Hello.
Yes.
OK, so welcome.
So it's a bit unfortunate not everyone's here yet
because this is kind of front loaded
so if you missed the tech part and it's going
to go into the rest of it.
But hopefully, you can fill people who are late.
So I'm Oliver.
I'm a PhD student at the University of York,
and this work was done in collaboration
with another PhD student, Nathan,
who's in the audience and a bunch of our supervisors.
The most obvious question for me--
reading the title is what, actually, are crypto-games?
So could I just get a quick show of hands.
Who knows roughly what a cryptocurrency is?
OK.
Cool.
And who knows how they work?
OK.
OK, cool.
OK.
So what are crypto-games?
If I frame this in terms of the traditional game design
kind of architecture-- so you have typically
a client-server model.
So this is the game state stored on a server, which
is managed by the developer.
This is kind of an abstraction so if you're
using, for example, something like Amazon web services
or servers then the server is actually kind of a cloud
so it isn't itself a network.
But the emphasis with this kind of comparison
is that it's centrally-managed.
So this really contrasts to the crypto-games architecture.
And that, instead of a client-server model,
we have this kind of cloud-network model,
where instead of the game state being stored
on a single server or the cloud, it's
instead stored atop a cryptocurrency network.
Which is a network of computers, which
store a synchronized distributed ledger.
So if that does mean anything to you, then that's fine.
And the main takeaway from this is
that by decentralizing the storage of the game state,
you actually incur a cost, or more accurately, the client
incurs some sort of cost.
So in a game like--
on top of my head some like World of Warcraft and Blizzard
will probably be paying someone to host their servers
or they'll be hosting them themselves.
And so the client does end up paying a monthly subscription
but they're not necessarily paying for the server directly.
Whereas in crypto games, the client--
that kind of cost of executing commands
is actually transferred usually to the client.
And another important point about this
is that this is not kind of an AB scenario here.
This is like a spectrum.
So it's kind of on the typical model on the left,
you have the entire game state stored on the developer server.
And on the network to one on the right,
you have part or all of the games on server.
So it's kind of like you have this kind of spectrum
of how distributed you want the game to be.
So why should we care?
Why is this a thing?
This is, hopefully, the next obvious question.
It's a different premise for gaming.
And so by storing the game state atop a cryptocurrency network,
the tokens that you choose to hold in that game state
enjoy all of the security benefits of the cryptocurrency.
So this is things like censorship-resistance
and resistance to tampering and things like that.
So there's like a kind of hidden benefit, which
is also part of why you would develop a game like this.
And so there's a growing player-base in trading volume
so a big emphasis of these games is
the trading of virtual items between games
and between players.
It seems to be kind of a useful and interesting part
of the design.
And finally, because they use cryptocurrency,
it's a new payment mechanism, or more accurately, it's
a new way of integrating payment into the design of these games.
As the slide before-- because the game state is
held on a network, it means to change it,
you have to initiate a transaction
and then that transaction obviously cost something.
So it's not like you can just transfer the game
state from a single server onto a network for free--
Free lunch.
Great, no one has to pay for anything--
Someone actually has to foot that cost
and so that's kind of something to keep in mind.
So how does this actually manifest in terms
of games that exist now?
So we'll take two case studies.
So the first one is Gods Unchained.
So has anyone played Hearthstone?
OK, cool.
So Hearthstone magic-- the gathering things like that,
they're kind of competitive card games, which
emphasize deck building and more powerful cards,
things like that.
And then it's kind of turn based combat element.
So in the case of Gods Unchained, the cards
themselves are stored atop the Ethereum network.
So Ethereum is a type of cryptocurrency-- one
of hundreds.
It just so happens that it's the largest one by market
capitalization that explicitly has the ability
to implement the smart contracts, which
is this kind of underlying technical detail--
which you'll find out more about in the paper--
but it has that capacity.
And so these are two examples of cards.
And in terms of art style and function,
they're very similar to often [INAUDIBLE]..
So second example is CryptoKitties.
You may have heard in news that this was really, really
popular 2017, 2018.
And so the whole thing is that you're ,
collecting and breeding these digital kittens,
which have different attributes.
And so the gameplay revolves around, literally,
getting two kittens and then you breed them
through a web interface.
And then there's this kind of element
of chance, where you're not sure which of the parents attributes
will be transferred to the child and so on.
And so this also uses the Ethereum network.
So all of the studies that we-- all of the games that we
sampled set atop the Ethereum network
and they vary in terms of how decentralized they are.
So this study, at least in this point,
is just a single sample of a single type
of cryptocurrency network.
Yeah, there's hundreds of different variations
but this is really just kind of start the discussion about it.
So what now?
So we know in very high level terms,
there's something different with the storage
and it's all a bit technical and they
have this kind of different properties.
So the client-network model introduces costs.
This is kind of inevitable costs.
