Autonomous World: A New Paradigm for Next-Generation Full-Chain Games

Written by: LeftOfCenter, BlockBeats

If you ask "Why do we need blockchain games?", "Autonomous World" is clearly a perfect answer. As a brand new category of games, the most exciting aspect of "Autonomous World" lies in the unexpected outcomes that naturally arise from the game, which even the developers and initial publishers cannot predict, as well as the potential to unleash players' infinite creativity. Blockchain technology is the prerequisite for its existence; in other words, "Autonomous World" can only be realized on blockchain technology and will challenge traditional game categories with new game design patterns and gameplay.

The fully on-chain game OPcraft, which was online for only two weeks, proves the potential of this new game category "Autonomous World." It offers a "physical reality" with minimal rules and a permissionless "component system" that can be used to expand the gaming experience and introduce new rules. This minimalist game design can fully mobilize players' creativity and enthusiasm, leading to dramatic conflicts with high tension, progressing from one event to the next through elements like conflict, collaboration, and governance.

It can be said that compared to "making money," "drama" is the key element for maintaining the long-term development of a game, as it can continuously attract human players' attention and drive them to voluntarily engage and participate in the game. Although making money is not the goal of the game, the drama generated by the game itself is sufficient to create ample other revenue streams, thus unlocking a new business paradigm.

Autonomous World

History tells us that every time a new computing paradigm emerges, it unlocks a brand new use case for games:

• With the rise of transistors, microprocessors, and televisions, computer games emerged.
• The popularity of PCs expanded new game categories—"strategy and simulation" games.
• The advent of the internet gave rise to multiplayer games.
• The emergence of social networks led to the rise of social network games.
• The emergence of mobile internet brought about casual games.

Blockchain is no exception; it brings us a brand new game category—"Autonomous Worlds."

Documented online records show that the term "Autonomous World" was first coined by Lattice, a team known for participating in the development of the fully on-chain game "Dark Forest" and its subsequent development of the first fully on-chain game engine, the MUD framework, and is renowned for incubating Ethereum's technology and infrastructure projects under the 0xPARC Foundation.

In August 2022, Lattice member Ludens first introduced the concept of "Autonomous World" to the world through an article titled "Autonomous World (Part 1)" and a keynote speech at DEFCON 2022.

In this article, Ludens mentioned that to transcend the concepts of tokens, NFTs, and liquidity, and to create a digital world beyond Ethereum, three conditions must be met: "autonomy, permissionless creation, and adherence to basic physical principles in the digital world," and invented the term "Autonomous World," which represents a completely self-sustaining open-source digital realm.

Autonomous World—More Than Just On-Chain Games

On-chain games refer to games that use blockchain to store all data and smart contracts, where game assets and game states are stored on-chain, and game logic and rules are defined in a client-independent manner.

In the article "The Strongest Crypto Gaming Thesis," Gubsheep (Brian - 0xPARC / Dark Forest) proposed a widely recognized definition of on-chain games, stating that on-chain games must meet the following five conditions:

• "The true source of game data is the blockchain."
• "Game logic and rules are implemented through smart contracts."
• "The game is developed according to the principles of an open ecosystem."
• "The game is client-independent."
• "The game contains valuable digital assets from the real world."

"Autonomous World" is a type of on-chain game, but its significance goes far beyond that.

"Autonomous World" does not set specific tasks and goals (such as players needing to "conquer more land" or "kill more enemies"), nor does it have predefined adversaries (like needing to fight and compete with other players). It only sets the simplest underlying rule—"digital physical reality" as a constraint, and by providing publicly accessible programmable interfaces, it allows players to freely create, enhance, and expand the gaming experience within the boundaries of this digital physical reality.

Note: "Digital physical reality" refers to the system of fundamental laws that exist in the computational world. Each world contains its own set of basic laws that govern everything that happens within that world; these laws are the physics of that world. Please note that the physics here does not refer to the physical laws in the narrow sense of the atomic world inhabited by humans, but rather refers to the fundamental laws that exist in any "world."

The basic rules in an "Autonomous World" are immutable.

An "Autonomous World" operates independently according to predefined rules, with no endpoint. It is a world that exists and continuously evolves without external dependencies; even without external support, without anyone's control, and even without citizens accessing or residing in the world, it still objectively exists. Moreover, this world allows anyone to join at any time, and the expansions built on the game will persist with the game.

Blockchain is the Prerequisite for the Existence of Autonomous Worlds

The unique characteristics of blockchain technology—"programmability," "permissionless composability," "persistent storage," and "immutability"—open up new possibilities for creating virtual fully on-chain autonomous worlds.

The "basic rules" of this autonomous world will be defined in the form of code within Ethereum smart contracts, and the autonomous world will operate entirely according to these rules without external intervention or maintenance; even malicious attacks cannot shut it down. As long as Ethereum continues to exist, this virtual world will not disappear; even if the original developers leave, the world will continue to evolve and develop, presenting multiple coexisting realities through players publishing new rules and improvement suggestions.

