 1984 (artwork © Kit Galloway; photograph provided by the Sherrie Rabinowitz and Kit Galloway Archive, Piñon Hills, CA)

Mobile Image, Electronic Café, photographic sheet with sign and five locations, Los Angeles, 1984 (photographs © Kit Galloway, provided by the Sherrie Rabinowitz and Kit Galloway Archive, Piñon Hills, CA)

Mobile Image, Electronic Café setup diagram, 1984 (diagram © Kit Galloway; scan provided by the Sherrie Rabinowitz and Kit Galloway Archive, Piñon Hills, CA)

Mobile Image, Electronic Café, various locations, 1984 (artwork © Kit Galloway; photographs provided by the Sherrie Rabinowitz and Kit Galloway Archive, Piñon Hills, CA)

The first broadcasts were the communities identifying themselves. Each café found it important to define their cultural identity through some kind of presentation or performance. They began to transmit images, icons and ideas that demonstrated the breadth and scope of their culture. They were very conscious of saying “This is who we are.” Blacks weren’t people who robbed liquor stores; they were poets.

Sherrie Rabinowitz

Many of the project’s myriad visual and textual manifestations were contained by its computerized bulletin board system (BBS). A customized version of Community Memory—the first public BBS, established in the mid-1970s in Berkeley, California—combined with a digital image bank, the platform allowed users to post text and pictures that could then be retrieved and commented on by other users. This not only enabled an exchange of information but also formed a cumulative, searchable database that could serve as a space for public interaction and identity formation according to the particular needs of the user—not as an autonomous individual, but as a social being with shareable concerns. It was explicitly designed to function as a flexible archive, a site for collecting alternate histories, and an arena for fresh forms of political organization.

Mobile Image. Electronic café network diagram with Community memory and optical disk recorder in center, 1894 (diagram © Kit Galloway; scan provided by the Sherrie Rabinowitz and Kit Galloway Archive, Piñon Hills, CA)

The first step to create a successful game is being able to attract a specific community, a virtual community that is truly interested in exchanging meaningful experiences. An experience in which anyone can express himself and be connected to other individuals, creating even new friendships.

How you letting people express themselves? Through a digital account? a character? an avatar?

Anything could be good if in someway let individuals identify and express themselves.

The first problem about some game designers is premature monetization. You don't think about converting something into money if you didn't thought about how to attract a virtual community.

Virtual economies usually begin with the ability to create digital goods that people can exchange in a virtual or a digital environment.

After creating a virtual community, the second step is thinking on how to create virtual goods that can be valuable for users.

Again, we always put users first, there's no selfishness when trying to build successful companies.

Virtual Economies in the early days

The virtual economy emerged in the early 1990s as the Internet and personal computing began to facilitate real-time interactions between disparately located users within mostly text-based gaming environments called Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs).

Traditional MUDs implement a role-playing video game set in a fantasy world populated by fictional races and monsters, with players choosing classes in order to gain specific skills or powers. The objective of this sort of game is to slay monsters, explore a fantasy world, complete quests, go on adventures, create a story by roleplaying, and advance the created character.

MUDs anticipated Massive MultiPlayer Online Role Playing Games (MMPORPGs), in which a large number of players compete or cooperate with one another in a fantasy virtual world. The advent of MMPORPGs led to significant advancements in the range and complexity of virtual goods.

Game publishers generally discouraged the formal sale of goods generated within these platforms but were relatively helpless to prevent the informal sale of currency, avatars, weapons, and other items.

This resulted in both the emergence of a significant grey market for virtual goods and emerging business models from publishers seeking to capitalise on user demand for virtual items.

The market for virtual goods grew rapidly, surpassing $1 billion by the early 2000s. By the end of the decade, the market was valued at $7.3 billion, a figure that would double within three years. As the various markets grew, so too did the opportunities to find employment in the servicing, acquisition or brokerage of these goods.

In 2003, San Francisco-based Linden Labs opened a new virtual world called Second Life. It was a social platform designed jointly by the users and publishers. For the first time, Second Life gave people space to create, socialize and collaborate free of objectives or linear restrictions set by the publisher. It was and is an organic nation built in the virtual world, with residents who express themselves in extraordinary ways, including through enterprise and commercial endeavors.

