What Is Dapped & Why It Is Needed

Shigeru Miyamoto (creator of Super Mario Bros) believes that the aim of a video game is to entertain people with new experiences.

That appears true if we look through the history of video games since the 70’s, however what is clear is that gaming itself is always evolving, it’s changing and these “new experiences” are pushing game developers into a new era.

Game Development

As you may already know, one of the earliest popular video games was called Pong developed by Atari’s Allan Alcorn as a simple training exercise in 1972 and sparked the imagination of many.

Even though at the time this was a simple 2D tennis game, it’s a far cry from today’s impressive, graphically detailed, story-telling video games such as the very popular Horizon Zero Dawn.

By comparing these two games, it is clear to see the vast distinction in technologies in terms of graphics, sound, complexity, depth but also it is incredible to see how far the gaming world has developed and at the same time maintaining the fundamentals; adoption by all, enjoyable entertainment and fun.

Today, games take on a variety of forms and can be used on a variety of platforms such as consoles, PCs and mobile devices. In recent years games have introduced an additonal financial element in gaming allowing users to buy in-game assets and customise gameplay experiences through micro transactions (though these are almost universally hated, they account for huge profits for game companies). More recently, mobile games have seen a massive surge in popularity and revenue. In 2016, the mobile gaming industry was worth $35.6 billion in US dollars (Source). So why has mobile gaming taken off so much? Maybe it’s the fact that people are now able to play mobile games anytime, anywhere with the advantage of portability, it’s easily accessible (apart from annoying advertisements) whilst still including a level of entertainment akin to what people enjoyed from the early game of Pong.

Introducing dAPPs

Which brings us onto the next possible step of the gaming era. With more and more people looking for new experiences in games, this is the perfect time for the development of dAPPs. dAPPs are essentially a decentralised application and has been defined by Radar Relay (decentralised exchange) as;

“…we consider dApps to be an application design pattern that augments modern web applications by distributing critical components across a network of peers or nodes.”

Source: Radar Relay

So essentially, the difference between a standard mobile game in comparison to a dAPP is that it has decentralised elements. One example of this is in-game assets that you may believe you own on games such as World of Warcraft or Battlefield, these assets are controlled and managed by the game company. Whereas in some dAPPs, these assets can be controlled and owned by the user which mitigates the risk of losing such assets if the game company no longer exists or decides to remove the asset at their choosing.

It’s clear to see that decentralised games are still at a very early stage however some of its potential is starting to become more evident as more and more teams produce iteratively more complex dAPPs. Whilst Crypto backed decentralised games are not likely to displace mainstream mobile gaming anytime soon, they are able to offer a number of unique features such as;

Transferrable Assets — Ability to actually own the in game assets with the possibility of transferring to other games i.e. Crypto-Kitties to Panda.Earth.

Allows the freedom to use in game funds or a single currency across a number of unrelated and unaffiliated games.

Can utilise new upcoming technologies such as Foam’s proof of location which allows for geographic based games with a higher stake in geography because of the controls to prevent location spoofing.

Limitations Of dAPPs

However, whilst the future of dAPPs look promising, the amount of decentralisation in games vary due to technological limitations. Crypto-Kitties for instance is one of the stand out Crypto games from 2017 which is partially decentralised in that its game assets are stored on the Ethereum blockchain, however the graphical qualities of these assets are stored off chain partly due to limitations in data storage on the Ethereum chain. So in comparing this to Pong, you could argue its similar to the reason why it didn’t come in colour, technology had not caught up yet.

Additionally, there are a number of downsides with the current state of Decentralised games. These include a lack of transparency (often not open source, missing white papers, anonymous teams etc), only partial decentralisation in many cases and shady business practices (such as charging thousands of dollars worth of Ethereum to get started, exit scams etc). The additional challenge is that a lot of dAPPs will need to address the high technological barrier to entry. To prove this, try getting one of your older relatives who are new to blockchain technology to play on Crypto Kitties…

We are really excited to see how this space matures alongside existing scaling efforts, new use cases for blockchain and development of best practices.

It’s Time To Be Dapped!

This is where You & Dapped comes in. Dapped is an open Organisation to help build a growing community to promote and ethically grow the decentralised gaming landscape. You don’t have to be a game developer or have knowledge of dAPPs to do this. Anyone can join and contribute by writing articles about decentralised games you have played, share your experience of game development, talk about dAPPs you believe are the next best thing and edit entries to ensure consistency and quality reviews.

And that’s not all… Dapped will be offering tokenised profit rights to contributors in return for their work (DAPPED Tokens), with the ledger kept on ARAGON (when it goes live in the future). Initially, Dapped’s main focus will be on curation of dAPPs allowing for scam-free discovery of current and upcoming games. So if you have used a dAPP recently, we want to hear from you! This is your chance to put your stamp on dAPP development.

To join, simply visit Here and complete the online registration. Not sure? Or have some questions? You can also join our discord room here.

Happy gaming! (& writing, editing, marketing, designing and developing)