In May Hoard’s CEO, Slawomir Bubel, demonstrated the first ever example of cross-game interoperability using Ethereum and Plasma. He showed how collecting puzzle pieces in My Memory of Us unlocked a secret level in Plasma Dog. As these types of virtual experiences evolve, we’ll begin to see the emergence of the metaverse: Ready Player One in real life!

Game developers want to make games fun, and they achieve this through clever and exciting game mechanics. To them, Ethereum is just another tool they can use in this pursuit. Mechanically, it’s most commonly viewed by game devs simply as a big, decentralized data base; a place information can be stored for everyone to access, like a shared and open API.

To game developers, Ethereum’s biggest contribution to the creation of “fun” is in its ability to link games together to produce a single shared experience. We commonly refer to this as cross-game interoperability: when activities in one game can influence the gameplay in another.

When games begin to link together, players will no longer see each game as an isolated universe. They will see these games blending together into one big universe; a shared universe — the metaverse!

Types of Interoperability

There are an innumerable amount of gameplay mechanisms that are unlocked with cross-game interoperability. Here are 7 examples that excite us!