Primitives of the Autonomous World: Constraints, Mechanisms, Value Distribution.

Sky Lab builds primitives of the autonomous world as well as initial games on top of the primitives. This blog explains why primitives matter.

”Give people incentives and tools, and let them build a new world based on their own conditions and preferences.”

Before diving in, let us give a quick definition of fully on-chain game and autonomous world. Fully on-chain game needs to satisfy all of the following qualities:

1. All game logics are run on-chain and open-sourced; there’s no back-end that needs to be run on a closed AWS server

2. Due to this openness, anyone can easily build front-ends, fork, mod, extend game logic, and build games on top of games -- without breaking primitive rules of the game

3. Upon deployment, core team loses control of the game and can only influence the protocol through governance. The game will continue functioning even if core team disappears

4. Core team, perhaps in the form of a foundation, can contribute only to later versions of the protocol, governance, product (clients, applications, front-ends), and marketing -- similar to DeFi protocols

Autonomous Worlds are essentially a subset of fully on-chain games with less specified constraints. Non-autonomous-world fully on-chain games have specific winning conditions such as “conquering more lands” or “kill more enemies” that can be accomplished through specific paths such as “building forts and castles with four types of resources”. Autonomous worlds’ constraints and mechanisms are less specific. If designed well, they can encourage developers to build a more diverse set of activities on top of it.

1. Our Vision: Build Free Economic Zone Cities Instead of Theme Parks

What’s the difference? Theme parks are built from top-down -- fully designed and built by a centralized team. The centralized team for sure are great designers and builders, but it’s impossible for them to understand the intricacies of every small clusters of people’s ever changing tastes.

Cities, especially free economic zones only sets forth social system, incentive structure, law, and governance that lay the ground for all types of economic activities to bourgeon. Anyone, seeing opportunities and incentives, can come develop the city and be rewarded by the market for their valuable contributions. The city belongs to all participants and is open for anyone to come build. It’s an open meritocracy. Drawing the analogy back to games, autonomous worlds are free economic zones.

We, as stewards of the autonomous world, only design constraints, and craft mechanisms, and set value distribution functions that reward developers to build valuable games and incentivizes players to make progress. We call this primitives of the autonomous world. The primitives abstract away tokenomics design, game distribution, bootstrapping early users and liquidity, and parts of infrastructures and toolings away from builders so that they can just focus on building fun games. If this is all too abstract in concepts, we will post another blog and a series of graphs that explain the first set of primitives of our first autonomous world protocol: Project Mercury. It’s easier to think through the design philosophy with a concrete example.

Follow @projmercury and @skylabHQ on twitter for latest updates.

2. Abstracting Away & Why 1+1=3 in the Autonomous World

Through abstracting non-game related work away from developers, we envision a team of one or two developers building casual games based on the primitives over one weekend and get rewarded without more operational works.

You might be thinking, “Sure. Anyone can build a simple game over a weekend. How in the world will that ever be a fun game?“

Well-crafted mechanisms in primitives, ie. resources production, consumption, and progression mechanism of the autonomous world, can make even simple games extra fun. For example, a tic tac toe game on its own can be dry; but a tic tac toe in which players bid scarce primitive resources against each other for putting marks in each grid can create much more complexity in gameplay and strategies. Having the result of the tic tac toe game influences players’ progression in the autonomous world can further expand the depth of the game. There exists not only the micro-strategy of how to play this tic tac toe well but also the macro-strategy of whether playing tic tac toe is the right move if you want to progress in the autonomous world without spending too much resources.

Exploring games in the autonomous world is similar to doing things in the real-world: each type of players under Richard Bartle’s four player-quadrants can find activities that fit their preferences, and each high-achieving player in the autonomous world have their own creative ways of getting there. They find games they love and thrive in. Players play whatever they like in the autonomous world and progress on the connected social structure. This connectedness greatly expands the depth of each game. Thus, 1+1 = 3.

Two lines that have greatly inspired us:

1/ Protocols are formal systems that facilitate complex group behaviors.

2/ Gaming is about selling the dopamine hits of making progress in hyper-feedback loops.

The primitives define a very simple game, but infinite games can grow from there. Players come for specific games as well as progression in the meta-autonomous world initiated by the primitives.

3. Interoperability and Composability - in Action

First, let us define these terms in the gaming setting.

1. Interoperability: In-game assets can be used in a wide variety of other games.

2. Composability: Logic of other protocols, no matter game related or not, can be deployed on top of a game or the autonomous world by anyone and facilitate more complex player behaviors

The on-chain game community has been vowing for interoperability and composability for a long time, but we have barely seen these in actions. While fully on-chain games make these technically possible, we need concrete incentives and use-cases to make them actually happen in games. In practice, it’s quite bizarre to ask game developers to think through how in-game assets created by other developers behave in their own in-game economy.

Practical Interoperability: It only makes sense for interoperability among games to happen when there’s a shared economy and trade layer. Basically that’s how every store and person in the real world are connected. In the autonomous world, primitives define the shared economy layer that connects distinct activities. The magic of interoperability clicks when players bring their in-game items from one game to another and have their performance in each game seamlessly transfers to their status in the autonomous world in ways that wouldn’t disrupt the autonomous world’s economy. The shared economy layer, including progression and resources production, can be influenced by any activities under constraints. An example of constraint: a level up must corresponds to a level down in order to keep the system from progression-inflation.

