Autonomous Worlds | BITKRAFT Summit 2024

All right, GM everyone. I see a lot of familiar faces in the audience. Thanks for joining us. Today's a pretty niche topic and so I'm glad to see people interested in in talking about this stuff. Um I had had some slides prepared and they didn't get sent through which is my bad. Um to just give a bit of context around what we're talking about today. Topic is autonomous worlds. I think I'll just like skip the intro and discuss like do some scene setting while we're you know having our conversations with the panelists here. Um you know as as a maybe as a quick introduction about myself. So my name is Nico. I'm part of the Bigcraft team. I am the guy on the BigCraft team that is into weird stuff. um which includes very niche areas uh at the intersection of web3 and gaming um and as a part of that

I've been the the the one who has pushed some of our investments in the fully onchain gaming space um two of which are here um and so let me maybe I'll do introductions I think that's fun sure yeah otherwise I know David will talk for 10 minutes about himself so that's not true so um David here has had a decade long career he has built games for PlayStation. He has built games for mobile. He has built games for PC. And um about three years ago now, he decided to start a new venture and thought, okay, this web 3 thing is interesting. Um but I'm not that interested in what all the other people are doing about making a game with NFTTS. And he said, what can I do more? And he fell in love with the idea of using the blockchain as the one source of truth and and the world to build a game on. Um, and so he started Playment and that's been two and a half years now or three years now of of building fully on chain and I'm sure you'll have a lot of learnings there.

Good intro. That's all correct. Correct. Awesome. Thank you. And we have Matt. Matt has also a decade long career by now. You spent time with Eddie. Uh, mostly product roles. Yeah. Product management historically largely on the mobile side. There you go. And uh one of the things that he did was he started a newsletter uh called Dark Tunnels, which if you're interested in what we're talking about today, we highly recommend. Um and more recently this year, he joined a company called Cartridge. Um Cartridge is maybe you can talk about what Cartridge does later. Um and uh also one of our portfolio companies. So we this year led Cartridg's series A rounds and Matt does business development mostly there. Biza, product strategy and content. There we go. Um so yeah, thanks for being here. And then finally, you have Raph. Raph, decades of game design experience, correct? Um, going from uh companies like CCP Games, Dapper Labs. What was the the EA? Was that No, Ubisoft. Ubisoft. That was it. I forgot. Thanks. Sorry. Long time ago. Yeah, long long

time ago. You don't seem happy about that. Yeah, I I was doing AAA shooters. It wasn't easy. uh you have spent one year at a company called Lattis who if you guys are familiar with the fully on chain gaming space you might know from a engine called MUD um you've designed fully onchain games there and now you're an entrepreneur in residence at a fund called 1KX who um are also very active in the more cryptonative side of of gaming. Yes, I also design fully onchain games at Dapper at Dapper. Yeah. Yeah. Produce CryptoKitties, right? Yeah. Which in a way was also a fully onchain game. Yeah. Yeah. No. Three. Yeah. Yeah. There you go. Good. Um, so I think there this is a fantastic p panel to talk about this idea of autonomous worlds. The way I'd like to do this is maybe level set with what an autonomous world is, how we understand this, and there might already be disagreements from like that very point. Um, we could talk about the the potential of the idea of autonomous worlds, kind of where we are today and where we are on the way to

that potential. um and then um what the future holds and looks like and how we get to, you know, actually unlock this potential and how we see this. All right, you let's go. Let's go. So maybe David, you kick us off with this this like why you ended up wanting to do this and and be in this space. All right, I'll start on that then. I I think there's uh there's often something interesting happens when some new medium, some new piece of technology meets games. I've seen that many times before and often the most I've made mistakes in the past where I've just taken a little bit of that thing and then done mostly the game that I was doing before. I think the best times when I've done that I've just jumped right in and so jumping right in and web 3 games in 2021 was fully onchain games which is insanity at the time because there was only Ethereum at that point. So the first game we built was on directly on Ethereum and then yeah I we sort of as a I think there's a different kind of product that you can build by

