The Galactic Milieu is built out of free open-source games, of course.
But I just came up with a potential use within the Milieu for a possibly not completely free-open-source game.
I think in fact that it could be a useful use even if the game in question were completely non-free, completely non-open-source.
But the reality is that vast swathes of it are free open source even if there do turn out to be portions of it that are not.
The Galactic Milieu itself, in fact, is much like that itself: vast swathes of it are free open source but there do exist bits and bobs of "duct tape" tying it all together; afterall it is a Knotwork project and from way way back the Knotwork sites were all about "tying it all together" and they were written in an extended flavour of HTML known as XML, so what you saw in the browser, even if you used the "view source" function of the browser, was not the actual source code the XML-capable web-server was reading.
That is the context, the back-story as it were; on to the specific game I have it in mind to integrate into the Milieu: Splinterlands!
I have been looking into Splinterlands lately in the course of researching the current state of the play-to-earn industry. One thing I noticed is that the game does not seem to impose changing the actual ownership of its NFTs.
That led me to think that maybe if I wanted items that are represented by NFTs to be left behind when a player moves from one planet to another, I might need to have the planet the NFT is left on have ownership of the NFT, at least until the player returns to (attempt to?) reclaim it.
Consider land for example. If a player buys a tract of land on one planet then moves "personally" to another planet, would it be "reasonable" for the land to go with them?
Certainly it could make sense for them to take with them some kind of title deed or even NFT attesting to the fact that before leaving the planet, and thus the land on the planet, behind some kind of authority or government or military force or whatever on that planet had regarded that land as in some sense or other "theirs"; but bringing the actual land with them? Maybe if they transported it in some kind of "terraforming" ship... :)
Such lines of thought brought me to the realisation that maybe there is a use that could be made of the monster NFTs from Splinterlands though.
A bit of background first about how CoffeeMUD (the default text-mode window into the Milieu) works...
Like many or most MUDs, CoffeeMUD's default paradigm is that its locations ("rooms") are "refreshed" from time to time, which is to say, they are put back into the "original" state specified in their "source code" as it were.
Thus the items the "source code" of the "room" specifies as the contents of the room get spawned over and over and over again, potentially endlessly.
Which can be a massive influx of items / goods into the "economy".
(Economy?! What economy!? MUDs don't have economies, they are "Monty Hall giveaways" of stuff-out-of-nothing!)
Well gosh golly darn it, isn't that kind-of what Splinterlands is, too?
In Splinterlands, if you have a monster's NFT in your connected wallet, presto the monster can spring back up "out of nothing", conjured by the magic(k?) of a "Summoner", no matter how many times it has been defeated (not sure if they ever claim it was killed in the combats, hmmm details details) in the past.
Well well well. I have struggled with that in CoffeeMUD, trying to think where the "monsters" that CoffeeMUD spawns are supposed (backstoried; rationalised) to be coming from; maybe I can tie them to Splinterlands NFTs!
Imagine if you will an area-building service for CoffeeMUD that populates an "area" (collection of "rooms"; collection of locations) for you with the monsters depicted / described by the Splinterlands NFTs that you "pay" to that service.
See what I did there?
Rather than do the potentially complicated thing of trying to go look at the buyer's own collection of NFTs whenever the "rooms" are to be populated, I jumped directly to simply accepting the NFTs themselves as "payment" for populating the "rooms" with "corresponding" monsters!
Now the game (aka the aforementioned area-building service) owns the NFTs, and some "area" in the CoffeeMUD now "spawns" monsters "corresponding to" those depicted / described by the NFTs.
That idea is what led me to come make this post, because yes indeed it does seem to me that I might have come up with a way that the Galactic Milieu could "make use of" Splinterlands NFTs.
So what about land? Well part of my thoughts about "land NFTs" was that probably in the Milieu they should be owned by planets, not by the players.
The planets, or various governments attempting to govern the planets, could issue NFTs that amount to some kind of representation that they at least pretend to in some way uphold or enforce or at least attest to some kind of rights the holder of their NFT might have over the land it refers to, but the actual land itself as an NFT should be held in the account of the planet or solar system or pocket-universe or whatever that it is "actually located" in.
Well enough for now, thanks for reading (if you actually did), hopefully I'll revisit these ideas at some point.
-MarkM-