 Hi, everyone. So the title of this talk is Ask Not What Ethereum Can Do For Video Games, but Ask What Video Games Can Do For Ethereum. So before we begin, I'd like to see an honest show of hands. Who here thinks that putting Ethereum in video games is basically like a dumb idea, or we're effectively trying to shove a square peg into a round hole, something like this? OK. So this was actually very much my impression before I got into the space of working between the intersection of video games and Ethereum. I really thought that all of this stuff was really for serious business only. Ethereum was meant for disrupting the central authorities of the world. It was meant for democratizing financial opportunities. I've been in this space for a while, and I had a very high set of ideals in that regard. But over time, I have come to the conclusion that there actually is a place for Ethereum in video games. And so that's what I want to explore in this presentation. The purpose of this talk is to persuade the wider Ethereum community to adopt more seriously a gaming strategy of their own. And this is both for the community as a whole and per individual project. And I'll demonstrate this by exploring the premise of this talk, which is that Ethereum really benefits from video game adoption. And this is a lot different than what you'll see in most typical talks for advocates of video game adoption. Most people talk about all the ways that video games benefit from Ethereum. And I really think that at the end of the day, Ethereum has the one that stands more to gain. So my name is Chris Robison, and for the last two years, I've been with Horde, which is working to enable true ownership inside of video games using both Ethereum and Plasma with our free and open source SDK. So the agenda for this talk is to provide an initial outline for what the medium of this experience looks like, and that is gaming. We'll continue to explore this theme as we move through three different ways that Ethereum can benefit from video games. And these are by way of marketing through the development life cycle of DApps and through the deployment of DApps. So starting out with the medium, video games are radically shaping our society. And to jump right into what's basically happening on a very high level is our society is undergoing a process of hypergamification. Nearly every facet of our lives can currently be managed by a piece of software. And as anyone here can attest, these applications are leveraging multiple elements from games. These elements might include notifications, achievements, tasks, and even radical decision modeling. So what's the reason that gamification has impacted so much of our personal lives and how did this happen? The basic reason is that games have figured out design really well. Now, while some of these designs are more nefarious in nature, such as the design of addictive behavior loops, others are much more socially beneficial and actually quite enjoyable, such as the creation of super effective and pleasant user experience. There is a lot of complexity that can exist in any narrative, system or aspect of life. And what games do really well is they can consolidate and simplify and contain complexity in really digestible systems. So what's happening on a high level is that in the age of information, societies become constrained through our own most finite resource, which is our time and attention. And as a result, these gamified mechanisms have risen as a solution, sort of as attention rails, which guide our expectations for how society should be organized. And this isn't a political statement one way or another, simply an observation, but it could be argued at this point that these gamified systems have now reached the point where they're actually used in a pretty significant capacity to even manage politics on a global scale. So if Ethereum and all the tenants of decentralization that go along with it could integrate into gaming culture very effectively, then it really begs the question, could they be as influential as any of these other geopolitical systems and elements of gamification? Could self-sovereignty and true ownership become just part of the way we expect society to operate? And to answer this question, we really need to dive into looking at how the video game market is growing. And if Ethereum were to successfully integrate with it, how it could impact society? Could video games become the most potent marketing instrument imaginable for Ethereum? And this brings us to the first way that Ethereum can benefit from video games and that's by way of marketing. So video games are by far the fastest growing entertainment industry or sector of the entertainment industry. And although they only generate about half the revenue of television at this time, they're growing at about three to five times the rate faster than any other form of entertainment. If this trend continues, then video games will outpace any other form of entertainment within the next seven, eight years. So what else can happen in about the next seven to eight years? According to video game economist, Edward Castronova, one of the major ways that video games will evolve in the next seven, eight years is that game developers will adopt a new strategy for generating revenue in video games and that is to pay players to play games. In 2016, Edward Castronova wrote a fantastic paper called Players for Higher Games and the Future of Low-Skill Work in which he stated that within 10 years by 2026, paying players will become the standard revenue model in the game industry. And there are effectively two reasons to understand why this would happen. The first is at a macro level. Games have for the last 20 to 30 years become progressively