Maintaining the operation of an autonomous world requires a well-designed incentive mechanism that allows builders to spontaneously create and expand new world realities through new components and systems. The financial programmability underlying the blockchain-based autonomous world can establish sufficient incentive mechanisms for the long-term operation of an open world. The game itself can become an economic system, possessing currency, markets, and economic rules, creating new forms of economic organization that coexist with traditional economies.

However, we need to note that incentives do not necessarily have to be tied to money; they can also be status, a sense of achievement, pure love, faith, and passion within the community. Human history tells us that these can inspire humanity to create astonishing miracles.

OPCraft: The Most Representative Fully On-Chain Game of Autonomous Worlds

Currently, most games on the blockchain are unrelated to autonomous worlds. If you want to better understand "Autonomous World" from a practical perspective, OPcraft would be the best interpretation. This is a fully on-chain version of a 3D Minecraft-themed game created by the Dark Forest founding team Lattice in October 2022, originally intended to test the performance of their self-developed first fully on-chain game engine, Mud.

OPCraft only sets simple rules, allowing players to perform only four in-game actions: destroying voxel blocks, crafting voxel blocks, placing voxel blocks, and claiming a 16x16 plot of land (which requires becoming the highest diamond staker of that plot). Additionally, players can customize the frontend through the publicly accessible plugin system provided by the official and deploy custom components and systems.

However, within just two weeks of its launch, this game with simple rules exceeded the expectations of game developers, not only achieving significant success in data, attracting over 1,500 participating players and over 3.5 million on-chain records, but also generating various user-generated pixel creations, some specific-purpose player-made plugins, and a series of spontaneously formed competitive and game-like behaviors, collective governance actions, as well as some malicious and benevolent player behaviors.

Unlocking the Creativity of Artists, Architects, and Developers

In the "Autonomous World," all players can participate in creation, including artists, architects, and developers, and OPCraft allows us to witness this.

OPCraft unlocks the creativity of artists and architects. From the beginning of the game, players create simple wooden houses and towers, and as their skills mature, they begin to build large castles and monuments of various shapes, such as statues of Mario and Fire Flower, and a giant phoenix spanning hundreds of blocks, among other breathtaking artistic buildings.

On the other hand, engineers and "scientists" can utilize another weapon—coding skills—to explore another limit of the OPCraft world. By integrating the World1 plugin system and "component system" provided by the system in a simple and permissionless manner, players begin to showcase their ingenuity and explore the possibilities of technology. For example, some players released a plugin for automated material mining without geographical coordinates, while others released a diamond-digging drill tool and a chat plugin tool for text communication, etc.

Evolution: Tools and Productivity Improvement

Basically, everything happening in the OPcraft game is a microcosm of human social development.

In the initial primitive period, players only performed basic operations, such as picking flowers, chopping trees, mining rocks, digging holes, building wooden houses, and constructing single-block-wide towers, as well as creating some rough digital objects that were hard to identify.

As time passed, players gradually began to understand this world and learned to craft more complex items, such as making glass, dyeing wool, and creating bricks. Subsequently, these more complex materials could be combined to construct (composability) larger artworks and buildings. For instance, colored wool blocks could be used to create giant pixel art, such as the British flag (Union Jack), giant pandas, and even an advertisement promoting their own NFT project. Some players built a magnificent aerial pyramid using composite materials including sand, stone, wood, and bedrock; while a huge planet themed around space, paying homage to "Dark Forest," was created by a player using 6,360 blocks of bedrock.

More complex items

The Tower of Human Knowledge is created by the combination of knowledge: reorganizing existing knowledge to unlock new cognitive and practical possibilities. -- guiltygyoza

When players realized there was a component system available, they began to create more advanced tools, including the aforementioned automated material mining drill, text chat tools, and teleportation plugins for traversing. This system empowers humans to create productive tools, and with productive tools, productivity and work efficiency can be maximized. The component system serves as scaffolding for players to create new tools, and just like in the real world, when the ability to create new tools is available, human civilization accelerates forward.

This is precisely what guiltygyoza mentioned in the article "Composable Engineering." When an autonomous world supports composable engineering, it provides infinite affordances for that world, allowing for recursive combinations of engineering artifacts, with no limit on the depth of recursion.

The composable engineering products in an autonomous world allow for the invention of composites, enabling a process similar to the knowledge combination process that drives human history in the atomic world, thus promoting the evolution of the computational world.

Composable engineering also allows for knowledge encapsulation, meaning, "I do not need to understand the specific details of the invention to incorporate it into the invention process." Knowledge encapsulation is somewhat analogous to the principle of separation of concerns in software development. By implementing separation of concerns, large engineering tasks can be broken down into smaller engineering tasks and then merged to completion. Since different tasks require different skills and types of resources, this naturally encourages labor specialization. With labor specialization, the world becomes more inclusive than before—residents with different backgrounds, skills, and interests can find their place as creators and contributors in the world.