being fully on chain although to be honest that's not particularly clear you know we're still exploring what that is and there are some interesting affordances that feels like they could build some games that wouldn't be possible without that technology and so sort of walking down that long dark corridor figuring out what the best products we can build are. Yes. Um Matt maybe yeah it might be good for you to maybe some give some background about cartridge I think that's useful and then maybe give us your view of um like how you understand the term autonomous worlds. Sure. So I'll start with cartridge. Um cartridge makes the tooling and infrastructure to help developers build fully onchain games and hopefully autonomous worlds. Um we are the core contributors to an open source tool chain called dojo t-shirt and um we also have our own products on top of that we have one called slot which is like a rollup as a service you can deploy L3s ephemeral

roll-ups permanent roll-ups then we have controller which is like our smart wallet um onboarding product setting that aside the question is how do I view autonomous worlds um maybe I have a slightly different point of view here I think it's kind of like a buzzword. It's approaching metaverse territory rapidly. Um but um I think there maybe some things we can agree on. So let's say maximally onchain if not entirely onchain. Maybe aspects of it are provably onchain. I think there's the autonomous part of it, right? It can run by itself. I create a game and let's say I go bankrupt. Um, you know, David could come along later on, build his own client, and still play the game so long as the underlying settlement layer still exists. The smart contracts are there. Uh, they're immutable, they're on the blockchain, anyone can, you know, permissionlessly interact with them. Um, and then I suppose there's the world's part, which has maybe you can speak more to this,

the sort of like introductory rules, the quoteunquote digital physics that get talked about a lot. Um, so these are, I guess, some of the tenants that are often discussed in the space, but in terms of actual products today that meet those standards, uh, let's say few if any. Uh, yeah, I agree with Matt. I think it's, uh, a very commercially viable term. Uh, we can put it like that as Metaverse once was. Um, I think that it it had a purpose, but I think that fully on chain games do unlock unique things. Uh, and it goes back a little bit to the to the first talk, right? When you think about modding, for instance, or you think about UGC, right? Uh, the lines between what is a game, is Roblox a game or is it a platform, it gets a little bit blurred. So, that's number two. When you think about what putting a game fully on chain allows in that space is that it becomes an even more powerful

platform because as Matt said it minimizes basically erases platform risk. It also allows for unique ways of monetizing the mod or whatever you have developed on top of that platform. You no longer have to ask for robots for your share. You just make your own coin and if your little part of the game is successful, your coin goes up. you monetize it whatever the way you want, right? Independent of the platform that you're running on. So that kind of dynamic is uh I think that so it's it's really not new. It's not like oh it's going to change though it's something we've never seen before. It's going to ex exibbate and give you an turbo drive to some things that we already see. It's really fits well that uh yeah that that's kind how I see it. But that said it's very early. It's hard to do. It's very very like you know uh primitive tech and as we all whoever tried to build there we know the pain. Yeah. Um so listening to you trying to

take a step back and maybe like pitch it back to you to just formalize this when I see you hear you say like the idea of autonomous worlds and some of the problems that it solves. Yesterday up on stage um Erin um was talking about some of the problems that exist within the gaming industry today which is you know the platforms that holds like a very large amount of the uh the economic power that take a 30% cut on every dollar you make and some of the the problems that that brings for you know actually being able to build a business right I know that us as a venture firm we are um we're careful or we take that strongly into account and we are always looking for businesses that are doing something that avoids the current status quo of the gaming market just because it's so difficult to build a very big business on top of that. And so having a sort of neutral decentralized base layer as the in like as the foundation to build um businesses on takes away some

of that product risk. The second part of that as I understand it and and maybe that's not exactly what you're talking about but I'm I'm assuming um that's also something you think about which is the base layer of the blockchain is essentially like this sort of decentralized computer which is completely permissionless and um ultimately flexible as a touring complete machine meaning that the kind of experiences that someone can build on top of any autonomous worlds are are like functionally endless and go beyond the all of the limitations that the initial autonomous world creator had in mind. So that so there is the the the the permissionless decentralization there is the like flexibility and then finally the part that you mentioned was monetization which is you are very flexible in what you can build unlimited and obviously there's no take rates or no built-in take rate that gets siphoned away. Go ahead. Yeah. Can I give you an analogy that I'm using at the moment? that is um

