Nine months ago I wrote a post about a possible game that could be created on the blockchain based on a very old one called Drug Wars. Perhaps some of my words were taken to heart, because a week after that development started on the Steem version of @Drugwars and the game released a month after that.
Get to the point.
In any case, there are a lot of ins and outs that go into creating an actual decentralized game. In my opinion, not a single one exists yet. Not even close.
A true decentralized game would include decentralized ownership of a shared economy/assets and decentralized development/production/scaling. We haven't really even come close to achieving these milestones. The organization required is far from trivial.
Networked blog
I often find myself linking back to old relevant posts of mine. I even use a custom script to help me locate them. However, once and a while, I find myself trying to find a post that I never actually wrote. This is one such occasion, and I'm now compelled to explain my concepts of Salt and Sugar assets in the cryptosphere.
Salt
A salt asset is one that demands we destroy another asset to create it. The most obvious example would be Bitcoin mining (or just crypto mining in general). In order to create Bitcoin, one must consume electricity and computing power. Through the mining process Bitcoin gains network security and provably scarce value.
Sugar
These assets are created 'out of thin air'. Examples would include airdrops, ICOs, and upvoting people on Steem. No resource was burned in order to create the asset, so the value derived from it comes in the form of actual community usage and speculation.
Pros/Cons
Both salt and sugar assets have their advantages. Salt has a very defined underlying value. The value of salt essentially can't dip below the value required to produce it. If it did users would stop paying the cost to do so. It is essentially provably-scarce impossible-to-counterfeit hard-money.
Sugar, on the other hand, is much more palatable to Average Joe. Who doesn't like getting something for nothing? Airdrops get people excited about the prospect of free money and living in abundance. For the vast majority of the world population, most would rather work hard for a little pay rather than invest now to hopefully get something later. Sugar assets target the impatient masses looking for quick fixes and instant gratification.
Silk Boulevard
In the context of gaming, the concepts of salt and sugar become much more important. Say someone boots up a Farmville clone on the Steem blockchain. Resources created in this game are provably scarce and owned directly by the players, unlike all the similar games that came before it.
The problem the development team is having is one that we are all familiar with:
Bots
How will they mitigate the damages of a bad actor with access to hundreds of accounts? A salt strategy would be one such tactic. Say it takes 24 hours to farm wheat on a given account. What if, in addition to waiting 24 hours, players also had to pay 0.01 Steem to @null before the network came to consensus that those resources were legit?
This wouldn't stop bots from simply paying the cost, but it would give them pause. Flooding the market with too much wheat at this point would cause them to lose money, perhaps discouraging them from ever creating the bot in the first place. However, micro-charges could easily turn a lot of players off to the game due to it no longer being free-to-play. It's quite the balancing act.
Captchain
In order to keep resources in the sugar category I thought of this idea. Rather than burn Steem @null a proof of brain activity could be employed that bots would have a very hard time with. If you have to solve a random puzzle to harvest the wheat bots would have a much harder time dealing with those logistics.
Over 10000 hours played.
I literally have played over 10000 hours of video games that had on online economy. I used to look back at that time with complete disgust. What a waste of time!
However, these days I realize that I am essentially a master of knowing how these economies should operate. Combined with my knowledge of how decentralization is supposed to work, I'm in a very unique position to identify valid blockchain gaming economies and perhaps even create my own one day. Exciting times.
Conclusion
Salt can leave a bitter taste if you eat too much,
but sugar causes cancer and diabetes.
The key is balance and using the right tool for the job at hand.