Conflict and Drama

In the article "Composable Engineering," guiltygyoza also mentioned the importance of "drama" for the long-term evolution of autonomous worlds:

The dramatic aspect of the world relies on the enumeration of objects within it… When the enumeration of objects is stagnant, regardless of the combinability of these objects, the possibilities for combinations will eventually reach saturation. The dominant strategy that stands out in the world has formed and become rigid. The distribution of resources and power among human participants also tends to stagnate. All these influences suppress the development of drama.

In the atomic reality of human life, new things continuously emerge through natural evolution or human discovery/invention, disrupting civilization and social norms, leading to dramatic events. Adaptive mutations of viruses can cause global supply chain collapses. The invention of printing made it possible for strangers to form imaginable communities, thus leading to the emergence of nation-states. If all items existing in the world are manufactured by a single enterprise, then this world may be constrained by the lifecycle, delivery capability, and willingness to deliver of that company, thus encountering bottlenecks, as the entire world has reduced autonomy.

OPcraft perfectly illustrates how drama can naturally grow in a self-governing game, continuously advancing the plot and evolving forward.

Digging and Filling Holes

Whether out of mischief, malicious intent, or as a result of collective game behavior, some players in OPcraft began digging deep holes, causing many unsuspecting players to fall into traps.

However, this negative event saw a turnaround when someone fell into a trap; some players initiated rescue plans, filling the holes or directly placing stairs in the holes to rescue those trapped. Some players even developed a teleportation plugin to avoid falling into traps.

The trapped players in the hole sent out rescue plans to the community, and another player offered to make a ladder to rescue the trapped players.

SupremeLeaderOP Republic: Join or Resist

Two days before the end of the OPcraft testing period, on October 29, a dramatic scene unfolded when a player named SupremeLeaderOP announced the establishment of a world government on Discord and Twitter, claiming that he (or his team) had mined 135,200 diamonds and acquired large plots of land through staking these diamonds.

According to OPcraft's game rules, players must mine and accumulate diamonds, which serve the purpose of staking to receive a (16 x 16 x 16) pixel-sized plot of land. When multiple players participate in staking for a plot, the player with the most staked diamonds will have priority in claiming it. Once claimed, the plot belongs to the claimant. Ownership is exclusive, meaning that once a plot is owned by a specific player, others cannot use it, whether for mining resources or building structures on it.

However, SupremeLeaderOP offered players a choice: they could use the apro-comrade plugin to swear an oath (ceremony) to join the republic. Once joined, they would have the right to use the government's "public property," not only to mine materials using the smart contract for that government but also to build structures on the land owned by the government, with the condition that they would have to forfeit their private property.

Players' attitudes towards the republic were mixed.

Some players chose to join the organization out of "faith," becoming comrades and members under the leadership of the Supreme Leader, and after joining the system, they worked hard to upgrade their comrade levels (which are rules within that subsystem) and began building various large statues and paintings themed around the Supreme Leader throughout the world.

Others joined the organization for "economic benefits," seeking more rights to mine materials and build on the land.

However, there were also players who strongly opposed joining the republic, vehemently condemning its controlling tendencies and collectivist policies, mobilizing others to resist and fight for freedom.

Another player named PhiMarHal discovered that the republic only claimed and controlled the land on the ground, while the space in the sky remained available, so he mobilized players to fly into the sky and build a sky city.

No Predefined Plot Means Infinite Possibilities

The most interesting aspect of OPcraft is that this republic was not pre-designed but was spontaneously initiated by players.

There is no predefined script in OPcraft, no set tasks/goals, and not even an ultimate villain to defeat. Yet, a series of spontaneous player behaviors emerged, leading from one event to another, resulting in highly dramatic developments.

Players can quickly deploy smart contracts using the officially released fully on-chain game engine MUD without a license, adding new rules to the game. This means that social organizations and other "augmented realities" in the autonomous world are completely limitless; unlike players in World of Warcraft who must operate within a predefined guild system, players in OPCraft can spontaneously create various structured social organizations through MUD deployment, just like nations, economies, and religious groups in the real world, where players can choose to join voluntarily and must adhere to the consensus rules of that organization once they join. (In OPCraft, players swear an oath to join through the apro-comrade plugin, forfeiting all private property and gaining rights to mine and build on government land resources.)

The success of OPcraft tells us that to maintain the continuous attention and participation of human participants, on-chain games should not make making money the primary goal for players, but should continuously generate drama and explore other revenue possibilities through drama. Just like the football industry, where football matches as "games" do not aim to make money, but the drama they generate is sufficient to create ample revenue streams, such as betting and advertising.

The minimalist underlying game rules and permissionless creative rights are the prerequisites for the continuous evolution of the "Autonomous World" and the emergence of a "non-man-made drama." Regarding what will happen next in the autonomous world, developers will not know more than players. The progress of the game is entirely controlled by the players themselves, and players' actions will influence the future course of the game; everything in the game depends on the expression of players' creativity.