I it's quite hard to imagine something that doesn't exist yet and autonomous worlds don't exist and we're struggling to define it. The way that I I an analogy I I'm using at the moment is that I remember when the internet was first about there was prior to that there was AOL and and CompuServe and they were fine. I remember using those and they uh I thought they were great at the time, but there was a step change when it went from being Comperve and AOL to being the internet. Like it just exploded. And I think that popular products like Roblox, Minecraft, Fortnite, all places where you can create content and they're clearly a popular thing for people to do. But I still feel like we're in the CompuServe AOL territory. It's a it's a world that's uh owned and operated by one big corporate company. And I instinctively feel like if you were to to have to allow people to build experiences in a truly autonomous world, then you'd see sort of a Cambrian explosion of

experiences in the same way as we did when we went for those gated sort of AOL and Comperve to the internet. And uh you know some of it is about what you can build like there's nobody to ask is it okay if I build this thing it's also you're free to commercialize it how you want because you're free to commercialize it how you want then you it's easier to get investment and there's no take rate and so like I I just think that the breadth of experiences and be becomes much greater in an autonomous world than a a centralized autonomous world like Roblox let's say and if you look back at some of the sort of history of gaming. Um, you know, this is a sort of a tired story, but we all know about battle royale and, you know, auto battlers coming out of modding communities. There's a long history of u mods and composability leading to uh creative breakthroughs that happen because these tools are available to the community to sort of build as they see fit. And in

sort of the Roblox and UF UEFN examples, like yeah, you can build a lot of things on those platforms, but they can deplatform you. They can take a huge take rate of whatever it is that you're building. Um they might decide that um hey, you know, um you built a really cool game there. We're going to just copy it and they own discoverability as well. So if no one sees your game, they're going to go to the one that is branded the same as the platform. So there are all sorts of issues with centralization. that um these sorts of autonomous worlds, fully onchain games can uh provide remedies to. So we mentioned we talked about platform shifts historically in games and those have led to major innovations. Something that I personally struggle with when I think about the idea of fully onchain games autonomous worlds and and perhaps even web three more broadly is that in previous technological shifts it was actually it was not very hard to imagine the kind of products that were uniquely enabled by

these shifts and how they would find product market fit at scale. Today, especially in the short term, I still struggle with understanding what that product market fit at scale looks like for fully onchain games/ autonomous worlds or even web 3 more broadly. What it seems like to me when I look at the markets, those product market fits indications have mostly been around speculation um and and the financialization of things. Is that unavoidable? Is that I see you're like ready to talk about this. Okay, I've said enough. Go ahead, Rafa. I'm curious. It's healthy. It's healthy. I found it incredibly healthy because like I think it's very Darwinian, right? Like yeah, let's get lot like you know it it it's how evolution happens, right? By dying and all of these. So I I I was talking to David earlier and I was saying like are there any autonomous worlds? I mean, no,

there are none. And I don't think this thing exists. I think it's like, you know, I see that people kind of are they in the room with us like that kind of I don't think this is but there are things that really bring up the principles pump. Fun for me is really really cool and it is something that is permissionless. You do whatever the hell you want and then you you you you create the experience and yes of course people like money. It's a huge carrot and yeah, it's going to work. So that's the motivation now. Yes, it is and it will probably for a long time. So, we got to kind of accept it. And and there's another point, too, that's really really important. People sometimes overlook as we think of games, 99% of games don't have trading, peer-to-peer trading. I can only think of one and uh it's online. I worked for a couple of years. It's a mess. When you have players trading amongst each other, the ele the the the assets of the game, it makes everything complicated. You look

