Topic: Should a Bitcoin based coin for gaming/gamification be developed? (Read 1449 times)

It is redundant.

Basically there are only two things, all the rest is merely denominations, flavours etc of those two things.

There are things/value inside the game and there are things/value outside the game.

Things outside can permeate, because inside the game is also itself embedded into the outside of the game, so the outside of the game valuables often tend to have more influence inside the game than the amount of influence value inside the game has over things outside the game.

Any outside the game valuables/currencies suffice to sell off stuff in one game and buy stuff in another game with the proceeds.

Any existing blockchain based currency can be used, or fiat can be used, but fiat has all kinds of problems, really, too much regulations and crap around it. But it is pointless to try to restrict games to any particular blockchain-based currency, they can each use any or all of them, there is no need to try to pretend one of them is "for games" any more or less than any other is.

In the Galactic Milieu we even just cast the blockchain based currencies as being part of the game, just like the planet known as Earth, this planet that we are on, is also part of the game. (We are just another planet among many planets.) This blurring or vanishing of "the fourth wall" is common in so-called A.R.G. (Alternate Reality Game) type games; the everyday world around us is regarded, at least in the game, as being part of the game. Thus all currencies and all cryptocurrencies are also part of the game.

In the Galactic Milieu it is assumed the "Hacker" civilisation invented blockchains, the Martians obtained the technology from them to create their national currency Martian BotCoin and also passed along the technology to the Brits and Canucks who used it to make their own currencies, United Kingdom Britcoin (UKB) and Canadian Digital Notes (CDN). As the technology spread, more and more currencies ended up using it.

The original, assumed to be the national currency of the "Hacker" civilisation, is of course Bitcoin.

Since various agents / agencies of the Milieu have been active upon this supposedly-mythical planet known as Earth since back when they gave Churchill the technology to win the Battle of Britain (by building a top secret "Wonder of the World" that causes air units to be created as "veteran" units from their inception), the technology has also reached Earth.

It is suspected that "Satoshi Nakamoto" was/is a Time Cadet deployed by the or a Institute of Chronodynamics to effect certain changes in the timelines hereabouts...

-MarkM-

That is why there should be an exchange rate between games and that is why not every game has to support Xcoin. In many games that is a good thing. If you put in X amount of time to become fabulously wealthy in one game such as for example Diablo 2 and then Diablo 3 comes out and you want to transfer your wealth from Diablo 2 to Diablo 3 you should be able to. The exchange rate can be high enough to discourage a person or there can be a limit to how much a person an transfer.

The way things are now people already use USD to do this so nothing would change. The integrity of Diablo 2? Diablo 2 always had people using USD to buy accounts or buy in game items. It's really simple, many games will have to be redesigned and also not every game will support something like this but ultimately if players really want to make these trades they will regardless of if the game supports it. Nothing stops me from setting up a site right now to let people bid on in game characters with wealth and items in exchange for Bitcoin.

So I do see your argument but I don't think that just because some games would be ruined for you that we shouldn't have an Xcoin at all. The ability to transfer results or wealth between games is incredibly useful and I don't think you've factored it all in how much it could change gaming but not only gaming but the entire economy and how we live. You will have people who will get wealthy in the game world and in the real world at the same time. Why wouldn't we want this as gamers?

Now think of the potential of ARGs. With an ARG you can literally create games which solve real world problems and people can get paid and get wealthy playing those games. The only thing missing is the universal global virtual currency to connect all the different serious game networks together. A serious game is a gamification which solves a real world or serious problem. Diablo 2 and Diablo 3 don't really solve any real world problems. That being said even if they don't solve real world problems and while I do not want these less than serious games to be ruined I would put priority on the serious games because those games can fundamentally change our world and the economy.

Here you go http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_reality_game
                 http://www.argn.com/tag/serious_games/

Please do some research into ARGs if you don't know how important they are. Just as Bitcoin and the Internet can change the world ARGs can fundamentally change what work is. It is a development such as this which would make Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies mainstream as everyone would want to play some ARG at some point and would have to buy the coins and spend them within the context of the game.


Yep , that is what I was thinking. But I don't know enough about colored coins as I have not seen anything actually implement the concept, I would say that yes it's related. I don't think it should use BTC but something which is based around it but somehow more suitable to ARGs and games.  Namecoin is something I was thinking about as well as having interesting properties for something like this. This thread isn't a technical thread, it's a thought experiment to see if the Bitcoin community is ready for something like this and to see how it would be received.

