Dialogue with Mask Network: Why did the whole chain game suddenly become popular?

At the time when CreatorCamp was registering, a heated discussion on blockchain games took place inside CreatorCamp S1, focusing on the transition from 2.0 to 3.0, talking with Huofeng Chen Yuetian “Only 3% of 167 high-quality game companies have transformed into Web3｜Dialogue with Huofeng Chen Yuetian” , Talking about the whole chain game, Tian Tian, the head of Ecology and Investment of Mask Network, what new thinking and actions does he have as a firm believer in on chain game? The following is a partial record of the content on August 1:

**Wanwudao:****How did the full-chain game develop? What stage are you in now ****? **

Today I will mainly share with you the development history of the whole chain of games, starting with the current two main camps, Dark Forest and Loot. I believe that anyone who has been in the industry for a long time has at least heard of one of them. Many people think this thing when they know them. It’s awesome, but it seems that I don’t know what to do. In the whole chain of game ecology, the development process of these two leading projects from birth to the present is a very interesting history. After you understand this history, you can It will be clearer why the whole chain game exists, what is its significance, value and audience**.

Let’s first look at the Dark Forest ecosystem, including 0xPARC, Lattice and Mud full-chain game engines. The Loot ecology first had Loot, an amazing text-only NFT, and then grew some projects, including DopeWar, Realms and Dojo full-chain game engines, so that Dark Forest and Loot also derived the current two major game engines Ecological Mud and Dojo, if compared with Web2**I think Mud is more like Unity, and Dojo is more like Unreal Engine. **

Dark Forest was originally written by Brian Gu alone in 20 years. He was a junior at the time and was also working at the Ethereum Foundation. During the research process, he found that ZK was very interesting, and then he just wanted to make a game. ZK It came in handy.

There is something called the fog of war in the centralized game. The fog of war means that on a game map, you can only see the people nearby, but not the whole map, and you don’t know where your enemies are. You have to explore by yourself, similar to Yu Hongjing, it is very simple to do this centrally, but it is very difficult to do decentralization, because the chain is open and transparent, but ZK can actually help you hide some information, so he uses the ZK method in the The fog of war was done on the chain, and the word Dark Forest itself was indeed inspired by the Three-Body Problem. He made a spaceship like the Three-Body Problem to explore the new world. ZK was used to hide the location. , this game has been in operation from the end of 2020 to the beginning of 22, with an average of one to two months for a round of battles. In the early stage, there may be only a few hundred people, and in the later stage, there may be thousands of people, but there are only six to seven thousand cumulative addresses in total.

Everyone feels that this is a very cool and interesting thing. After all, it is a game form that has never been encountered before. Before when everyone did not distinguish between full chain and incomplete chain, their understanding of Web3 games was GameFi, but Dark Forest is different from the previous GameFi. It has no economic model and no NFT. It’s just a bunch of young technical geniuses who pay some relatively low transaction costs to play happily, because ZK’s hidden location is actually a You can run computing power, and you can dig with your GPU. If you can mine faster, you will have a greater advantage in battle. Geniuses come in every day trying to beat others.

Of course, the corresponding thing is that ordinary people are actually not so friendly to play. The initial interface is relatively broken. I personally played it at the end of the early 20s. I also thought it was quite interesting, but I gave up after playing for half an hour. It’s normal, I don’t know how many people have played it in the early days and what kind of impression they have.

In general, it is a new game that is at the core of Ethereum and uses ZK’s most cutting-edge technology. Everything is written on the chain, which has inspired a lot of young talents Come in and explore, not just play games, but let them explore all kinds of new uses of ZK. When they operated until the beginning of 22, they felt that although Dark Forest had also developed a very complete plug-in ecosystem, if this thing continued to rotate, the upper limit was not high, and then they saw a broader application prospect of ZK, So a new organization called 0xPARC was established, mainly to do research institutes in the direction of ZK, and several awesome ZK projects came out of it. If you follow ZK, you may know it, and it actually originated from The founder of Dark Forest is also Brian Gu. If I’m not mistaken, Brian Gu and Blur’s boss Pacman are from the same MIT class, and they are both young about 98 years old.

At one time, they wanted to devote 80% of their energy to ZK and 20% to games, but later found that full-chain games are also very interesting, and then changed their energy to half ZK and half full-chain games. The branch of full-chain games is called Lattice. A game engine like Mud.