at any other game, they don't do it because it's bad, because it's really really hard to do. When you put a game on chain, it's kind of a uh it happens naturally. You cannot stop it. And in as just to design the experience, that's a huge mess because it creates exactly it's creates space for speculation and making money and people will do it. And the easiest way is what Ponzi after Ponzi after Ponzi. So yeah, I think it's uh it comes with the territory and you have to be happy with it. I find that depressing that uh all fully onchain games, autonomous worlds just will lead to speculation. Is that first of all, is that what you're saying? No, I think it's a I think it's something that will happen naturally, but they don't have necessarily to be that all the time. It depends on the people, right? But that's the big carrot. It's too big a carrot to ignore and pretend it doesn't exist. you have to somehow incorporate it into the design.

I think maybe a slight distinction between speculation and financialization. I think the financialization is inevitable. It's going to happen because of the crypto payment rails. Um and and perhaps to your point, it would behoove the developer to build some of that in or to at least take that into account in the beginning so that you don't have the community kind of, you know, running rampant. They're going to do what they want. It's permissionless, but at least if you provide sort of a path is like here's the way we see this being financialized, you can sort of set the ball rolling in a direction that you're more comfortable with. But speculation is I think maybe a subset persona of uh the users right now. Can I please? Uh yeah, cuz that worked that didn't work for the Fed. We had 2008 crisis in the real world. people trying to hold specul speculation back and derivatives just went out of control. And in a game, if it's truly autonomous, if it's truly permissionless, yes, there will be

finance people doing derivatives that are going to generate speculation. Yes, it's a danger, but then it's it's a kind of a radical perspective where people are going to have to protect themselves unless you start to centralize what can be deployed. And so in roadblocks, it won't happen. So you know that's it. So you know Raf when I hear you speak you're you're saying that based on because we are at a very basic level as humans degenerate gamblers um every type of you know financializable product which ultimately every autonomous world becomes um becomes you know implodes upon itself because of that speculation. Is that inevitable? And if not how do you avoid it? I don't I didn't say that. I I said a lot of things that you said. I put a lot of words in your mouth. What did you not say? Uh I think that this kind of behavior will happen within this context. It doesn't mean that it's the it's not everybody's behavior but it will happen. Right now we see this

specific kind of people attracted to this space uh because it's really free and they can do that you know wildly but it's not because the people who just want to play games and have fun they are much better off getting a mobile game or you know getting a console or something like that. So, another thing I've been thinking about a lot is are we limiting our imagination by thinking about autonomous worlds as like sort of 3D or even 2D environments where, you know, one person has one character and you're walking around and and like the very traditional narrow mindset of what we think about as as like a video game. You mentioned pumf fun as being, you know, kind of an autonomous world. Is is that an area that you think more of the um the people in the space should be looking at and thinking about? I think that we say when you talk about game it's super dangerous especially in web 3 when you talk about games and we go immediately to this archetype of a game and it usually has

an avatar in a 3D world that you move around and all that. But then okay fine mobile game what is Candy Crush? Where's the avatar? Right? There's no avatar in Candy Crush. It's still a game. There there are so many forms that play can happen and uh so yeah we have to stop you know this kind of archetype it it's kind of the danger of the metaverse right because like it it it becomes this thing so I yeah 100% you are not bound by a physical presence you're bound by the wallet that would be the closest thing you would have in as an avatar in this operational system is just a wallet because that's the entity that interacts with the logic. That's it. Well, there's some I I still think there's something magical in the idea that there's a digital place that exists that isn't owned by anybody in particular and it's owned and operated by the people inside that world. To me, like that's still a really exciting

