The topic of Day 9 of Steemit's 100 Days of Steem is gaming, so I thought I would share some of my thoughts about it. I wouldn't call myself a professional software developer right now, but for a little while some years ago I did work for the game engine company GarageGames, mostly on their Torque2D and TorqueX game engines, so I have dipped a toe into game development. I have been meaning to try to dust off my software development skills for a little while, and the recent turmoil in the community has led to me trying to teach myself Node.js and the Steem APIs for it, with the idea that the departure of old developers potentially leaves space for new people to succeed with new projects. Part of my motivation for that is that I might have some ideas for games that could be built on Steem.

One idea I have is to do a digital adaptation of my pencil-and-paper drawing game Four Panels. This wouldn't be about any kind of complex economy or digital collectibles, it would just be a fun little group drawing game with the option to post your completed result as a post to the blockchain.

The other idea is a lot less fully baked but is little more “blockchain-ish”. The idea would be to make a logistics/efficiency type of game like SpaceChem or Factorio, where some of the outputs translate into you earning cryptocurrency (Steem or an SMT or something). Beyond the basic idea I haven't really thought through how the economy would work, but with games like these there is also often an element of wanting to show off the elegance, efficiency, or Rube-Goldberg-esque insanity of your structures, so I think that aspect could translate into posts onto Steem, on top of whatever transaction stuff is going on with the game.

Right now these ideas are still somewhat speculative. While I think they have potential in theory, there's a big chicken-and-egg problem of them only being worthwhile if I develop the skills to make them a reality, but developing those skills is an investment of time and energy now, and it can be tough to maintain motivation to spend time and energy building skills that might pay off in the long term when I have bills to pay right now.

Analog gaming

Digital games are where most of the commercial action is, but from a game design perspective I tend to be more passionate about board games and especially tabletop roleplaying games, so I thought I'd mention that area of gaming a little bit, too. In the past I tried to convince people who are into the kind of experimental indie tabletop RPGs that I am to try out Steem, but it didn't take. I think there are a few issues, but one is a big “network effect” problem: the creators aren't here because their fans aren't here, the fans aren't here because the creators aren't here. Plus, the bid-bot culture that dominated at the time soured some of the people who were willing to experiment. My conclusion at the time was that it would only be worth trying to convince people to come here if I had enough stake to be able to give nontrivial rewards with my upvotes.

I think that the Steem model potentially makes more sense for creatives than things like Patreon and Kickstarter, but those platforms have most of the mindshare right now. I think there are both technical and cultural reasons for that. For example, you can only get maximum value out of your upvotes here if there are ten posts per day that you want to reward. Even if there were some creators on the Steem platform that you wanted to reward, unless they were posting every day it's hard to funnel enough rewards to them. (Plus the “convergent linear” rewards curve from hardfork 21 squeezes small rewards, making it an even bigger problem). There could also be issues with the ability to deliver subscriber-only content: By design Steem is a very “open” platform, so I don't know how if there's a way to do posts that are only visible to a subset of people. Some people in this space are also very concerned about exposing themselves to trolling and harassment, so people might need some features to protect themselves from that before being comfortable using the platform. Plus there's the big “is cryptocurrency a scam?” barrier to deal with.

I think the fee-less transactions with Steem and SBD could also be great for selling digital products like PDFs of game rules. Right now the “industry leader” in RPG PDFs drivethrurpg.com only gives 65% of a sale to the creator. Itch.io is smaller and more creator friendly, but still takes a cut – at a minimum they need to cover the transaction fees they see, and they have infrastructure costs from maintaining the digital storefront. It has always struck me as a weakness in the Steem ecosystem that it's hard to do ecommerce with SBDs. It would be great if it was easy (and free?) to set up a digital storefront for things like PDFs and ebooks. Obviously that's easier said than done.