Developing Worldviews
Thinking Behind Games as Cultural and worldview expression
Digital worldviews must contain two sets of rules:
Social Rules (Ex. Narratives)
Physical Rules (Ex. Game Physics)
Games are where the two sets intersect.
What are games?
The Assyrians invented the world's oldest game, "The Royal Game of Ur," more than 5,000 years ago. The game was a board game in which a board represented a course and pieces were moved by players.
Games are central to all cultures, acting as one of the oldest forms of human social interaction since the dawn of time. They are ways of expression of play, capturing momentarily the ideas of their society, as well as the cultural perspectives. It is also used as an ideological expression layer of the digital societies of today. The pre-historic and ancient games are also rooted in ideological and governance settings, games like chess and gambling dice grew out of monasteries and other Buddhist sites while court cards grew and evolved to represent European royalty.
During the industrial revolution, around 1850, the game is known today as checkers or game of goose became popular. Role-playing games also grew out of fantasy stories and wargaming miniatures to represent fantastical wars in uncertain times while video games sprung out of mainframe simulations and interactive systems in the 1950s but quickly grew to prominence with the introduction of cross-platform environments, smartphones, and cloud computing resources. In 1980, the gaming industry in the West saw a rebirth. Basically, it evolved thus;
Arcade -> Console -> PC -> Browser Multiplayer -> Mobile Games
Internet accessibility gave birth to individual game developers that allowed for global expression with websites like Newgrounds to inspire future titles like Angry Birds. Then the rise of social media sites allowed users to interact with friends on their platforms, these platforms started to gain power, way too much power.
Today, the gaming landscape is being revolutionized by blockchain technology. Generally, blockchain-based games are gaming experiences that utilize blockchain technology in some capacity. Until now, this use has been primarily centered on issuing and transferring in-game assets. These assets include non-fungible tokens that represent in-game items and fungible tokens that are used for in-game incentives, value transfer, and, in certain circumstances, to confer governance rights to native ecosystem token holders. Currently, the line between what we call "blockchain-based games" and "traditional games" is becoming less clear as digital assets become more seamlessly integrated into gaming experiences and user experiences get better.
In 2017, Larva Labs' cryptokitties were one of the early versions of what is now termed a blockchain or crypto game, and it introduced the concept of unhackable, unique assets that can be purchased, sold, and traded in-game. However, blockchain-based gaming emerged in early 2018 with the launch of games that expanded upon Larva Labs's prior successes by incorporating more active gameplay, such as combat, RPG, multiplayer, and more intricate in-game economics. Games have hit a brick wall in terms of innovation.
With only a handful of genres being copy-pasted hundreds of times over, Mirror World's Matrix Core Engine aims to create a new, smart, interconnected universe of games, from casual to hardcore. Core to the open-source thesis of Web3, Mirror Worlds will utilize the unique incentive layer of blockchain assets to create a broader incentive for a renaissance of AI-enabled, player, and community-owned markets.
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