Cost will be kind of realized in a number of different ways,
depending on the type of cryptocurrency you are using
but generally, they introduce costs.
And chance-based mechanics exist.
So I'm kind of piggybacking on [INAUDIBLE] talk.
Uncertainty is fun and interesting
and it is kind of a really useful part of game design.
And so this cost-chance combination, hopefully, you
can see there's something untoward here.
So let's apply some definitions.
And this is the realization that my co-author, Nathan, and I had
in our lab when we were talking about it,
we were like, huh, this looks a little bit familiar to some
of my other work.
So which definition do we apply?
So we took four criteria from the gambling literature-- more
accurately, the gambling studies literature, which
is a branch of psychology.
So this is from a psychological perspective, which behaviors
should be of interest in terms of how
they're different to just normal types of risk.
So what separates one activity from another in terms
of its relation to gambling.
And two criteria from the UK Gambling Act--
I know we're in Spain right now so this study is
specific to the UK.
So we took the psychological--
a four-point criteria from the psychological literature,
a two-point criteria from the legal kind of literature.
And we essentially combine them because one of the legal ones
actually turned out to be pretty much identical to one
of the psychological ones.
So it made sense that we could make this combined definition
so that's useful pretty much for everyone.
Because, ultimately, if you're looking at an activity
and it meets the psychological definition of gambling
but doesn't meet the legal definition of gambling,
then you have this kind of weird difference like,
should we be interested in it?
Should regulators be interested in it?
And so it makes little bit more sense to combine them.
So the key finding was that typical gameplay
in all of the sampled games met our combined definition.
So typical gameplay here--
I'm taking or we took to mean the gameplay that
was advertised marketing material in gameplay videos
and things like that and the typical gameplay.
So in summary, if you are more interested in this
and more interested in the technical side of things
as well, you will find in the paper
a sample of popular crypto-games on the Ethereum network,
in particular.
You'll find a description of their mechanics
and their prevalence.
So because they exist the atop of cryptocurrency network,
that means that all of the user interactions, all
of the transactions that they create are publicly observable.
Which means that from a research perspective,
we can see literally everything that the users
are doing for the game state--
for the part of the game state that they're modifying,
which sits atop the network.
We then applied legal and psychological definitions
of gambling and found of the entire sample met
all of the definition criteria.
Again, this is just a small sample of crypto-games--
just on one cryptocurrency and this varies immensely.
So to conclude, so we're here--
so that's me, in front of my favorite color
and Nathan is sat in the audience.
And the paper is pinned on my tweeter--
I think on Nathan's tweeter as well.
And this entire paper wouldn't be possible without all
of the co-authors as well--
so that Sebastian Anders, James and David,
and there's all their contact information.
Thank you.
Questions?
Oh, questions.
Starting over here.
Let's start over here and the move on.
Hi, [INAUDIBLE] Can you give any of the definitions?
The criteria?
Because I'm really curious now but you haven't answered it.
OK, so the splits, there was in the paper
but so the legal definitions is something
like there is an element of chance, which determines
the exchange and that the exchange is
money or money's worth.
So in other words, if I were to bet three bananas on a roulette
wheel, then that wouldn't be the legal definition.
But if it was three sterling in roulette wheel then it would.
And then so the psychological definition
off the top of my head, it's kind of along the vein of,
is the exchange determined by chance?
Is there some exchange of financial value?
I think that that's a little bit more broad
but we can merge those.
Yeah.
OK.
My question-- sorry, [INAUDIBLE] My question is essentially that
but maybe we can elaborate a little more--
where did you get these psychological criteria
from because there's a lot of disagreement in the literature
on what gaming addiction is?
Or if it is, was this the DSM-5?
Or was this the ICD-10?
So the definitions themselves were originally
based on Mark Griffiths' five-point criteria
from his book in 1996 but they were since
revised by Jonathan Sower.
So they refined it to, I believe, a four-point criteria.
I believe one was a four-point and one was a five-point
but then, essentially, Jonathan Sower
kind of skipped Mark Griffiths' revision so he actually
revised it more recently.
But they didn't pick that up and so we
kind of picked it up and drew influence from Jonathan Sower
as well.
Thanks.
I just misspoke.
It was gambling not addiction but I that's what I meant.
Thanks.
No more questions?
So with a crypto-network, you have a lot of different servers
and there's been a lot of talk about
like how much energy that consumes?
And just looking into the future,
do you think that that will have any influence on the game
development?
So ultimately the-- because it's stored on the network,
executing any code or getting that network to do anything
becomes more expensive.
And so the games that we looked at--
CryptoKitties as an example, the transaction cost
associated with any game action.
So if you were to breed two kittens,
I believe it's around $0.10.
So with different network, structures, and sizes,
that cost will vary.
But, ultimately, there is some sort of cost in there
plus it's sponsored.