Blockchain gaming represents perhaps the fastest approaching widespread use case of blockchain technology. For many gamers and investors, there is a natural synergy between these two industries, and real adoption is inevitable. However, much of the future success of blockchain gaming hinges on the ability to solve a number of problems that persist throughout current initiatives. As it stands, existing blockchain gaming projects are slow, expensive, and most importantly, unscalable. Fortunately, XAYA recognizes these issues, and by utilizing new technology with game channels, these problems will soon be alleviated.

(This article is a continuation from Existing Problems with Blockchain Gaming.)

Gamifying blockchain technology with game channels

Inspired from off-chain scaling solutions presented by Bitcoin’s Lightning Network, game channels provide a system of trustless, private, peer-to-peer sidechains built by participants in games played on the XAYA blockchain. In this system, two or more players agree to the rules of the game and contribute to the prize pool. From there, a private game channel is created, where participants take turns communicating their moves by building blocks within the private channel. Only one transaction takes place, at the conclusion of the game, where the results are displayed and the prize money is awarded to the victorious player.

An illustration of game channels from the XAYA White Paper

Game channels solve all three major problems inhibiting existing blockchain gaming mechanisms. This solution is cheap. Minimal on-chain transactions take place, and it is easily funded using a small fraction of any prize pool collected by the winner.

Game channels are fast. The only limiting factor, like traditional gaming environments, are the processing and network limitations of the participating computer systems. As technology continues to develop on a global scale, these limitations will continually diminish.

Lastly, game channels are massively scalable. One transaction per game accrues minimal bloat, even at the scale of millions of active players. On a personal scale, game channels provide a much more storage-efficient solution, as players must only sync their XAYA client with the specific off-chain game channels they choose to participate in.

While game channels may appear to only be an accessible solution for turn-based games, several developments allow for a number of genres of games to be incorporated in this manner.

The most immediate advancement is the incorporation of real-time strategies. These are made possible through a hashing system, where players can simultaneously announce their moves, encrypted behind the hashing sequence, and then reveal the move once all participants have published their turn.

Each move is checked against the immutable set of rules originally agreed upon, and if a malicious or careless player submits a “bad move”, it will be rejected in favor of the other, legitimate moves.

Beyond this, Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas (MOBAs) can similarly be executed through game channels. In this environment, players will build a near-instantaneous stream of dozens of blocks per second. Players will default to contributing “do nothing” blocks, which are overridden in every instance where they make an impression on the gaming environment.

The same approach in MOBAs can be expanded to incorporate a massive and even infinite virtual world, known as a Decentralized Reality (DR). In a DR, the virtual world is sharded into different sections with each maintaining their own, separate off-chain game channel. Players who make up the world will only interact with the shard immediately around them. This not only protects players from individually accruing bloat from maintaining all the impressions of the world, but it also allows developers or participants to expand the environment infinitely, by adding on more and different shards as needed.