Painting by Pawel Kuczynski

For the reader not familiar with ice-hockey, a forward is a player position whose primary responsibility is to score. By contrast, a two-way forward can contribute to a team both offensively and defensively, not only by scoring important game-winning goals but also by making big plays.

Pokémon Go is an extremely greedy game as far as personal data is concerned. It also makes users pay for various perks without giving them proper ownership over the content they find in the game. Let’s see how we could improve the game experience through blockchain applications, both defensively by protecting personal data and offensively by hooking gamers with economic incentives.

The Pokémon fallacy: the servers get fat and you probably won’t slim down

We have seen in the press some very catchy titles (and indeed, you’ve gotta catch them all) about the benefit of playing the game, such as: “ Pokémon Go shows how the free market can get kids moving again” or “Is Pokémon Go the answer to America’s obesity problem?” I have a quick rule of thumb that says “if the title is a question then the answer is no.” Here, it turns out the answer is more likely to be a big no: while Pokémon Go may help you stay healthy, you can probably forget about losing weight.

Worse, someone — or should I say something? — is actually getting fat over this: the servers. Because your personal data are jamming them.

Let’s try to sum up this small Pokémon Go issue in 5 secs, shall we?

By this time, game users should have experienced the “servers are busy” screen multiple times. What’s for sure is that the servers are not busy generating new Pokémons. Rather, the problem comes from the fact that servers syphon so much of the game users’ personal data that they cannot chew as much as they would like to eat.

When you log in with your Google account, here is what happens: you give Pokémon Go the ability to:

Read all your emails;

Send emails in your name;

Access all your Google drive documents (which includes the ability to delete them);

Look at your search history and your Maps navigation history;

Access any private photos you may have stored in Google Photos;

And a whole lot more.

Basically, you give a lot of permissions to the game developer, Niantic. Sure, certain uses are limited, but as they are still technically possible, it’s a major security issue. Pokémon Go had initially full account access and “this ‘Full account access’ privilege should only be granted to applications you fully trust, and which are installed on your personal computer, phone, or tablet” according to Google’s help page. If you would like to read more about that, you can check this blog post by adam reeve. Niantic has responded and fixed the problem in an update but you shouldn’t actually expect them to become less data-hungry especially on geospatial data because what’s at stake here is targeted marketing.

Appropriate deviantart by prisonsuit-rabbitman

Yes, Nintendo didn’t recently double its market capitalization for no reason: it has morphed one of the most popular game ever made into the most powerful “go shop” ever made!

Stores can pay for their location to appear frequently with a Pokémon. Very soon those stores will be able to do targeted campaigns with the data Pokémon Go is collecting from you. Indeed, prices of the perks you can buy in the game and the overall game contents can easily be tweaked according to your profile. We are a few steps away from being dragged to every single store in our towns to catch eluding Pokémons, with the inevitable “buy this and get a free Pokémon” promotion hanging over our heads.

My advice if you want to start/keep playing Pokémon Go: try to find the option that allows you to log in via a “Pokémon Trainer account” (yes there is one) or at least use a disposable Gmail account.

How the blockchain can be a two-way forward for Pokémon Go and the game industry: decentralized data storage for the users to control their data and organized trading for game assets

Getting control back over your data: Uport

I think the original framework comes from an article by Guy Zyskind, Oz Nathan and Alex ’Sandy’ Pentland. According to the authors, all we need is blockchain and off-blockchain storage to construct a personal data management platform focused on privacy. The authors are implementing this framework in Enigma, a MIT-based start-up that released its white paper in June 2015. This framework looks also functional in the ethereum ecosystem. This is what the Uport project is developing. Basically, it uses a smart contract that recognizes the user as the owner of the data and the services as guests with delegated permissions.

Uport associates an ethereum address with your name, and potentially other info like email addresses, profile pictures, social media accounts etc. It maps your identity with various attributes. The storage of the data is done using decentralized cloud storage like IPFS in the beta, but Storj, Swarm and other decentralized storages could be used. Digix global, a company that sells gold-backed tokens, is already collaborating with Uport for digital identity management. I do not want to get too technical about how Uport works but you can learn more here and check out the presentation by Christian Lundkvist at DEVCon1.

Having your data stored on Uport will allow you to do your online identity management yourself instead of abandoning it to Google,Facebook or other third-parties that own, control and thrive on data by:

providing identifiers for users looking to interact with a service;

confirming to the service that the identifier is known;

providing the service with all sorts of information known about the user.

Google, Facebook and these other third-parties’ approach relies on security token issuance and can look pretty appealing to users. It allows them to bypass the “create an account” step. But it’s a double-edged sword: think about all the data you are giving up next time you click on a “log in using Facebook” button.

Blockchain solutions like Uport are a simple and user-sovereign option. You won’t need a third-party to issue a security token for you. You will be the third party that grants and revokes access to your personal data. Also you will be able to keep track of precisely who can access what and when. Last but not least, you could also add a tollgate to collect cryptocurrencies every time a service wants to access your data.

What you own in a game should be yours: getting control back over your game assets with Ownage

It might sound weird to own video game contents but there is a philosophical justification for it, based on the link between labor and property rights. John Locke wrote that when you add up your labor to an object, it becomes yours. Playing a game is sometimes hard work: collecting all those Pokémons, slowly hoarding gold in a MMORPG etc. Still, most of the game licenses explicitly limit users’ property rights to game content. I remember back in 2005, Blizzard Entertainment was trying to stop people from selling their high-level World of Warcraft accounts and gold on Ebay, threatening to ban accounts. Today, it is sometimes tolerated and a website like Player Auctions is one of the few marketplaces for those kinds of transactions. Without surprise, Pokémon Go accounts are already selling for hundreds of dollars. What if your newly caught Pokémon could be sold right away on a marketplace?

This could be possible if the Pokémons you owned were recorded as digitals assets on a blockchain. Picture it: you are logged onto your ethereum account and every time you catch a Pokémon, it is recorded in the blockchain and you can transfer the ownership to the highest bidder.

This is a project currently being developed by Ownage: an Ethereum-based platform where it is possible to distribute, collect and trade digital game content. It should be pointed out that the advantage of a platform that records user ownership in the blockchain is not mainly that it allows game users to make money. Indeed, another thing the game users will be getting out of it is autonomy from the servers and the fact that their data will be stored indefinitely.

And why should game developers adopt Ownage-like approaches? Because storage in perpetuity creates a strong incentive for game users to collect game contents. It makes them more eager to play. It would also facilitate transfers of game contents and accounts from one version of a game to another.

Ok let’s recap: in a perfect, blockchain-running world, I would log into Pokémon Go through my ethereum account. I could retrieve my blockchain-stored Pokémons from my Pokémon Red 1999 Game Boy cartridge. I could show the world that my Pokémon dream team (mix of Gengar and Chansey) is unstoppable and maybe sell it to an aspiring Pokémon Master. What? No ? Not yet?

Oh and by the way, this was Google April fools’ ad from 2014:

PS: a very cool open source ethereum project of a Pokémon copycat has started, check it out! https://github.com/cryptomon/cryptomon

PS 2: Learn more about How free games are designed to make money.