Hello and welcome to Dark Tunnels, a newsletter dedicated to exploring the emerging ecosystem of fully onchain games. Dark Tunnels is published by Always Scheming, a research consultancy focused on the future of interactive entertainment.

The following essay is Issue #8 of Dark Tunnels. This and the following issue are centered on the idea of the “forever” game and its place in the fully onchain games discourse. Enjoy!

I find the concept of the eternal game to be utterly fascinating.

If you’ve been keeping up with the Dark Tunnels back catalog, you’ll recall that I’m a big believer in the idea of unstoppable, autonomous, and indefinite games being one of the central value propositions offered by maximally onchain experiences.

We know that onchain games can theoretically outlive their developers. So long as the underlying blockchain continues to run and players remain interested in participating, the game should be available indefinitely. No need to worry about developers getting shut down, game servers being decommissioned, or rules being changed unexpectedly.

Yet I also struggle to reconcile this concept with the practical realities of game development today.

I’m actually less worried about the game itself lasting forever, as that’s really just a technical hurdle to overcome. Rather, the greater challenge is one faced by all aspiring live service game developers, both within and outside of web3: how to convince an increasingly content-overloaded gaming audience to return to one specific virtual world — repeatedly — for years on end.

Image Credit: BibliothecaDAO

To illustrate this point, consider a hypothetical AAA-caliber game with some level of blockchain integration. Assume for the purposes of this example that this game has the same budget, the same development talent, the same access to distribution channels, and the same level of technical challenges faced by any other large gaming studio. In other words, a relatively level playing field; apples to dApp-les. (1)

Even when controlling for all these factors, what are the chances that our hypothetical game will be able to stand out from the crowd? Tens of thousands of games release to little fanfare every year. To assume that gamers will flock to a new game simply because it has incorporated NFT assets or P2P trading is, frankly, foolish.

10,000+ new games release on Steam alone every year | Image Credit: SteamDB

Today’s gaming audiences are spoiled for choice. An ever-growing back catalog of excellent titles is increasingly being made available to consumers via subscription services like Xbox Game Pass and PlayStation Plus. Add to that the deluge of high quality new releases hitting the markets seemingly every week and it’s easy to see why game discovery can be a challenge for any game…to say nothing of games with complicated new financial mechanisms and unclear value propositions.

2023 was especially overloaded with high-quality game releases | Image Credit: Axios

Of course, when your game’s time frame is indefinite, perhaps you’re less concerned with the challenges of short-term discoverability and user acquisition? In such cases, a game developer may instead be more focused on laying down a strong foundation for an ever-expanding game world to be built upon.

This does kind of make sense, in a way. Marketing traditionally comes downstream of a finished (or mostly finished) product, whereas an immortal onchain game is never really feature complete. Builders can always extend, modify, or update as they see fit, provided none of the underlying digital physics are altered.

Nevertheless, a “forever” game really can’t be considered as such without a similarly long-lived pool of players and contributors taking part in the game’s ecosystem in parallel. In this way, user acquisition and ongoing development become a sort of chicken and egg problem.

It Means Forever and that’s a Mighty Long Time…

One topic we’ve not yet broached is the current crop of titles commonly discussed as “forever” games: franchises like Counter-Strike (first launched in 2000), World of Warcraft (2004), League of Legends (2009), Minecraft (2009), Candy Crush (2012), or Fortnite (2017).

Indeed, games like these do have massive staying power and offer many interesting points of comparison for onchain titles hoping to replicate that sort of long-lasting success. (2)

While a decade or two of successful operation hardly qualifies as “forever” — especially when compared with other physical or analog games that might have hundreds or even thousands of years of recorded history — that kind of staying power is still remarkable, given how much the industry has changed over that time.

