<aside> 🙂 Eternal Privacy Playgrounds

1 - Why your game needs hidden information

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Can we build a bridge?

In 2023, applied cryptographers and game designers are facing a single problem, from opposite sides of a gaping chasm. The gulf between their design spaces is enormous. It’s really hard to translate the needs and capabilities of each role across the divide. Relatively few people are well-versed in both sophisticated game mechanics and the suite of cryptographic privacy-enhancing technologies - that, let’s not forget, was largely sponsored to solve problems in DeFi rather than, say, hiding player inventories in onchain games.

These cryptographic primitives do make relatively simple mechanisms possible, such as Dark Forest’s fog of war, or Battleship. However, there’s a rich world of hidden information mechanics that these don’t account for.

This leaves us in a problematic scenario where game studios have limited visibility on which sorts of hidden information mechanic are possible. Consequently, studios are designing games from the ground up in a way that doesn’t require them. This does enable games to reach production, but only those that are inherently constrained in their ability to handle secret information that’s baked into the world (as opposed to hiding in the skulls of human players).

Baking hidden information into autonomous game worlds is really important, for three reasons:

1. Hidden information is vital for making games fun and engaging. In a sense, almost all gameplay involves strategic decision-making in risky, fuzzy, incomplete information environments. Almost all of the most popular games of the last century contained hidden information in their core mechanic.
2. Hidden information is vital for making games balanced and sustainable. Permissionless, financialised game worlds are especially vulnerable to sophisticated teams of players and bots that grind the game primarily to make money. When this category really takes off, the distinction between professional esports teams, and hedge funds, may start to blur! But games won’t work if they’re not balanced, and robust hidden information mechanics that obfuscate the paths to economic victory will be a vital rebalancing mechanism to level the playing field and repeatedly breathe fresh life into autonomous worlds.
3. Hidden information is vital for the future internet. Unlike DeFi where the objective is simply to conceal transaction information, the complexity of designing hidden information mechanics for game worlds maps to the complexity of designing hidden information mechanics for human social worlds. If we are to recreate social networks, labour relations and identity systems on the open, decentralised web - if autonomous worlds are to propagate beyond gaming - we need a privacy sandbox to battle-test privacy primitives for onchain compute. Game worlds are that privacy playground we’ve been searching for.

Let’s see if we can build that bridge.