Second Life has produced a raft of entrepreneurial success stories. It showed almost 20 years ago how virtual environments could supplement or even replace real-world earnings. It remains the forebear of the sophisticated decentralized platforms that have given rise to a new type of virtual good that could be identified, traced and unique. This has led to a boom in virtual collectables, gambling, and curiously, virtual real estate.

Virtual Economies have been successful in the past 20 years, but there's something missing in all his mechanics and iterations, user ownership.

In a typical game infrastructure, the game developer is the true unique owner of any existing virtual good. That means that at any moment the game developer can deprive a user from the ability to connect to the platform, therefore the user loses any digital good associated with that single digital account. Not just virtual goods, but also the time invested, friendships and connections to the virtual community proliferated on that platform.

That’s why ownership it’s so valuable that we must build new experiences that respect this principle.

Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum founder) invested a considerable amount of time playing the popular video game before. After three years of intense play, a centralized server change weakened his "beloved" World of Warcraft character. This is one of the reasons that encouraged him to create a new kind of Blockchain that could enable general-purpose decentralized applications.

Blockchain technology allow us to finally bring user ownership

There are other important principles to consider apart from ownership, like interoperability, composability and censorship resistance.

Today we can encapsulate digital goods in NFTs (non-fungible-token).

An NFT is a digital asset that can be owned,* shared* and sold on top of a Blockchain.

The NFT holder is the unique owner and nobody can deprive him from his digital good, finally bringing true ownership to digital platforms.

Since NFTs are based on a Blockchain, cryptocurrencies become the medium to exchange these digital goods. So we can say that cryptocurrencies become a consequence and not the cause for creating crypto-based games.

Some gamers reject crypto games because they focus on the word “crypto” and not on the important principles that derive from the use of the Blockchain technology.

Therefore we must invest an important amount of energy in explaining the values and principles we want to bring.

Interoperability is the ability of different systems, devices, applications or products to connect and communicate in a coordinated way, without effort from the end user.

Being able to let a user bring his virtual goods on multiple platforms is an important goal.

Today gaming experience is fragmented, most digital goods are enclosed in each individual game ecosystem. This is bad from a user perspective. Gaming companies think that letting users bring digital assets to other companies games could harm their business model. Maybe we just need to think about different business models around interoperability.

An important point of NFTs is that even if they give true ownership to users, NFT creators can still monetize secondary sales. That means that if the user bring digital assets to other platforms you still earn if that digital good is exchanged with other users.

With that thinking, even different virtual communities could exchange experiences and virtual goods, enriching every part of the equation.

Composability is a system design principle that deals with the inter-relationships of components. A highly composable system provides components that can be selected and assembled in various combinations to satisfy specific user requirements.

Composability in the Blockchain space mean developing open-source platforms that allow anyone build on top of those platforms. This is where we mention the concept of user generated content.

If we developed the tools for users to easily create and generate virtual goods, they could be creator themselves, and gaming companies could still earn with royalties.

Let’s make a comparison: Netflix and TikTok. They both compete for one thing, user attention, using video content. But if we talk about their business models, Netflix need to spend billions to create new video content. TikTok don't need to spend billions on that since content are user generated. Ultimately who has more chance to survive from the financial perspective?

In the future, gaming platforms with also user generated virtual goods have more chance against companies that need to spend to create any single digital asset.

Censorship resistance refers to the idea that no party can prevent anyone from participating in a given platform or network. In blockchain systems, censorship resistance guarantees that all regulations ruling a network are set and followed by users equally, and cannot be changed for personal gains.

• Free-to-play (F2P) means that there is no cost to purchase the software and there is no subscription charge. Variably applies to traditionally bought and forever available games

• Freemium (a portmanteau of free-to-play and premium) means that the majority or all of the game's content is available for free but players can pay for extra content, character customization, added perks or faster advancement into the game via micro-transactions. Freemium thus overlaps with both the free-to-play and pay-to-play models.

• Buy-to-play (B2P) means that the users can only play by purchasing the game, but there is no subsequent subscription fee for playing the game. These games may or may not include additional micro-transactions, or may sell additional content in the form of expansions instead of asking for an ongoing subscription fee.

• Pay-to-play (P2P) means that the game requires a monthly subscription fee or other ongoing fee in order to continue playing the game.

With the Blockchain, new business models have been developed, especially the concept of play-to-earn.

Play-to-earn games are online games that let players earn rewards with real-world value by completing tasks, battling other players and progressing through various game levels. These rewards come in the form of in-game assets like crypto tokens, virtual land, as well as skins, weapons and other NFTs.