So what happens when player 1 decides to play game abc and becomes fabulously wealthy. Then game xyz comes out and player 1 is automatically the best player in the game before anyone has a chance to do anything simply because player 1 has a massive bankroll coming in from abc. This is the real issue with creating a universal currency. It causes you to ruin the integrity of a stand alone game. For example, is it fair if I go run 500 bots on Diablo 2 then trade all those items off for some currency and then trade that currency for all of the best gear in World of Warcraft? (This is currently happening btw and it hurts both games)

Maybe this could be implemented using colored coins, either using btc or on an alt coin blockchain.

It wouldn't be a currency but more a meta currency store of value which would apply to all any game which adopts it as it's virtual currency. This means for instance if you play one game as an early player and you get a lot of coins then yes you would be able to transfer them to another game but this could be managed by having an exchange rate between the different games. This exchange rate between games could actually fund development of the games. But what if it's an ARG? Well in that case you buy a bunch of X coins and then you trade them in for the specific currency of the ARG? The point is with Xcoin people would be able to take their money out of each any game and store their winnings in a completely new safe deflationary decentralized currency as a store of value. So you make a lot of virtual money in an online RPG with an in game currency which is Xcoin, when you stop playing that game you don't have to lose all the money you earned in that game. When you put the money into your Xcoin wallet it has Proof of Stake so it gains 1% interest like PPcoin and it's deflationary like Bitcoin so the money you save from gaming can actually go from being pennies, to tens of dollars, to hundreds of dollars, to eventually thousands of dollars. This alone would revolutionize gaming because if you play well in one game and get a lot of e-cash you'd be able to take it to another similar game so long as that other adopts Xcoin and sets a reasonable rate of exchange. The purpose of Xcoin is to have one unified coin so that  games people play and earn money, points or whatever in, all of that can be legitimately monetized, by being turned into Xcoins, and even if those games get canceled or they never play it again they don't lose their time investment. The end result is a niche economy where people get paid to play games and a portion of that goes to support the game economy which benefits developers and infrastructure.

Just an idea and I don't have it all worked out as this is more a thought experiment at this point in time. But I do think it's possible in theory to do it which is why it's worth thinking about.

To think about it more clearly let me first define the main goal. The main goal is to allow gamers of all types and of any game to make a living from playing games. To accomplish this goal most effectively we would need a unified global virtual currency for games which any game could make use of. This way users could purchase this currency with Bitcoin or with dollars and have in game currency for any game they play whether it's an online game or an ARG.

This way they wont need to purchase different currencies for different games by closed source companies which completely centralize and dominate the economy. Do you catch my drift? I'm saying I want for people to be able to take their WoW dollars, Second Life dollars, or whatever these millions of gamers are earning in each of their games and put it in an Xcoin format and into an Xcoin wallet and while it's saved in the Xcoin format it should gain in value as Bitcoin currently does yet have interest like POS based PPCoin will have. I'm saying lets liberate gamers from restrictive centralized in game economies by creating a platform independent, developer independent, open, decentralized meta currency, so that all of those in game economies are controlled by the players themselves and not a developer. Yes developers should have a right to set an exchange rate high enough so that there is no incentive to flood their game with money but other games it makes perfect sense to be able to take your winnings from one game to another.

A Deflationary in-game currency?
How this would work? Early adopters of the game would have lots of this currency letting nothing to the guys that were late to the party.
This would also lead to the coin hoarding, letting the in-game market frozen, knowing that the itens and services they want would cost more if they buy now.

T I N A G

I suppose individual game developers could choose to use the currency or not. I don't see how it's a bad idea just because you wouldn't use it. Also what about for ARG's (alternate reality gaming)?

perhaps you'll find this interesting:

https://github.com/shamaniotas/yotagem/wiki

note: be sure to check out the other 'pages' in the wiki

i also have a working prototype, but have set this project aside temporarily as I have to complete another project that popped up first...i should resume work on this within the next 60 days or so...

Speaking as a professional game developer, I'd be against this idea. Adding a unified currency into any game creates a very restrictive environment and adding it to a game which has a system where those purchases create advantages for the player makes this worse. In the gaming community this is known as "Pay To Win" or P2W and is currently frowned upon. Diablo 3 gets a lot of flak for this.

The purpose would be to allow game makers to utilize this unified virtual currency which can then be traded into BTC. If this unified virtual currency is adopted by enough games and is deflationary enough, it could be highly sought after within each of the games it's implemented in.

Say if a future WoW had the new Xcoin instead of WoW gold and lets say a bunch of mainstream game makers agree to use this currency, but let's say this currency is also deflationary, could it work?

The purpose of this coin would be the gamification of work. This coin could be used in any video game, or ARG to provide a currency so that the gamers could make real money just as sports athletes, prize fighters and others make a living from their games. Of course this will not happen overnight, but if there can be Devcoin why not Xcoin?