i’m wondering if anyone in the community has played around with the idea of incorporating a block-chain model (or something similar but adapted to gaming) into a gaming environment? i am interested in learning what potential positives this could provide in the areas of security and provable fairness. i can even imagine a new structure to support the autonomy of persistent worlds.
has anybody had even some ideas of how something like this could be implemented in jME?
So I have some (very basic) knowledge of what Blockchain does and what it’s generally used for (basically a method of storing what has occurred to a thing over time in a ledger type manner). The issue I’d see with using this in a game to put it simply is scale.
The first few transactions would be fine but after a while and with enough objects that ledger would become huge. Of course there are ways to handle this by only sharing a set amount of time in the ledger among everyone. Then the “new” issue becomes the issue of sharing that ledger effectively and quickly so that other transactions can be verified as they occur.
This all loops back though to 1 main question though. For a game you don’t really need many authorities to verify a transaction occurred (say moving a player from 1 point to another). You just need “AN” authority. A server which is running some code that handles what is a legal move and what isn’t. Basically you don’t need consensus in your game world if you have 1 absolute source of fairness.
Now… In saying that… If you were to make an MMO of some sorts and wanted to use Blockchain for virtual financial transactions (say for your ingame market, and stocks a la Eve Online) utilizing Blockchain might be a really good idea as it’d allow for people to perform transactions outside of the game itself.
Sorry for the wordy reply. This topic really interests me and I’m kinda rambly today.
tl;dr
For player action verification such as movement and physics Blockchain is too bulky.
For financial in game transactions utilizing blockchain could be a bit of a stroke of genius.
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