Some users made life-changing earnings with play-to-earn economics, but usually, these types of game last for a short period of time, since they tend to reward mostly early adopters, like a Ponzi scheme, especially where game developers insisted with having their own token.

The problem is that those games use play-to-earn as the only way to bootstrap a group of individual people.

I say a group of people because it’s not the same thing as a community. A group of people to be defined as a community need to share at least one interest in a specific topic.

Successful crypto games need to be built around the principles described till now.

Actually no. Gaming companies try at any cost to design token emissions that could be sustainable, but it’s hard.

What a gaming companies should focus on is attracting virtual communities and creating valuable virtual goods that could be exchanged in a virtual environment. People could just use existing cryptocurrencies as a medium of exchange.

Less stress for the token design, more energy to invest for the development of engaging experiences.

Other important concepts are universal identities , universal logins and on-chain universal reputations, part of the interoperability principle. In one sentence, users could bring their digital identities, connections and achievements anywhere.

Thank you for reading my article, consider subscribing and following me for other Web3 contents.

You can follow me on Twitter and Instagram: @yayasoumah

collect://

A successful crypto game is first a virtual Community in which individuals can express themselves, own virtual goods and freely exchange virtual items in a virtual Economy, all on top of a censorship resistant platform.

We can define a virtual community as a group of people that share a common interest on one or more topics, exchanging ideas and experiences in a digital or virtual environment using electronic devices.

The first use of the term virtual community appeared in an article by Gene Youngblood written in 1984 but published in 1986 about Electronic Café (1984), an art project by artists Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz.

Electronic Café linked public locations in five different Los Angeles neighborhoods: South-Central (now called South LA), East LA, Koreatown, Venice Beach, and Downtown LA. Each site in this “telecollaborative network” was equipped with an array of communication devices that were futuristic for the time:

• a computer messaging system,

• searchable text and pictorial databases,

• image-exchange and audio-conferencing equipment,

• slow-scan television cameras, digital writing and drawing tablets,

• and high-resolution printers—all made available to local residents.

Visitors could post text and images, participate in conversations, appropriate and manipulate material from both mainstream media and users at other café sites, record and archive memories, histories, and encounters, and search and retrieve contributions from the expanding database. This ambitious project was part of the Olympic Arts Festival, a citywide multicultural celebration of “international brotherhood” meant to exemplify the spirit of the Olympic Games, hosted by Los Angeles that year.

Operating six hours a day for seven weeks, the project encouraged participants to use telecommunication technologies to critically engage the material and immaterial connections and divisions that existed across this notoriously sprawling and fragmented city.

Mobile Image, Electronic Café, Gumbo House site (South LA), 1984 (artwork © Kit Galloway; photograph provided by the Sherrie Rabinowitz and Kit Galloway Archive, Piñon Hills, CA)

Mobile Image, announcement card for Electronic Café, 1984 (announcement © Kit Galloway; scan provided by the Sherrie Rabinowitz and Kit Galloway Archive, Piñon Hills, CA)

Mobile Image, Electronic Café, Ana Maria site (East LA), 1984 (artwork © Kit Galloway; photograph provided by the Sherrie Rabinowitz and Kit Galloway Archive, Piñon Hills, CA)

Mobile Image, Electronic Café, photographic sheet with sign and five locations, Los Angeles, 1984 (photographs © Kit Galloway, provided by the Sherrie Rabinowitz and Kit Galloway Archive, Piñon Hills, CA)

Mobile Image, Electronic Café setup diagram, 1984 (diagram © Kit Galloway; scan provided by the Sherrie Rabinowitz and Kit Galloway Archive, Piñon Hills, CA)

Mobile Image, Electronic Café, various locations, 1984 (artwork © Kit Galloway; photographs provided by the Sherrie Rabinowitz and Kit Galloway Archive, Piñon Hills, CA)

The first broadcasts were the communities identifying themselves. Each café found it important to define their cultural identity through some kind of presentation or performance. They began to transmit images, icons and ideas that demonstrated the breadth and scope of their culture. They were very conscious of saying “This is who we are.” Blacks weren’t people who robbed liquor stores; they were poets.

