The Gamification Of The Blockchain Posted on : Oct 15 - 2018

Collecting as a hobby has been around for centuries. It's simple, when you think about it -- finding something you like and building a collection of those. This can be anything from rocks to baseball cards to dolls, even cars. Regardless of what is being collected, one common element is the assignment of value to each piece in the collection. The rarer it is, the more valuable it is. For example, in the collectible card industry, low-value cards (often called “commons”) are printed at higher quantities, while cards with greater perceived value have smaller print runs, making them harder to get.

But does this model apply in the digital realm? We're already seeing a shift in the idea of physical ownership when it comes to consuming media: Owning music -- CD or vinyl -- is much less common these days, and instead, many people opt to pay for access to a streaming library. What is the purpose of amassing a physical collection when digital access becomes an on/off switch?

The problem with this is that binary all-or-nothing digital rights eliminate the idea of rarity, and that kills a lot of the fun in collecting. However, the blockchain can be used to bring the best of both worlds together: the anywhere/anytime device-based access to digital assets and the rare distribution found in physical collecting.

Gamification As An Industry Driver

It’s clear that the blockchain has become a technology buzzword, so much so that it’s common to hear just about anything associated with the blockchain. In some cases, the technology itself isn’t even important; simply adding the term “blockchain” to a company name has become a strategy in itself. However, the gaming and collecting industries actually make a lot of sense when it comes to integrating the blockchain.

In essence, collecting has been a part of gaming for decades. In physical card games, Magic: The Gathering has turned collectible cards into assets of a game. Pokémon Go is the wildly popular augmented reality craze that focuses on rarity and collection -- and it’s still going strong as players continue to seek rare characters. Pokémon Go does not, however, use blockchain, so while Ditto may be hard to find, it is not truly rare in the sense that only a certain amount of people can own it. The collection of things, be they paintings or baseball cards or Pokémon characters, is about the providence of the item and the scarcity. But achieving those things for digital items remains a hurdle to clear.

The solution, though, is inherent in blockchain technology -- particularly the creation of the ERC 721 token standard on Ethereum. ERC 721 is an open standard that provides guidelines on completely unique tokens. Or, as its own website puts it, “Think of them like rare, one-of-a-kind collectables.”

With this model of completely unique tokens, the creation and distribution of digital assets on a particular blockchain is the digital version of printed or manufactured items. While every piece is technically a unique individual item, the rarity in a specific print or design can be controlled. In addition, Ethereum provides other useful functions such as payment and proof of ownership. For offline items, these functions were made possible by central authorities such as Sotheby's and Christie's -- this independent arbitration of value establishes the true scarcity of items and their value. View More