idea. It's hard to know exactly how all that works, but like uh that's an idea that's really grabbed me. the fact that oh there's this world that isn't owned by any one company and uh and so like and it's I immediately go to what you say which is like a world that looks a bit like Minecraft I suppose and people moving around and trading with each other. It's also a really big game to build. So it's is a challenge. I think both of these views are compatible. You know one thing I think you've said in the past or question you've raised is like is Bitcoin an autonomous world? And you know, we're just talking about like sort of the representation of a of an AW like is you know, avatars and 3D 3D or 2D space. I don't think that has to happen. It could be text based. Like that's where that's gaming's history. It could totally come from text and and numbers on a screen. And part of the beauty of being composable and and headless by nature is that, you know, anyone can build their own experience that uh reflects that

data in their own way. So, you know, if Rafa wanted to build a 3D version of the data onchain and David wanted to do 2D, these are fully compatible with one another, they're based on the same underlying data. Yeah. And it goes to the fact that it's an underlying set of rules that provide meaningful interaction between the agents. That's it, right? That that's all it is. Now, what form it takes, what UI it takes. And again considering where we are in terms of latency and transaction confirmation and all those things we are kind of better off not using avatars. Do you is um the EVE team calling their new game an autonomous world? Do you think it is? No. Okay. Um John in the last presentation ended up with a number of predictions. I'm known to like my spicy takes and so I'd love for you guys to maybe look five years ahead and and and talk us through briefly what you think about like what

you think autonomous worlds look like in uh 2029. I know it's tough. I'm not starting this one. Okay. Rough. Me? Yes. I think we may have some kind of weird platforms where things get deployed on top and different experiences and yeah, I think we could have that. Uh I don't know if it's going to be avatars. I honestly don't know because I've seen many experiences at this point and and and they are weird. But I still think that in 5 years from now, it's going to be highly it's still going to be very much motivated by uh some form of financialization because you really can't escape that at this point. One of the predictions he made was that you quote unquote pure web 3 gaming, which in this sense I'll take to mean autonomous worlds or fully onchain games, will remain a niche genre. And I endorse that prediction. I think that

makes total sense. Um, I think there's a lot of things that you can do um, with fully onchain games and much of that is still unexplored, but I think certain genres are better fits and always will be better fits and um, I think the audience will remain niche, but that doesn't mean it's not meaningful. Uh, it could monetize extremely deeply and then on the AW front like I think that there will be multiple launches that uh, try to fully uh, become autonomous whether it's Citadel guys, whether it's Eternum and the realms ecosystem. And there's going to be others who try and do this and hand over governance to the community and let the game kind of run itself perpetually. Uh people will try and we'll see how successful it is, but I have no qu no doubt that it's going to happen. We'll just see to what magnitude. Yeah. Yeah. I suppose I've come to realize that the the full vision of autonomous worlds is just not a easy or it's not an easy or quick thing to build. So, I think that something that is an autonomous world probably needs to be a thinner version of what it will be

ultimately. Like, I think uh trying to build the the Minecraft or No Man's Sky version of an autonomous world now is it's just too big a project with too many unknowns. And I think I've come to realize that there needs to be some baby steps between that. And that may look like pumped up fun or something that I I haven't historically thought of as an autonomous world, but they it has aspects of it that you use to then grow into the next thing to the next thing, whether it's from the same team or a different team. So I I think that it probably doesn't look like the 3D world that I imagine. I think it ends up being something a bit different. I I I want to add something there. I think I don't know what it's going to look like, but I know there will be a community. So it's a little bit like an esport. You can't say your game is an esport unless people are playing it for you. So you can try to make it like that. So if you want it to actually be this kind of place where people build things on top and all that.