Practical Composability: Composability only happens when primitives set the right amount of constraints to the autonomous world. With too little constraints, composability can disrupt the social structure of the autonomous world and deem all in-game entities and player’s grind “worthless”. With too much constraints, not much creative composable magic can be built on top. An example of too little constraints: one unit of resource can be sent to a contract and becomes two units of resource. On the other hand, it would be too much constraints if resources can only be transferred to forts and castles construction contracts to build forts and castles. Under that constraint, there’s no space for resource exchanges or resource derivatives contracts to emerge.

4. Open-World with Sufficient Incentives to Build

Incentives rule the world. If you want great things to happen, get the incentives right.

We want to clarify that incentives here are not restricted to financial incentives. In open-world like projects such as Minecraft and Roblox, we’ve seen people build amazing things for all types of reasons: status within a community, the sense of accomplishment, or out of pure passion and love.

Games are about selling progress. There has to be something that incentivizes builders to build fun activities on top of the autonomous world - thus, the third pillar of primitives: value distribution.

Primitives are protocols whereas user-generated activities are clients that give players various ways to interact with the protocol. Since every valuable client makes the protocol more extensive, it makes sense for the protocol to distribute values to its valuable clients. Well-distributed clients on prevalent protocols can capture values independently as well.

5. Not Just for Nerds - With the Right Primitives, Fun is for Everyone in Autonomous World

A prevalent phenomenon of on-chain games is that technical players who can deploy bots, expand game logic, and even leverage beefy hardwares can have significant leg up over non-technical players. For non-technical players who can’t navigate through these technical tools, most fully on-chain games felt very dry and not that distinguishing from traditional games.

We must be intellectually honest that if on-chain games stay like this, it would never be a promising business that creates value for a wide audience. So how to solve this problem? The answer again lies in primitives design.

The primitive mechanism should be clean and simple such that there’s little space for technical players to gain advantages. However, composability magic happens on top of the primitive mechanism. Technical players can become builders and get rewarded for building activities and tools for the wider community to use. If rewards are tied to usage, developers would make more efforts on building activities that attract a wider audience, and thus align the incentives of different parties in the autonomous world.

6. What’s Cooking at Sky Lab

May 2023: Trailblazer Tournament

We are launching a two-month long tournament for Trailblazer in May 2023 -- the first PvP game on Project Mercury Protocol! Trailblazer is a PvP strategy racing game. There are three-stages in each Trailblazer game session: commit vs flee, pre-set, driving stage. Players manage resource allocation and choose the optimal route in order to get to the destination faster than the opponent. In the tournament, since each players are given a set amount of resources and no additional resource can be added, players also need to be strategic about how much to spend for each session in order to be the last standing player.

We apply zero-knowledge proof to succinctly verify validity of strategy instead of running the heavy compute on-chain. Using zero-knowledge proof also allows us to verify results of strategy without revealing the strategy during commit stage, and have never reveal the strategy as an option. But if you just want to play the game, no need to know anything about zero-knowledge proof and you will have the exact same experience as a zero-knowledge proof expert!

The tournament is completely free and open for anyone to join. More details on how to join the tournament will come in May. The tournament runs one round every two days, and winners of each round will each get an alien. Aliens will not be minted and we only distribute them through tournaments. Aliens are native pilots in Project Mercury. Pilots also include Nouns, Moonbirds, Mfers, and Cryptoadz. The only way to get it is to win a round and earn it. Stay tuned and good luck!

Trailblazer Sneak-peeks 👀 ⬇️

August 2023: Project Mercury Primitives Launch

We are launching our first protocol Project Mercury in August 2023. In Project Mercury, the main storyline is that players all start with Level 1 Paper Plane and can level up their aviation when they beat other players in PvP games. The path to leveling up involves macro and micro strategies in multiple rounds of games.

Pilots also include aliens (play Trailblazer Tournament in May to win :)), Nouns, Moonbirds, Mfers, and Cryptoadz. Pilot owners can add pilots on their aviation and get special treatments by the Mercury Vault -- a collection exotic of aviations with pilots. The higher the level, the rarer. Since every level up the population by default decreases by at least 50%, the vault values higher level aviations as double the value of the previous level. Thus, for players, the value of the aviation grows exponentially as players win and level up. For developers, the more resources a game contract earns in proportion to the total amount of resources earned by all games, the more value will be distributed from protocol to the game contract.

This protocol focuses on PvP games and includes level progression, player matching, resource production and consumption, player and developer value distribution structure, and protocol governance. There are four types of PvP structures that developers can choose from: x vs x, x vs y, p choose w, and immutable type. Trailblazer will be the first game on Project Mercury.

Project Mercury Sneak-peeks 👀 ⬇️

September 2023: Another Game on Top of Project Mercury

We are launching another game on top of Project Mercury in September 2023 :) It will be very different, drastically different from Trailblazer. Stay tuned 👀, and be aware that all games on Project Mercury share the same economy layer. Thus, all entities and status can be used across all games.

Upcoming Blogs:

• On-Chain Games: Why Easier to “Cheat” is a Feature and Not a Bug, If Done Right

• The First Set of Primitives: Project Mercury

Again, if this is all too abstract in concepts, we will post another blog and a series of graphs that explain the first set of primitives of our first autonomous world project: Project Mercury. It’s much easier to think through the design philosophy with a concrete example.

Follow @projmercury and @skylabHQ on twitter for latest updates.