Sherrie Rabinowitz

Many of the project’s myriad visual and textual manifestations were contained by its computerized bulletin board system (BBS). A customized version of Community Memory—the first public BBS, established in the mid-1970s in Berkeley, California—combined with a digital image bank, the platform allowed users to post text and pictures that could then be retrieved and commented on by other users. This not only enabled an exchange of information but also formed a cumulative, searchable database that could serve as a space for public interaction and identity formation according to the particular needs of the user—not as an autonomous individual, but as a social being with shareable concerns. It was explicitly designed to function as a flexible archive, a site for collecting alternate histories, and an arena for fresh forms of political organization.

Mobile Image. Electronic café network diagram with Community memory and optical disk recorder in center, 1894 (diagram © Kit Galloway; scan provided by the Sherrie Rabinowitz and Kit Galloway Archive, Piñon Hills, CA)

The first step to create a successful game is being able to attract a specific community, a virtual community that is truly interested in exchanging meaningful experiences. An experience in which anyone can express himself and be connected to other individuals, creating even new friendships.

How you letting people express themselves? Through a digital account? a character? an avatar?

Anything could be good if in someway let individuals identify and express themselves.

The first problem about some game designers is premature monetization. You don't think about converting something into money if you didn't thought about how to attract a virtual community.

Virtual economies usually begin with the ability to create digital goods that people can exchange in a virtual or a digital environment.

After creating a virtual community, the second step is thinking on how to create virtual goods that can be valuable for users.

Again, we always put users first, there's no selfishness when trying to build successful companies.

Virtual Economies in the early days

The virtual economy emerged in the early 1990s as the Internet and personal computing began to facilitate real-time interactions between disparately located users within mostly text-based gaming environments called Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs).

Traditional MUDs implement a role-playing video game set in a fantasy world populated by fictional races and monsters, with players choosing classes in order to gain specific skills or powers. The objective of this sort of game is to slay monsters, explore a fantasy world, complete quests, go on adventures, create a story by roleplaying, and advance the created character.

MUDs anticipated Massive MultiPlayer Online Role Playing Games (MMPORPGs), in which a large number of players compete or cooperate with one another in a fantasy virtual world. The advent of MMPORPGs led to significant advancements in the range and complexity of virtual goods.

Game publishers generally discouraged the formal sale of goods generated within these platforms but were relatively helpless to prevent the informal sale of currency, avatars, weapons, and other items.

This resulted in both the emergence of a significant grey market for virtual goods and emerging business models from publishers seeking to capitalise on user demand for virtual items.

The market for virtual goods grew rapidly, surpassing $1 billion by the early 2000s. By the end of the decade, the market was valued at $7.3 billion, a figure that would double within three years. As the various markets grew, so too did the opportunities to find employment in the servicing, acquisition or brokerage of these goods.

In 2003, San Francisco-based Linden Labs opened a new virtual world called Second Life. It was a social platform designed jointly by the users and publishers. For the first time, Second Life gave people space to create, socialize and collaborate free of objectives or linear restrictions set by the publisher. It was and is an organic nation built in the virtual world, with residents who express themselves in extraordinary ways, including through enterprise and commercial endeavors.

Second Life has produced a raft of entrepreneurial success stories. It showed almost 20 years ago how virtual environments could supplement or even replace real-world earnings. It remains the forebear of the sophisticated decentralized platforms that have given rise to a new type of virtual good that could be identified, traced and unique. This has led to a boom in virtual collectables, gambling, and curiously, virtual real estate.

Virtual Economies have been successful in the past 20 years, but there's something missing in all his mechanics and iterations, user ownership.

In a typical game infrastructure, the game developer is the true unique owner of any existing virtual good. That means that at any moment the game developer can deprive a user from the ability to connect to the platform, therefore the user loses any digital good associated with that single digital account. Not just virtual goods, but also the time invested, friendships and connections to the virtual community proliferated on that platform.

That’s why ownership it’s so valuable that we must build new experiences that respect this principle.

Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum founder) invested a considerable amount of time playing the popular video game before. After three years of intense play, a centralized server change weakened his "beloved" World of Warcraft character. This is one of the reasons that encouraged him to create a new kind of Blockchain that could enable general-purpose decentralized applications.

Blockchain technology allow us to finally bring user ownership

There are other important principles to consider apart from ownership, like interoperability, composability and censorship resistance.

Today we can encapsulate digital goods in NFTs (non-fungible-token).

An NFT is a digital asset that can be owned,* shared* and sold on top of a Blockchain.

