Welcome to a wiki on (what we’re currently calling) “privacy playgrounds”.
This is a living set of documents - hopefully a practical resource - outlining various hidden information mechanics found in games, and high-level proposals for recreating them in the context of a trustless network, such as a fully onchain game backend. Our hope is that this educates and inspires you to add hidden information to your next onchain game.
<aside> 🙂 This doc assumes that you have a good grasp on the whole “why fully onchain game backend?” question. For more on this, see an overview here.
</aside>
TL;DR - Game worlds live on hidden information, but public blockchain backends present some gnarly technical obstacles. ZK is not a one-size-fits-all solution and to inject autonomous worlds with mystery digital physics we need more exotic cryptographic techniques. If we want the fully onchain gaming category to get off the ground with engaging, balanced gameplay, we need to bridge the existing world of privacy techniques generated from DeFi to the emerging onchain gaming scene. Furthermore, encoding private information into onchain game worlds is our best bet for encoding private information into social autonomous worlds at large, beyond gaming. This could unlock a new category of dapps, untested today, that depend on secure channels for sensitive information and public blockchains to play nice together.
Let’s dive in!
<aside> 🙂 Eternal Privacy Playgrounds
1 - Why your game needs hidden information
2 - An ontology of hidden information mechanics
3 - An ontology of trustless privacy techniques
4 - Knitting our ontologies together
</aside>
<aside> 🙂 With thanks to stimulus from the entire onchain gaming scene, most of whom are captured here. Special shoutouts to those who have provided ongoing feedback - Flynn, Conquest, Playmint, Asphodel/Kamigotchi, Mithraeum, CometShock, Lyron Co Ting Keh and many wonderful cryptographers (grjte, and the folk at Aztec & Geometry). Please dm @_bazlightyear for attribution if I’ve missed someone. We stand on the shoulders of giants!
</aside>
We’d love your feedback and thoughts:
@tonk_gg
@_bazlightyear
@goblinoats