Author: FaultProofBen

Gm!

Last week, I was at Permissionless in Austin, Texas.

I was supposed to use the conference to meet, greet, and network with people IRL.

But instead, I spent most of my time online, playing Primodium.

Primodium is an onchain strategy and resource management game.

It takes place in an asteroid belt, where your goal is to mine resources, construct factories, produce materials, and build space fleets to grow and conquer the cosmos.

It was only last Monday, the first day of Permissionless, when I wrote about my experience playing.

That feels like a lifetime ago – Things have dramatically escalated since.

As I discussed in that piece, players are currently unable to progress past Level 4 in Primodium due to a resource-claiming bug.

However, I wanted to keep playing after maxing out my base. So after shipping said article, I decided to spin up a new game in a different browser to pass the time until the patch went live.

During this second playthrough, something clicked, and I became completely hooked.

I spent hours playing during Permissionless and even got the friends I stayed with in an AirBnB (shoutout to the chad Pods team) in on the action.

We wound up spending a huge portion of the conference playing and talking about Primodium, and I haven’t stopped since (I’m on my 4th game in my 4th different browser).

I’m obsessed with Primodium not just because of its incredibly fun and engaging gameplay, but because I think it's well-suited to demonstrate the awesome potential of onchain games as a hotbed for emergent behavior.

Emergence is one of the most interesting and powerful properties of onchain games, and creating environments conducive to them appears to be becoming a core principle in their design.

Today, we’ll explore emergent behavior in onchain games by:

• Defining it

• Examining past instances of it OPCraft

• Discussing possible future emergent behavior in Primodium

Now, let’s get into it!

(I’d highly recommend you also check out Devs on Devs: Moving Castles, Gaul and Emergence which served as inspiration for this piece.)

WTF is Emergent Behavior?

Before we dive into examples of emergent behavior, let’s take a moment to understand what it actually is.

At the highest level, emergent behavior refers to activities that occur in a system without direction from a central authority.

(You’d be surprised how hard it is to find a plain English definition of it.)

In the context of gaming, this would encompass actions taken by a player that are unscripted by the game’s developers.

An example of emergent behavior in a Web2 game like Call of Duty would be a 3rd-party tournament.

In this tournament, you’d still be playing COD. However, the circumstances around it (i.e. organizing or participating in the tournament) are bought about independent of studios like Infinity Ward.

Examples of Emergent Behavior In Onchain Games: OPCraft

Now that we have an understanding of emergent behavior, let’s look into some examples of it in onchain games.

Despite the nascency of the space, we’ve already seen instances of emergence in titles like Dark Forest and OPCraft.

I played OPCraft myself, so I’ll focus on that one in particular.

OPCraft is a fully onchain version of Minecraft built in MUD by the Lattice team and deployed on its own OP Stack L2.

In October 2022, OPCraft held a two-week public playtest, where like in TradCraft, players were able to build and mine for diamonds.

Each diamond gave a player the right to claim one block in the world of OPCraft, meaning that they (and only they) could modify or build on it as they wished.

As the playtest progressed, one player, SupremeLeaderOP, managed to find over 135,000 diamonds, which they used to claim an enormous chunk of blocks.

SupremeLeaderOP declared his land the “Autonomous People’s Republic of OPCraft” (APROC for our purposes) and themself a leader.

The supreme leader did more than just anoint themself as ruler, as they created a smart contract that allowed other players to join the APROC and access the contents of its treasury in exchange for relinquishing control of their inventory.

This entire saga is not just a funny anecdote, but a prime example of how onchain games can enable emergent behavior.

Without any direction, prompting, or permission from the Lattice team, SupremeLeaderOP was able to build a mod on OPCraft to create an entire in-game “nation” governed by smart-contracts.

Potential Emergence In Primodium

Now that we have an understanding of what emergent behavior is and an example of it in OPCraft, let’s dive deeper and unpack its potential some more.

I find it hard to discuss ideas like this abstractly, so to do so, let’s look through the lens of Primodium.

Below, I’ll explore how we could see emergent behavior develop in the game, and the broader implications of this.

Military Alliances

One way we may see emergent behavior in Primodium is through the creation of multi-base alliances.

In Primodium, you spawn with your own, individual asteroid that lives in a belt shared by all other players.

A key part of the gameplay involves creating and deploying units, which are spacecraft that can be sent into the shared belt to capture and extract resources from motherlodes.

Motherlodes are neutral asteroids that are valuable because they hold reserves of one of four rare resources (Titanium, Platinum, Iridium, and Kimberlite), which are vital to progressing to higher levels in the game.

In future updates, units and motherlodes will play an even more critical role, as they will be used in PVP combat to attack other players' bases and take resources from them.

Today, Primodium lives on a Caldera testnet, meaning that if a player’s base were to be attacked, they would only risk losing their pride in addition to resources.

However, when the game launches on mainnet, it's quite possible that there will be real economic consequences to attacks.

We don’t have much information on how financialized the game will be, but for our purposes, let’s imagine that each player’s base is represented by an NFT.

The value of this NFT would likely be tied to how the amount of resources the base it represents ownership of has.

So, were a player to lose resources in attack, they would also suffer a financial hit, as their NFT would lose value.

Because of this, we could see a “NATO of Primodium,” in-game military alliances where players team up and pool units to defend each other’s bases, motherlodes, and perhaps bags.

These types of pacts could be enforced by social consensus or, ideally, by smart contracts.

For instance, players could instantiate covenants in code, like forfeiting the ability to attack bases of alliance members, removing the need to know and trust the players they team up with.

Mafia’s and Protection Rackets

We may also see more value-extractive organizations emerge in Primodium.

It won’t just be larger, established players who want to protect their hard-earned resources.

Players who may be newer or have smaller stockpiles will also look to defend themselves against attacks.

As a result, we could see players create an in-game “mafia” or protection racket.

This type of syndicate would be similar to its offchain counterpart, as it would protect less resource-rich bases….but for a price.

In exchange for providing defense, the “mafia” would charge these smaller bases by taking a pre-determined cut of their total resources via a sanctioned attack.

The protectorates would be prohibited from putting up any defense against the “mafia,” as if they did, they would simply be wiped out and have all their resources stolen.

Like military alliances, mafia <> protectorate relationships could be enforced by social consensus, but are a much better fit for being instantiated by smart contracts.

These contracts would include restrictions on how many resources the cartel could take, a waiver of the right to defense from the player seeking protection, and perhaps an opt-out clause.

Yes, this idea may sound a bit dystopian and presents some obvious ethical dilemmas, particularly if real value is involved.

(Is something like this even legal?)

And just to be clear, I am NOT endorsing or condoning it any way.

However, an idea like this is fascinating nonetheless, and shows how autonomous worlds can challenge how we perceive power and property rights onchain.

I also think it could lead to some unique metagames within Primodium, entirely independent of the core game outlined by the devs.

For instance, we could see rebellions form and all-out wars break out, with players banding together to fight back, take down the cartels, and restore freedom.

Only Onchain Games

As you can see, emergence is an incredibly powerful property of onchain games.

Because they are permissonless to build on, onchain games are magnets for emergent behavior.

As we’ve glimpsed with games like OPCraft, this can unlock new types of gameplay and experiences that are not possible with offchain games.

Furthermore, future emergence in games like Primodium has the potential to challenge our deep seated notions of how we think about onchain power dynamics, property rights, and address-to-address relationships.

We have yet to experience the full potential of this idea.

But I’m excited to see what emerges.

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