The Mud full-chain game engine is also inspired by Dark Forest, because Dark Forest is written directly on the blockchain, which is actually quite difficult to develop, and basically cannot be changed in the future, because there are many troublesome things to interact with the blockchain , so they thought that they should abstract the Dark Forest experience into a framework or call it an engine for more people to use, and then made Mud.

**They also created a very good word called Autonomous World for the whole chain game. **What’s so good about this word, let me explain it a little bit. One is Autonomous, which is A in DAO, using blockchain to realize an automatic and autonomous infrastructure. World is not only the whole world, but also a designated As long as it has some specific rules, for example, Harry Potter is a world, and Romance of the Three Kingdoms is another world. So in general, as long as it is a world with specified rules and automatic execution, it conforms to the definition of Autonomous World, and it actually tastes like the earlier Metaverse. I personally think that the term Autonomous World may become Metaverse in a year, but generally speaking, it is a very well-created term that covers many things, including games, nft, defi, and dao, because aw is also going to do it Governance also requires a financial system, which is also in line with eth’s vision of building a Network state. Another distinction made by mud people is that defi is a simple on-chain application, and aw is a complex on-chain application

The first example was also officially made by them in November 2022. It is called OPCraft. It is a simple fork of MineCraft running on the OP chain. Basically, your various actions in MineCraft, such as digging a piece of land, are all Actions on the chain, but a particularly interesting thing was born in OPCraft, which allows players to set some rules on it, and then there is a player who sets a rule similar to staking, saying that everyone can surrender and take what you have Resources are added to a certain country, and then they can become citizens of this country at the same time, enjoying the same rights to these assets and land. It is a bit communist, and many people want to try it out, and the result is really formed. The communist society on the chain is very interesting here. In fact, it is very simple from the perspective of writing the rules, but after writing the rules, everyone really joins and has the taste of an autonomous world. The later, more important time point is also after they finished Mud V2 in May, they held a relatively large hackathon, and 109 submissions came in at once. As far as I know, eight Chinese teams have submitted.

Another Mod official project is called Sky Strife. It is a real-time strategy game. Each leads troops to attack the opponent’s position, but four people are required to be online at the same time. They often organize a play test once a week. The two-hour time range You can come and play inside, but it is difficult to get 4 people in the rest of the time. Of course, the number of people is also very telling. In fact, not many people can get started with the whole chain of games.

Loot was created a little later. At the end of August 21, it was the first text-type NFT. Before that, the bull market had lasted for about two months, so when Loot appeared, it was already in the second half of the bull market. Before that, NFTs only had avatars. At this time, Loot’s vacancy still gave the industry a lot of novelty. He also said that he deliberately did not draw pictures, so he left room for everyone’s imagination. There are eight equipment on each Loot NFT through text. The way to describe it, everyone thinks that this thing has unlimited imagination space. In fact, no one paid attention to it in the first few days after it appeared, but I remember that people bought it from the third day, and I bought it on the fifth day.

Later, someone made a simple fork based on Loot, and some of them may have more ideas and want to do some specific things in it. A total of hundreds of derivative projects have come in, most of them are scam projects, and they disappear after one to three months. , but the quality of about 20 projects left is quite good, and they together constitute the entire complete ecology of Loot. Among them, there are four important NFTs. The first is the common character of Loot itself, and the second is Genesis Adventurer, understood as an advanced role, the third realm is a large land, including Chang’an, Luoyang, Suzhou, etc., and the fourth crypts and caverns is a small map. At the beginning, a small map of dungeons was made in it. This is a A separate and particularly interesting project, he wants to create 8,000 random maps to make it a universal map, and hopes that all kinds of dungeon games around the world will use the same map. You can arrange and combine them yourself.

These are the four key projects of the Loot ecology, and there are other more interesting projects to supplement the ecology, including building houses, passages, experience points, etc. Putting these together will form a relatively complete, A bit like the new world of Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

And you think in reverse, if you were asked to create a new world at the level of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, how would you create it? Are you going to write a book like the author of Romance of the Three Kingdoms again? From my point of view, first post an NFT with only text, which arouses everyone’s imagination, and then fills it with things, and finally has the opportunity to make something of the next Romance of the Three Kingdoms level.

Dojo was made on StarkNet by Realm, Cartridge and Briq. They saw that Mud was doing well, so they forked a version at the end of 22. Because StarkNet is not EVM, they rewrote it. It is pure Compatible with ZK, that is, you only need to program it and it will automatically convert it to what ZK needs for you. It can be proved in every step, which is an important attribute of ZK.

