Opinion | How player agency and autonomous worlds can make future games full of imagination

In addition to existing blockchain games, what other forms might future games develop into? James Brodie, Investment Director of the cryptocurrency fund ID Theory, introduces in his article how Autonomous Agents operating in autonomous worlds and artificial intelligence AI will combine with blockchain to bring more imagination to future games.

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What is an Autonomous World

James Brodie defines Autonomous Worlds as a world where blockchain technology is used as the underlying settlement layer.

An Autonomous World maximizes autonomy seen in existing societies, allowing anyone to introduce rules without compromising objectivity. It does not rely on any individual to maintain rule boundaries.

Blockchain successfully brings the immutable regularity of the physical world into the virtual world, achieving the objective existence of the virtual world.

Without encryption technology and blockchain, open autonomous worlds and true property rights, free markets, or privacy protection in the metaverse would not be possible.

The immutable ledger records ownership of value and information while providing robust security features to protect user data and privacy. Building a fair, transparent, and empowering metaverse ensures trust among participants.

Autonomous Worlds Making Games Real

Many all-chain games are gradually achieving the setting of autonomous worlds, including Realms Autonomous World, Sky Strife, Mithraeum, Citadel, Conquest, and other projects.

Market Mechanisms Automatically Regulating Difficulty

Using blockchain-driven digital physics will generate forces of cooperation or conflict, forming self-balancing mechanisms.

Through natural on-chain events, individuals and entities will automatically strive and gain relative advantages. There is no longer a need to deliberately fill the world with evil bosses or rewards to balance the game; now the game will naturally evolve and adjust. If someone starts hoarding scarce resources, others will try to hunt that person down.

A Virtual World Does Not Equal a Fake World

A persistent world will make participants care more about their actions because all actions will affect future developments.

An autonomous world creates an environment where players truly cherish resources and time. The sense of loss when meaningful time and tangible value are taken away is real.

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Renowned game designer Hideo Kojima has been discussing this concept since 1998, known as Project Raw, a game that players can play for many years, and when the player dies, the game ends.

The Outlook for Autonomous Agents in Games

In addition to autonomous worlds and blockchain technology, AI-operated autonomous agents are also crucial for future games.

Rapid Development of AI

Last April saw a paper that allowed 25 autonomous agents to interact freely in a simulated experiment in the virtual village of Smallville. Each AI was given a description of its own identity and then freely formed complex relationships with other AIs, creating a dynamic social environment.

These AIs exhibit self-awareness, memory indexing, thinking planning, and other cognitive abilities, showcasing behavior similar to real humans, such as arranging their lives, building and nurturing relationships, planning social activities like gatherings, reflecting on their identity and goals, and making creative decisions based on comprehensive experience. For example, choosing a music-themed gift for a specific friend and guessing that they would like it.

If this technology continues to evolve, it will revolutionize content creation for future games and even the metaverse, breaking free from resource-constrained game development environments. Just imagine the development of the next generation of Grand Theft Auto that has been in the works for over a decade.

On the other hand, benefiting from NVIDIA's AI computing integration, NPC characters can now respond through real-time dialogue, enhancing players' gaming experience.

Integration of Autonomous Agents with the Operation of Autonomous Worlds

In the aforementioned autonomous world, complex social dynamics are guaranteed by blockchain. Whether it's player-to-AI protocols, hidden but provably existing roles, game rules, game mechanisms, and verifiable game states, property rights, and privacy, these are all parts where AI no longer relies on centralized authorization; they are truly empowered by the decentralized autonomous world.

Therefore, AI can trust that their future interactions have probabilities and predictable natures, enabling them to put their hard-earned value at risk to obtain carefully calculated returns, driving the flourishing development of the native digital asset economy.

In the near future, these virtual worlds will not only have human players but also a variety of autonomous world citizens born through AI.