Still, I am of the opinion that it’s worth taking a closer look at games that have much longer track records before we dive deeper on digital games. Here, I am referring to categories of games like board games, casino games, parlor games, sports, and so on. (3)

A proper “forever” game? | “The Cardsharps”, c. 1594, Caravaggio | Image Credit: Wikipedia

Obviously, computers and digital entertainment haven’t been around long enough to match the sort of recorded history underpinning games like Go or Chess. The first video game was created in 1958, and video games didn’t reach anything approaching mainstream popularity until the 1970s or 1980s. With less than a century of historical data to rely upon and a long trendline of changes to the supporting technology underlying video games throughout that period of time, we may simply not have a large enough sample size to draw meaningful conclusions about the staying power of digital games into the distant future.

Many of the longest-lasting franchises in the history of the games industry have only been created in the last 10 to 20 years. Games like Grand Theft Auto V, Fortnite, Candy Crush, and others have only become possible with the advent of always-online connections, free-to-play business models, the development and refinement of “live ops” publishing and operational capabilities, social metagames, and countless other innovations largely unavailable to physical games.

However, herein lies a tremendous opportunity. One of my personal hypotheses is that we will eventually see digital games that rival the staying power of their historical analogues. Games that outlast their creators by generations.

As a subscriber to this newsletter, you’ve surely surmised by now that I believe blockchains are key to enabling that hypothesis. (4)

The permanence and immutability of blockchains enable robust, verifiable history, data, and lore to emerge within and around digital games. This creates a strong foundation for future participants to build upon, learn from, and engage with, regardless of their geographic location or time of entry.

The permissionless nature of blockchains also means that anyone with a suitable computer or mobile device can participate in digital play. While those of us residing in relatively free and open societies might take this for granted today, the ability to take part in games and sports has historically has not been especially equitable.

Couple these dynamics with the ability of digital games to spread rapidly via the Internet and digital distribution platforms and, if you squint, you can see how an onchain game might potentially spread farther, wider, and with much greater magnitude than its historical counterparts.

Conversely, physical games have carried on by way of oral traditions, close ties to religions or ruling monarchs, or via centralized bodies tasked with preserving, governing, or administrating these games.

Chess aficionados can now review historical matches from some of the game’s greatest players | Image Credit: Chess.com

Physical games also require physical presence and infrastructure. Billiards tables, baseball diamonds, cards, tiles, dice, and so forth all represent different forms of physical infrastructure required for participation. While the advent of computers and the Internet has helped to expand the reach and legacies of many of these games (see image above), physical requirements necessarily place limits on adoption.

Though some requirements are obviously more intractable than others (e.g. a deck of playing cards is much easier to acquire than a set of ski gear and a suitably snow-covered slope), any physical requirements will inevitably be at odds with wider game adoption. (5) It’s hard to shoot pool or play ping-pong without the proper table; it’s tough for netball to take hold in a country where all the nets have backboards, too.

The American mind can’t comprehend this | Image Credit: ABC

Another important factor in the spread of physical games has been the ability of participants to remix or reinterpret the rules of play.

Through use of simple “primitives” like dice, playing cards, or dominoes, participants can easily construct new variants suited to their preferences. Sports are an especially strong example of this dynamic, perhaps representing the original form of decentralized play.

Consider the many twists present in some of today’s longest-tenured games:

Similarly, the permissionless composability of smart contracts enables countless variations of onchain games to emerge, too (provided the initial rulesets are sufficiently flexible). We have already seen simple examples of this take place around Dark Forest (Dark Forest —> Dark Forest Arena —> Dark Forest Grand Prix).

Currently, there is little incentive for participants to create variants of existing onchain games, given the limited adoption of the format. However, this is essentially one of the key bets being made by builders in the space: that a game with enough player momentum will inspire its own set of new twists, formats, and spin-offs.

So, to recap, we’ve discussed how the spread of digital games is uninhibited by many of the physical requirements and gatekeeping present in the “forever games” of the past. We’ve also covered how the permissionless composability of smart contracts enables onchain games to be remixed and reinterpreted in the same way that sports and board games have been for centuries.

Next edition, we’ll pair these observations with a closer look at some recent learnings from the crop of digital “forever games” referenced earlier.