What if we all work together to build an interconnected game universe? A universe that is interoperable, where a player can carry their items, characters, friends list and accomplishments wherever they go. A universe that is fun, containing many independent game worlds that aren’t tied to any particular platform or genre. A universe that is neutral, where the rules are laid out transparently and no single entity has root level control. A universe that is massive, where the collective lore and depth of gameplay can rival or even surpass the largest massive multiplayer online games.

This is the dream of Shapecraft, a four week game jam/hackathon starting November 18th. We’re calling all of you, professional and aspiring game developers, to help bring this vision to life. There will be $250k in prizes awarded to the most inspiring projects submitted during this time period that capture this vision. If you’re excited and ready to jump in, be sure sign up at Alchemy University to register today!

Curious about the interconnected game universe, and how something like this could work? Read on, and I’ll walk you through one possible way.

Down to details

There are two key ideas that could make something like this possible:

  1. Separating the player’s data from games themselves, and storing it on a neutral platform
  2. Setting the incentive for independent games to be paid for collaborating with one another over this shared data

Data Separation

OK, let’s focus on the data part first.

A good, simple example to start with would be a friends list. This is a good example because it’s a common pain point that most of us have experienced. Picture it: you’re excited because you bought a new console, or a signed up on a new platform to play a game. And then it hits you, you have no friends here! You need to go start your friends list over from scratch because its not interoperable across platform. If the data was stored somewhere shared, and the reading of that data was standardized, you could imagine having one friends list that you bring everywhere.

We can extrapolate this a bit to other forms of data in games. Imagine that you had a pet that could come with you in all of your favorite games. Maybe it just follows you around and looks cool, kinda fun. Or maybe, it has some in-game effect that fits the gameplay and delights you as a player. From a player’s perspective, that would be pretty wild to have a pet that could effect your game experience across some of your favorite games. Granted, from a game developer’s perspective, this probably seems like a bit of a nightmare! Having to create assets to render this pet in your game and also somehow balance it in your game loop is incredibly difficult. But… what if, the time and creative energy you spend balancing these pets and items from other game worlds was well compensated and rewarded by your player base? And, to bolster that, what if it was encouraged by other game developers to take their data and journey into your world because they know its a continuation of the player experience and they share a common incentive with you?

Let’s talk about an incentive for collaboration.

Collaboration Incentive

Imagine you and I both create our own independent games with their own unique style and gameplay. There’s very little incentive for us to collaborate, and it would take an extraordinary amount of effort to do so. Let’s imagine you have an item in your game world that I would like to allow players to bring into mine. In order to do so, quite a few things are necessary! First we’d need to establish an API, or some database that we can share to check if a player owns that item. Second I’d need to create an asset to render your item in my game, an asset that would represent the rest of my art style. Third, and lastly, I would need to figure out what kind of effect your item has in my world that balances the rest of the gameplay with considerations for how the player earns that item in your world. This… is incredibly difficult!

There is, however, a good tool that can make much of this easier. One that has been markedly improving in the last few years: blockchains. And I know, the term “blockchain” carries quite a bit with it based on the applications that have been built on it so far. However, I’d like to look at blockchains from a purely technological lens as a shared, neutral databases that nobody controls. From that lens, they’re actually quite perfect for this use case of shared incentives and data.

For this particular case, where you and I would like to share an item across our worlds, we can both create a program on the blockchain (generally referred to as a “smart contract”). Within these programs we can create an incentive such that, when the items are moved from your world to my world or vice-versa, we are both paid for this collaboration. You can compare this to something like revenue sharing in games like Roblox, or even applications like YouTube, except that the revenue sharing rules are written transparently in automatically executing code instead of on a server in a corporation beholden to shareholders. Ultimately the rulesets that communities choose to adopt will decide how revenue is shared.

The blockchain in this case acts as the shared database of player ownership, so that piece of the puzzle is solved. We can both look to this database as the source of truth and know it will always be available. It doesn’t necessarily make incorporating your item into my game any easier. However, as a developer, I’m much happier to implement your item knowing that it will help me earn money. And you will be likewise happy to hear that I’m building on top of your world because you share an incentive with me. We both earn by creating a fun, interconnected player experience for our shared audience. This small change in incentive could potentially have huge impact. It could make it so game developers are excited when others build on top of their worlds to create continuity for their players. And for players, they get a massively interconnected universe of games where they can take their data everywhere that its implemented.

Join us!

This is the vision of Shapecraft, and if you’d like to be part of it, here are some key links:

Learn more about the event