Can Onchain Games Survive Bots?
Fully onchain games facilitate everything—their assets, logic, rules, and state—directly on their underlying blockchain.
In this new gaming frontier, every action is ultimately recorded onchain.
As such, this dynamic offers various benefits, like transparency and possibilities around novel game economics.
However, these offerings also attract a deadly efficient type of player: bots.
Can humans be competitive in onchain games?
Recently, Dan Elitzer, a cofounder of venture capitalist firm Nascent, asked on Twitter whether it was “even possible to make a fully onchain game in which unassisted humans can be competitive?”
Elitzer asked the question in the context of a thread by plotchy, a security researcher at Nascent Security who has become a dominant force in Kamigotchi, a new fully onchain RPG that I recently profiled in Metaversal.
Despite Kamigotchi’s early testnet smart contracts being unverified and closed source, plotchy managed to reverse-engineer the game's architecture and created an indexer to parse its data.
With access to detailed game info, including the locations and health status of Kami pets, plotchy then wrote a bot to hunt down other Kamis and quickly started dominating the in-game leaderboards.
In the wake of this impressive performance, plotchy has been in discussions with the Kamigotchi team, who are iterating all the while. Players have also adapted their playstyles to optimize for survival, and a new quest was introduced to lead to widespread coordination against plotchy’s pet army.
Still, the specter of plotchy—and of bots in onchain games in general—remains.
lethe, one of the creators behind Kamigotchi, noted in a retrospective thread that onchain games must accept bots as part of the user base due to their open nature, and the challenge is to make game design adjustments to balance for this dynamic.
That said, the ultimate goal is to create a playing environment where human players and bot players can coexist in a way that’s still fun and not impossibly daunting for human players. So what might the future of onchain gaming look like when it comes to threading this balance?
As for mitigating users who deploy many bots to manipulate games with automated account swarms, anti-sybil measures will likely increasingly be turned to.
To be sure, sybil attacks remain an open problem in crypto, so no solution will be perfect here. Yet some combination of proof-of-individuality techniques, like signing up via social media, community reporting initiatives, and AI analytics may prove fruitful in tamping down on bot swarms in onchain games.
On the flip side, another strategy for fighting bots is to tackle them head-on in numbers. As my former colleague Ben Giove recently put it, “The best defense against bots in onchain games is to join a guild.”
Ben would know, too, as he’s the founder of WASD, the largest onchain gaming guild in crypto. When you have a large group of human players that are locked in and coordinating tightly together, you get a fighting force that can start to hold its own or even better against bot players.
Of course, if you can’t beat them, join them. Ben has also predicted that “access to bots will become democratized to where non-technical players can use them too.” Think of things like game plugins or services that make it easy for anyone to optimize their gameplay. In the very least, this approach would help level the playing field!
Onchain gaming is still in its frontier days, so it's no surprise that the scene is grappling with bots now. I face bots when I play mainstream games like Fall Guys or Overwatch, which run on much more closed rails. Bots are simply a paradigm in modern gaming.
Yet I don’t think this dynamic relegates onchain games to being niche forevermore. As this scene matures, advances and innovations will help clamp down on the dominance of bot players so that human players can still thrive. There are plenty of challenges ahead, but I’m personally optimistic for the future here.