I'm not using the words, but you know uh you need to have a community and that community has to really be invested in the thing. Maybe financially but not necessarily definitely emotionally. So once you have that where where that leads so basically I think the community is going to lead that and then you follow them. So yeah I I think um I agree with you that there has to be a community for this for these things to evolve into a a proper you know sort of self-sustaining world but to just to take a contrarian point of view for a moment. I think you would find this interesting Tim like what if that community is just bots you know right because they're on a level playing field with humans. Theoretically, it's just a address uh on the blockchain. That could happen. Bots are people, by the way. Ah, okay. Fair enough. Fair. But like, is that a community then? If it's just bots um transacting with one another, if it if they are building things on top, yes. Okay. They're just contributing to the dead internet that we already love, you know? If they are building things on top

or there are content for people to build things on top, they they are fine. Let me uh you're a future gazer. You can't ask that ask that question and not expect it. I I hope to avoid this. I Yeah, you don't have to. No, no, I want to. Um, I think um I I just want to say something different because like I I kind of like agree with all of you. I think that some of the most exciting opportunities will happen um outside of what we traditionally consider as games, right? The pumpf fun type of things. I've talked to many of you about what's you know small brain does. he built like these these really fun consumer applications that are like more toys than what we would consider like a game. Um, and I think that there's a lot of re really really fun and interesting things to be built there. Um, and so I would say that let's let's make this more more clear. I think that the most successful autonomous worlds by autonomous world by any definition will be less of a game as we

would traditionally think about it and more of something different. And don't ask me what that looks like. uh that'll be my prediction next year. Okay, I'm with you. And and if I could, you know, leave the audience with something if you're thinking about bu building a game or an experience fully on chain, like that's partially why it's so fascinating to me is because we just don't know. Like we're we're in that kind of like around and find out phase where like try something fun and see what happens. We just don't know because it's vastly unexplored from a game design perspective in my opinion. Yeah, it's almost like I don't know how many parts of the games industry are unexplored. This is so few, right? Yeah. Yeah. I kind This is probably the the one the only one that springs to mind for me. I don't know maybe there's some things around AI or AR. But interestingly, those sort of converge with fully on chains, whether it's bots that are on chain. Uh we talk about sort of the composability UGC aspect, enabling more people to participate in contributing to these autonomous worlds. AI does a lot of that. And then you talk about sort of

like novel distribution platforms. Well, most crypto games are web- based right now. And now we've got Telegram. We've got Discord and and others experimenting with web- based distribution and I you know I think these things could converge in really interesting unexpected ways. Yes, we still have a bit of time left. So if there's any audience questions um you know feel free to shut them out. Yes, Sam. Sure. When it comes to what you guys look like, I didn't quite catch the end of that, but if I'm understanding incorrectly. Um, you know, these these things because they're headless. Um, you know, people

can then sort of take your I guess the question follow-up question is like is it a closed source front end? Um, and that's, you know, potential business model, right? You could monetize on the client side while the protocol is relatively permissionless. Uh, or if it's open source or at least partially exposed to the public, well then they could fork your client and improve it in some ways or do plugins like we saw with Dark Forest. Um, so I, you know, I personally don't have an issue with, um, you taking whatever sort of front-end approach you want so long as the game itself, uh, is open to builders to ex's really like you have to start the network somehow, right? So, you want to make it open in some ways. If you're going to put in all that effort, you want to start that flywheel somehow, get other people building on your client or augmenting it or forking it. It's it's really kind of up to you. I mean, loot survivor. Yes. Uh yeah, Sky Strive was fully open source and it was

it actually one of the concepts that we used in Sky Strive was uh client agnostic. The game can be played by bots, can be played by scripts. Uh that was one of the points to really push that forward, but we don't call it an AW because don't use that word. Yeah. the the Loot Survivor team is is also doing something in that area which you'll hear more about in the the coming months and I believe Pirate Nation has at least been open with like giving people access to those kind of tools. I can't really speak for them, but that's my understanding. Fantastic. Well, we're out of time, so I want to thank the panel. This was fantastic. I enjoyed this. Um, thank you all for being here and um I think there's now something happening upstairs. So, uh, let's go. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.