Steem Gaming and what it could be
Iv been thinking a lot about how I can help add to the blockchain ecosystem that is growing so fast in the world. Soon as I found steem I knew it was something different, the idea that one should be rewarded for your ability to create compelling and interesting content and for engaging with that content is one that has already started to make a difference in the world though the fantastic steem blockchain. I asked myself how I could help grow the community to fill gaps and create new opportunity for other to participate with steem.
I imagined a blockchain based game but gaming is a wide and diverse world by itself, so what sort of game would work on a blockchain became the question. My mind wandered a bit as I contemplated and I ended up reading a post by @dwinblood https://steemit.com/steemit/@dwinblood/steemit-steem-game-development-opening-doors-discussion but it seemed that it would be rather restrictive if it was an overly complicated game.
Back in my day
In the past games haven't always had to have to best graphics or top notch performance to be engaging and suck you into play. Some of my early memory's gaming were text based games with simple or no graphics such as one of my favorites Zork or like the one from the image above. These simple text based adventure games had many variations but they were fun to play, quick to download, and usually only required somewhat simple text commands to play. The important thing about these games that I see now is that they all had a fairly similar style of play and don't rely on an active internet connection. This is only important as current blockchain setups don't allow for any sort of fast connection so multiplayer feels restricted to turn based games.
If we broke one of these games down it would be a set of rooms, observable objects, items to pick up, and actions to perform along with their attached descriptions. The entirety of a games contents can be written out as a tokenized series of tables, flags, and descriptions that could be saved onto the blockchain and read back into a system for play. This would allow anyone with some writing experience and a mind for setting up a series of events to unfold the chance to write up their own interactive adventure and post it to the blockchain for others to play. All the players would have to do is open a website or copy the text into a local program and start playing. I don't see any way to really give players credit for playing or finishing the game except though the traditional steemit way of commenting about your play experience and up voting the authors post.
But how?
Ah this is really the question that pesters my mind. A standard format for how the adventures would need to be put together and be worked out so that it is easy enough for anyone to follow. Perhaps a site or program that did all the hard work of organizing the data and converting it to its correct form, with the fantastic steem API it could even post the work once its completed. At that point anyone would be free to make new adventures for others to play and comment on, we could hold contests for best adventures, lots of possibility!
Thanks for reading and id love your input!