In general, its advantages include that the ecology is not just games, and its developer community is very loyal and powerful. There are three flagship projects, one is the most famous StarkNet EVM Kakarot, then Madara as a sorter, and finally It is Dojo, which is a game engine. Recently, StarkNet also announced that it will be an application chain, and Madara and Dojo may be directly integrated in it.

Another advantage of Dojo is that its own team is relatively complete, and there are several projects with complete teams and IPs in the Dojo ecosystem, such as Influence Space Games. Although the level of hackathon may be two months slower than that of Mud, the core game team of the Dojo series is more mature than that of the Mud series. Generally speaking, most of the projects in Mud are partial to hackathon teams. The quality is not high, but the quantity up bigger.

The first game on Dojo is Loot Survivor, which is a relatively light-weight game. It is made for everyone to try. Its general logic is that you can manipulate a Loot character, and then meet a monster and then fight it. Adding equipment to yourself is a classic arcade game, because it is all made by the original crew of the Loot department, so it also completely inherits the entire set of Loot settings, including countries, races, generals and advisors.

The above is taking Dark Forest and Loot as examples to explain the development history of the full-chain game. The PPT link for this sharing is as follows, and you can read it further:

**Wanwudao: Why did you enter the full-chain game in the early stage and stay firmly? **

For me, part of the reason is that I bought Loot early and have been in the community for a long time. In addition, I found out that this field is quite amazing. Simply put, the full-chain game in 2023 is very similar to Defi, Cefi and Defi in 2019. GameFi is a semi-centralized thing, which made everyone initially realize that the blockchain is very interesting and can do many things, but in the end everyone also found that they are both half-baked. If you want to do new projects now, you will definitely switch to Defi. Seeing the prospect of Defi.

StepN still set off a big wave of enthusiasm, but it finally cooled down, but if there is no such process, it will not cause everyone to realize that the whole chain game is the next big thing, **so the process from Cefi to Defi is GameFi to GameFi The process of the whole chain game. **

And just now I mentioned that full chain games are complex applications on the chain, and Defi is only a simple application on the chain, so there is also a sense of judgment.

Everyone will divide Defi into two camps. One is projects that have taken money from big American VCs, and the other is driven by the community or even fair launch. An analogy is very interesting. Mud feels very similar to the first one. The son of Ethereum is Genzhengmiaohong, and Dojo is obviously community-driven.

As for Mask’s participation in the whole chain of games, I personally only bought some Loots at first, and later invested in some StarkNet ecological game projects by accident, so I came into contact with StarkNet’s five flagship projects at a relatively early stage. Four. Then at the end of 2022, everyone gradually discovered that the full-chain games on StarkNet seemed to be pretty good. Everyone knows that Mask is for social networking, but we actually have a lot of social components or protocols here, and we have also invested in a lot of application layers. The main thing related to Autonomous World is to put the things in the Mask protocol layer, such as Mask Our own product is Next ID, which can help you bring together various identities on various chains. The application direction in the whole chain game is actually very easy to understand. For example, in the first game, you may reach level 100. , you are a very high-quality player, so the second game will deliberately attract you to say that you can start from level 30, which is an application that DID can use in it.

The second is Web3MQ, which is a communication layer protocol. It can not only communicate from person to person, but also from machine to machine. Specifically, it can be used in games to become a message solution across different games.

The third is an application layer product of MetaForo’s forum, which specifically does things such as a fair grant voting platform and subsequent related autonomous events, so it is a solution related to community governance.

The fourth is RSS3 as a feed. Take the most classical example in the application scenario of the game field. Your Qzone or Renren will notify you that your food has just been stolen. These are actually things that can be done in the game feed.

So this covers a relatively complete set of things we want to do in the whole chain. I think that in general social and games are not separated. I often say that Mask may want to be the Tencent in the Web3 world. Now that I have Autonomous World, I think this story is more likely. In the past, it was the social part of Tencent, and later it was a very powerful presence of Tencent’s war investment. Now with the game part of Tencent, I think it’s not bad. It’s more logical.