The NFT holder is the unique owner and nobody can deprive him from his digital good, finally bringing true ownership to digital platforms.

Since NFTs are based on a Blockchain, cryptocurrencies become the medium to exchange these digital goods. So we can say that cryptocurrencies become a consequence and not the cause for creating crypto-based games.

Some gamers reject crypto games because they focus on the word “crypto” and not on the important principles that derive from the use of the Blockchain technology.

Therefore we must invest an important amount of energy in explaining the values and principles we want to bring.

Interoperability is the ability of different systems, devices, applications or products to connect and communicate in a coordinated way, without effort from the end user.

Being able to let a user bring his virtual goods on multiple platforms is an important goal.

Today gaming experience is fragmented, most digital goods are enclosed in each individual game ecosystem. This is bad from a user perspective. Gaming companies think that letting users bring digital assets to other companies games could harm their business model. Maybe we just need to think about different business models around interoperability.

An important point of NFTs is that even if they give true ownership to users, NFT creators can still monetize secondary sales. That means that if the user bring digital assets to other platforms you still earn if that digital good is exchanged with other users.

With that thinking, even different virtual communities could exchange experiences and virtual goods, enriching every part of the equation.

Composability is a system design principle that deals with the inter-relationships of components. A highly composable system provides components that can be selected and assembled in various combinations to satisfy specific user requirements.

Composability in the Blockchain space mean developing open-source platforms that allow anyone build on top of those platforms. This is where we mention the concept of user generated content.

If we developed the tools for users to easily create and generate virtual goods, they could be creator themselves, and gaming companies could still earn with royalties.

Let’s make a comparison: Netflix and TikTok. They both compete for one thing, user attention, using video content. But if we talk about their business models, Netflix need to spend billions to create new video content. TikTok don't need to spend billions on that since content are user generated. Ultimately who has more chance to survive from the financial perspective?

In the future, gaming platforms with also user generated virtual goods have more chance against companies that need to spend to create any single digital asset.

Censorship resistance refers to the idea that no party can prevent anyone from participating in a given platform or network. In blockchain systems, censorship resistance guarantees that all regulations ruling a network are set and followed by users equally, and cannot be changed for personal gains.

• Free-to-play (F2P) means that there is no cost to purchase the software and there is no subscription charge. Variably applies to traditionally bought and forever available games

• Freemium (a portmanteau of free-to-play and premium) means that the majority or all of the game's content is available for free but players can pay for extra content, character customization, added perks or faster advancement into the game via micro-transactions. Freemium thus overlaps with both the free-to-play and pay-to-play models.

• Buy-to-play (B2P) means that the users can only play by purchasing the game, but there is no subsequent subscription fee for playing the game. These games may or may not include additional micro-transactions, or may sell additional content in the form of expansions instead of asking for an ongoing subscription fee.

• Pay-to-play (P2P) means that the game requires a monthly subscription fee or other ongoing fee in order to continue playing the game.

With the Blockchain, new business models have been developed, especially the concept of play-to-earn.

Play-to-earn games are online games that let players earn rewards with real-world value by completing tasks, battling other players and progressing through various game levels. These rewards come in the form of in-game assets like crypto tokens, virtual land, as well as skins, weapons and other NFTs.

Some users made life-changing earnings with play-to-earn economics, but usually, these types of game last for a short period of time, since they tend to reward mostly early adopters, like a Ponzi scheme, especially where game developers insisted with having their own token.

The problem is that those games use play-to-earn as the only way to bootstrap a group of individual people.

I say a group of people because it’s not the same thing as a community. A group of people to be defined as a community need to share at least one interest in a specific topic.

Successful crypto games need to be built around the principles described till now.

Actually no. Gaming companies try at any cost to design token emissions that could be sustainable, but it’s hard.

What a gaming companies should focus on is attracting virtual communities and creating valuable virtual goods that could be exchanged in a virtual environment. People could just use existing cryptocurrencies as a medium of exchange.

Less stress for the token design, more energy to invest for the development of engaging experiences.

Other important concepts are universal identities , universal logins and on-chain universal reputations, part of the interoperability principle. In one sentence, users could bring their digital identities, connections and achievements anywhere.

Thank you for reading my article, consider subscribing and following me for other Web3 contents.

You can follow me on Twitter and Instagram: @yayasoumah

collect://