more affordable for the casual player. For a long time, the dominant model was to charge players a large sum, maybe $60, to buy a game and they could go on and play it forever. Then games were able to connect to the internet and it gave game developers an opportunity to charge a much smaller amount, but on an ongoing basis in a subscription type model in which payers paid for only as long as they played. Now the most dominant model is the free-to-play model and this is largely enabled by the ubiquity of mobile casual devices like our cell phones. Now players only pay if they want to become something of a more serious or hardcore gamer by way of in-game purchases. So each one of these stages has made gaming more affordable for the casual player and they've each been enabled by the emergence of new technology. So how can the pendulum swing even further in favor of players to become more affordable for the casual player? Games can't get much cheaper than free. So the only thing that is better for players from a financial standpoint would be to get paid to begin playing games and this is enabled of course by the newest technology which would be blockchain. On a micro level though, this can all be explained by a simple fact that less than a quarter of a percent of all players are responsible for more than 50% of all in-game purchases. These whales only make purchases because other players are playing the game. The psychology behind whale purchases is an interesting one. They basically only make purchases for two reasons. One, to differentiate themselves from other players by way of vanity items and to dominate other players to win through pay-to-pay, pay-to-win power-ups. For the game developer, the strategy then becomes quite simple. They're looking to bootstrap communities that then become attractive enough that they'll attract whales into the community to go ahead and begin spending in the game. Game developers therefore can justify paying players, casual players, to play their games. And the method of paying players can really be anything. It can be stable money, cryptocurrency, in-game currency, and even collectible items, all of which are currently already supported by Ethereum. And this is one model that is almost undeniable to justify the integration of Ethereum into video games. And the cool thing is is that Ethereum can be integrated pretty natively. And this is much more than can be said for television or movies or music. These are very passive forms of entertainment while video games are very active. And Ethereum is designed to reward people who are active participants. So Ethereum can't integrate so well who will even care at the end of the day. Will the integration with video games fall upon deaf ears? I don't think so. If Twitch were a U.S. television network, it would be the absolute largest by-daily viewership. More people would watch Ethereum transactions taking place in the backgrounds of players playing their games by way of their streaming media than would watch Fox News or MSNBC. And that doesn't even take into account the number of people who would be actually making Ethereum transactions in the background of their games. Steam alone has more engagement than all of these media outlets combined by Tenfold. So how can all of this translate? How can all of this attention translate into real change? There's an excellent quote in Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky that states, mass media serves as a system to inculcate individuals with values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of larger society. If Ethereum wants to become an institutional structure of the larger society, then we should take this statement very seriously. After all, the world governments currently do. In 2017, WikiLeaks published a series of documents revealing that the Pentagon and CIA have attempted to successfully influence the narratives of more than 1,800 TV shows, movies, and television networks, including Oprah, BBC, and nearly every Marvel and DC movie. This is the game that's being fought in the entertainment industry. When governments do it, we call it propaganda. When I'm suggesting that Ethereum does it, I'm just going to refer to it as marketing. The only difference is that I haven't caught wind of any governments trying to influence video game developers yet. So that is our opportunity. The second way that Ethereum can benefit from video games is by way of development through the DAP and protocol lifecycle. Video games can be used as a sandbox for innovation. And when I say a sandbox, I mean that games are a place, a play area intended specifically for fun. It sounds really simple, but the concept of fun is actually rooted in economics, and this is something that we should examine. Evercaster Nova defines fun as the pleasant experiences associated with the co-activation of motivational systems which promote survival. In the context of the person's choices and decisions in an environment which they know to be a game. In other words, video games are fun because they trigger our survival instincts while we remain in a safe place. And while there are many environmental factors which can trigger a person's survival instincts, there's one in particular which we are no strangers to here in crypto, and that's scarcity. In video games, there's tons of artificial scarcity, such as the amount of land available in a game or the number of valuable swords that are available in circulation, but these are just made up by the game developers. They don't really mean anything. There are however real and naturally scarce resources that occur in video games. These are attention, computation, and content. These are the economic waters in which video games swim in, and they're the ones