Topic: Bitcoin Alternate Reality Game: The world is your playground (Read 773 times)

That's not an ARG. It's a Parallel World Game.

These are basic rules for a decentralized Bitcoin based ARG. This is a draft for a game that requires no maintenance, doesn't need to be run by anybody and requires no trust.

What is an alternate reality game?
An ARG is a type of game that is carried out in the real world, where each participant represents a player, usually following a pre-defined storyline. In an ARG, actions, missions and events are carried out in the real world, also using real objects most of the time.

Bitcoin ARG
As a player of the Bitcoin game your objective is to survive in a world full of dangers that want to take you out. Create your own clans, secure your area and watch your back when going out. Everyone could be an enemy.

Rules

1. Every player must have a private key with, at least, a preset amount of bitcoins. This represents the player's life and active status in the game.

2. When in game mode, players wear a button, badge, pin, symbol or bracelet that other players recognize and identifies them as "currently playing". This sets their PVP status to ON. Obviously they can choose to take it off when unavailable, at work, etc. in order to set their PVP status as OFF.

Players can decide to form alliances or factions to help each other out.

3. Players who are spotted in the wild can be challenged to a duel. The combat is carried out with plain rock paper scissors, hence no equipment needed. Alternatively, if both parties agree, the duel can be carried out in a different form: Chess, Video Games, sports competition, etc.

4. The player or group of playerst that wins the duel obtains the other's side private keys and defeated players are removed from the game.

5. Defeated players may decide to re-enter the game at any point, but it would obviously cost them the price of a new private key. Depending on the established amount, dying might be affordable or not.

Combat rules

For Rock, Paper, Scissors combat, which is the default if no other duel method is agreed upon.

In a 1 vs 1 situation: The first player to beat the other in a rock, paper, scissors throw wins.

Brawl (two opposing teams): Each team sorts their players from first to last. The first players of each team battle each other. The winner stays and faces the second player of the opposing team. And so on until all of the opposing players have been defeated.

The members of the losing team are all dead and must hand over their private keys. The members of the winning team are all alive (whether or not they have been defeated during the combat).

Players can choose to join a battle, flee or even defect and switch sides at any moment until the whole battle is carried out.

Faction Rules

Each faction is required to have a heart. This is a small object or token tied to the identity of the faction and usually containing a private key of its own. The faction publicly announces what their heart is and it is then carried by the leader. If the leader is defeated, then he must hand it over to the winning party.

Factions can establish their power and honor by winning over hearts from enemy factions. This can be easily verified thanks to the blockchain since the public address of each faction's heart is known. They can then transfer the funds to their own heart, making it stronger. (And maybe giving a battle advantage?)


Possible expansions

This is the basic outline of the game. With some technology it would be possible to create a database of players or associate each player with a specific bitcoin address, so that the life and death of the players could be monitored: address is emptied = player died.

Also, eventually a story would be needed and an objective, other than just defeating everybody. Maybe something that would require players to actually work together. Anyways, associating BTC with lives make it easy to penalyze death depending on the amount needed to re-enter the game.

It's a pity that Bitcoin 2013 convention is now over. It would have been a nice game to play there.

What do you think?