RE: Feedback requested: An idea for a Steem-based game
But on the Steem blockchain, we can make it better.
I'm not sure if this can be applied to this particular game, but when I read your earlier post about attention stuff I was thinking that Steem-based games can maybe take advantage of some of the cryptographic aspects of the chain (like memo encryption) to do spoiler-proof social games (for example, everybody gets a unique daily WORDLE rather than there being a single one each day for everybody on the planet).
When someone replies to the word search post with the correct source post, the game is over.
Not sure how this would be implemented yet, but for a game played on a social media site it would be cooler if there was a semi-cooperative element to play, so that players are also rooting for others to be successful. Maybe the puzzle identifies several different articles, each player is only allowed to "win" with one of them, and the second level is somehow unlocked once they're all found.
What are your thoughts?
I think the idea of social-enabled games on the chain is a good one. Word searches have the positive of being pretty straightforward, but there's a downside that playtime will be pretty low so if someone isn't checking the site very often they may never see puzzles when they have time to work on them, just before they're posted or after somebody else has already won. Also, I suspect it will be a bit aggravating to play a wordsearch on a webpage without some UI support (maybe a custom frontend, or some kind of support built into Steemit itself).
Yeah, I agree. That's where the hints idea came from. If one person guesses a word, the resultant hint helps everyone. But this is a very simple concept, so there's plenty of room to do this better.
I agree with this, too. I was also thinking of implementing it as a browser extension, but that would have totally killed any cooperation that might have happened. Thinking about it now, as a future enhancement, I suppose it might be possible to read the post into a browser extension and provide UI support that way.
I think this is key, regardless of whether it's this particular game.
It seems ironic to me, if Steem is going to really grow, it has to happen at the social/attention layer (IMO), but so many of our developers want to focus on the blockchain layer. An experienced developer or two from FB or Twitter could have a huge impact here. SteemMonsters was a start, but it was too much of a standalone product. With its transactions all buried in custom_json, it was sort-of a free rider. I think the ideal game needs to plug into the social media more directly.
Yeah. Even in the gaming space I think people's first instinct is to focus on the financial aspect (micropayments, "owning" components, etc.) rather than the social media interaction aspect. One of the ideas I was toying with some years ago was a digital version of a simple social drawing game, the idea being that the group would have the fun of playing but in the process you're also creating an "artifact of play" that works as a light social media post. (This is what made WORDLE so big, playing it produced something that looked like it would be fun to post as a tweet). Unfortunately I currently can't really justify putting much time and effort into projects that don't have a reasonable chance of contributing to keeping a roof over my head and food on my table, so I doubt I can do much experimenting myself.