that Ethereum should submerge itself in to leverage the development life, to leverage video games for the development life cycle. Omisego has a gaming strategy in which they leverage attention. Golem has won to leverage computation and colony for content. So last year, Horde and Omisego partnered together to battle test Plasma. Horde created a 2D platformer called PlasmaDog, whereby every coin that was collected by PlasmaDog triggered an on-chain transaction on the Plasma network, and this was used to successfully test Plasma. Omisego needed the attention of thousands of users, distributed everywhere, making continuously the same actions over and over to make sure that what they built actually worked. Task their community to set their computer and repeatedly click, transact over and over and over would be a tough proposition. But playing a game became an impressively useful hack to test their development. We hit more than 2,000 daily active users and more than 35,000 daily transactions. Golem leverages computation as a scarce resource, and just a few months ago they partnered with Horde to create a better mesh computing network by leveraging the video game industry. It's a fact that in the gaming industry both developers and players have pretty powerful computers. It's a necessity for developing and creating games. We collaborated then to develop a tool to allow game developers to leverage Golem Unlimited to, so that way game developers could collectively compile each other's code while the others were passively working in the background, and this would reduce wasted time while at work. Now while this is only leveraging what is happening on the game developer side, you could imagine the same thing being leveraged from the player side. A player could be playing their favorite game while contributing spared computation to the developers who are creating the sequel to that favorite game. Colony has also approached Horde with an enthusiastic desire to develop their own gaming strategy, to create a framework for players to create on-chain guilds. When players have true ownership of the items in their games, they can open smart contracts to influence behavior, even outside the bounds of the rules that the game developers created. Creating new rules is a type of content, and it's what Colony needs to generate more of in order to develop bigger and better dows to understand how people are really going to use these things. Scarcity in games is what allows these sandboxes to become hubs of innovation, and it should be part of more projects gaming strategies. And this brings us to the third way in which games can help Ethereum, and this is through the phase of deployment, the moment of truth when dApps go to mainnet. The thing to keep in mind here is that video games are adversarial by nature. Returning to Edward Castronova's quote, video games are fun because they trigger our survival instincts, and survival instincts are when we are overcoming adverse circumstances. In video games, our adversaries are other players. In Ethereum, we have our own adversaries. We have the money monopolies, the governance monopolies, and the data monopolies, and we're trying to fight them head on with DeFi, dows, and privacy protocols. In some ways, this is like a bunch of civilians trying to run head first in the storming Area 51. It's unbelievably exciting, but it is also dangerous. And when anyone takes this danger into honest consideration, they face a decision. If they decide to build something, do they go the safe route down a path where they know they can make some decent tech money? Or do they create the things that are really going to challenge these powerful adversarial agents? And end up like Edward Snowden or Julian Assange? Do they create the things that really will make a world of difference? It's a difficult decision, and so I'd like to offer a simple solution. And that is to develop a gaming strategy. If your tech is so radically subversive that you legitimately fear it's dangerous to deploy, launch it for gamers. In the context of gaming, a mixer or any other anonymous by default protocol is a necessity, a necessary piece of infrastructure. If players can see what's happening on the other players' wallets and see what they're doing on chain, the game mechanisms break down and unfair advantages are had. The game is no longer fun. But because any subversive tech that's developed for gaming is on the same platform as the rest of the Ethereum community, it means anyone can begin using it however they like. Video games become a type of black box where real conflict can be shielded by simulated conflict. Of course, not all deployments with a gaming strategy need to be subversive. Even something like Compound could be used, could be leveraged to use the money that's locked up in players' wallets to add lending liquidity to the market. The possibilities are really pretty endless. And so this brings us to our call to action. Projects in the Ethereum space should adopt a video game strategy. They should work with gaming projects. They should continue to contribute to open source SDKs in the gaming industry. They should invite game developer friends into this community and they should openly discuss what their gaming strategies are. Of course, in this process, we'd like you to consider Horde. We have been bridging the gap between the gaming industry and Ethereum for the last two years. And today we're proud to announce a new partnership between a prominent gaming company, a studio, out in Warsaw called Farm51. They will be integrating Ethereum and Plasma into Chernobyl Lite, which is their latest game. So thank you so much. If you'd like to get in contact, please follow us at Horde Exchange and I am at C Bob Robinson.