**In the ecology of full-chain games, relatively few investors have received investment. Generally speaking, it is still in a very early state, so everyone is mainly in the state of grant. **

**Wanwudao: The narrative of the whole chain is far away from the Chinese ecology. Any suggestions? **

The whole chain is not only a narrative, everyone still wants to do something, but the whole chain is also a place to talk about narrative, Mud coined the word Autonomous World, and Loot itself is a huge narrative . It is very difficult for Chinese to create their own narratives for Europeans and Americans. You can do things in the existing narratives. There are indeed examples suitable for Chinese entrepreneurs, such as the MetaForo forum I mentioned just now. I was the one who helped them connect, so after mixing in the community deeply enough, you can see that there are opportunities to do things in it.

In addition, I also told many friends who went to Paris that you can try to block the door directly, find a way to communicate with the bosses who are doing the whole chain, try to make contributions based on their development, and join them first to get things done.

The Loot ecology itself is a big funnel. At the beginning, 300 or more air projects came in, and then about 30 of them were doing relatively well. After a year, most of the 30 had no money, leaving a few This is for love. Such a huge loophole will leave a very powerful project in the end. Although Mud does not raise funds, I am willing to give Mud a valuation of 300 to 500 million US dollars. It can be seen that I think it is slightly worse for Dojo, but it must be 200 to 300 million. So the last things left by such a funnel have been built into a complete set of flavors for this Loot version of Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

But I personally think that Mud does not have an IP. It is a big flaw, but the orthodox performance of Mud ensures that it attracts enough thousands of developers to make things on it. And the core big IP of Loot on Dojo can attract many people, and especially for Chinese projects, basically every project faces a big problem of how to do Western marketing. One of the great advantages of being in the Loot ecology is that you can participate in it relatively early in the projects that are financed by Western good money. After the ecology is established, Westerners will come in by themselves. In other places, you have to recreate an IP to let the Americans I think this is a good thing for you.

For example, StepN is basically a Chinese IP. In fact, not many Americans know what StepN is doing, but although Loot has been deserted for a while, when everyone comes back, they will feel that they are still working after two years. If someone really makes something, there will be a lot of western tap water. Especially for Chinese entrepreneurs, this can solve a lot of problems.

**Wuwudao: Who is the most in need of full-chain games? **

To be honest, no one needs a full-chain game now. This is an obvious thing to try to make something decent first, and then push it to users. If it is necessary, I think it is a relatively hungry VC. They think this is a new thing. The things that can be voted for, and then start to come in and play, so maybe each project party is a user of each other, and the users are probably at this level now.

The user stickiness of Dark Forest is not high, which is actually part of the reason why the Dark Forest official does not continue to make games but to make Mud, because it feels that the upper limit of a single game may not be high.

**Wuwudao: What are the possible ways to play the whole chain, which are new tricks that Web2.0 does not have at all? **

I particularly like to give an example. In the past, there were many Three Kingdoms games produced by different manufacturers. Cao Cao or Zhuge Liang in each Three Kingdoms game was not the same person. And in Web3 games, I think there must be in the Loot ecosystem. There are 50 or more games, just like there are countless games in the Three Kingdoms, but Cao Cao or Zhuge Liang will be the same NFT. This is actually a great demonstration value of Loot. In the past Web2.5 games Everyone also said that monkey avatars can also be used in games, but now the monkey’s own games are just like that, and other games that use monkey avatars have nothing to do. **Because in essence, Web2.5 games are actually managed by their own servers , The interest in being compatible with others is not so great, and a complete set of ecological policies have not been formed, so the monkey’s game is only played by the monkey itself.

Another time that I think is good is when the PFP logic is almost dead, and everyone will really want to find new things, and you will find that the whole chain is a more advanced story, the same Zhuge Liang in countless Three Kingdoms games, This is a very meaningful thing, and of course it can be the same Luoyang and Suzhou.

**Wanwudao: What is the definition of the whole chain? Does it have to be 100%, or is a part allowed off-chain? **

First of all, if you look at the infrastructure of the chain, you will find that many people are working on the infrastructure of the so-called application chain, making it easier for everyone to send chains with one click, but more than half of them are modified with the OP Stack, so strictly speaking Each of the chains is quite centralized, but strictly speaking, the ZK chain needs to run mining machines to achieve decentralization. For example, Opside of Wanwu Island is doing this.

**I think everyone’s tolerance for the whole chain is quite high now. You follow the general industry rules and use their things. Even if there are some centralized components in other places, everyone is not very good at it. say what to you. **

**Wanwudao: Thank you for sharing the whole chain of games. We will open the second season of the Wanwu Creation Camp in September to focus on web3 games. You are welcome to come back in S2 and continue to communicate with the project! **