RE: Nth Society update - fork to tabletop RPG
I would be interested in commenting further, but it's a little bit past my bedtime.
On a more serious note, I've actually been thinking about how to run a more involved game on the blockchain. @simplegame has been doing some really interesting stuff in increasing the complexity of play-by-post, but there's been some lack of ability to do effective simultaneous play.
Discord works, but it's not sufficient for everyone's needs. I think that @v-entertainment may have been working on something like a virtual tabletop that could be used as an equivalent to Roll20 or Fantasy Grounds, but with some integration to the Steem blockchain.
Imagine having a roleplaying game where every important reference document is a post on the Steem blockchain, and anyone can upvote it to support the creators.
And down vote it so that it is almost never seen by anyone, and is unable to be rewarded via the interface provided by every client after seven days – because no one references a role-playing game document after a week, right?
Blockchain technology is not good if you pretend it is a replacement for a real database. Which is kind of a problem.
Downvotes are a potential issue, but you typically don't see that happen so often that it's worth worrying about unless stuff goes really wrong.
You would, of course, probably need a database for some stuff.
However, a lot of content that people make for their games would be good for public consumption, or at least interesting to outside observers, and right now it just sort of gets locked away.
First we need to identify a problem.
Is it actually true that people who want to make their game materials available for public consumption have a problem doing so?
I don't think that's the case. I think that if people want to make their content publicly accessible, they have more options right now than they ever have, whether it be online fora dedicated to that particular game, various social media platforms which accept longform content (farewell Google+, we are sad to see you go), a multitude of free blogging sites, many of which are highly customizable for personalization purposes, a pile of paid blog sites which are also extremely easy to maintain, tons of distributed storage solutions (Dropbox, Google Drive), and no shortage of places to talk about any or all of the above.
Including the steem blockchain.
So I don't think the real problem is that people don't have the ability to share their stuff publicly.
You might be able to make the argument that there is no sufficiently widely adopted micropayment system where interested individuals can reward others for having shared that content – and I would agree with you on that particular point, but I think a solution akin to Flattr or the BAT which doesn't require an individual to be on a particular platform in order to receive the rewards allocated by their consumers would be a far superior methodology to locking all creators into a single platform.
Now, if the problem is "people are locking away content that I want to see," that's a different problem. That's an issue of them making a conscious decision that you would prefer to override, and that's not a path I would be down for. Call me crazy.
Most game folk that I associate with outside of the industry are fiercely protective of the privacy of what they do. Some of them because they have an overblown belief in the idea that other people are constantly looking to steal their ideas, some of them because they are embarrassed about their past time or the kind of content they engage with, some of them just because they don't consider it anybody else's damn business. I'd say they have the right to any of those positions, although I ruthlessly mock the first.
The glass fishbowl is not necessarily a good place for development. It's definitely not the best place for casual individuals to necessarily pursue their entertainment. I am much more comfortable with the burden of discovery and reward falling on those interested in discovery and reward and far less so on those who are doing the creating.
That's cool, I'd love to hear your ideas. Steem posts are suited to the play-by-post style but I think that style would not be attractive to many. I'm going to review what @simplegame has done so far now.
I had a couple of ideas before which involved exploiting the 7 day editing window for a Steem post, that springs to mind as an effective way to craft a "scene" (or whatever appropriate game building block) without spamming the chain, and while commit data to record as it goes.
In terms of integration you cannot call external services in Roll20 even though you can write scripts, and I couldn't find anything similar for Fantasy Grounds. I'm doing a little research on some smaller scale open source tabletop platforms that might be applicable instead.
Regarding @v-entertainment are you talking about Way Finder?
You do know that doing an edit to an existing post within the seven day window creates a relatively hefty blockchain transaction every time you do it, right? And every time that you do it, a client reading posts on the blockchain is required to go through all of the blocks which have been committed since the original post creation time looking for update transactions so that it can have an actual coherent view of a post to present to a reader.
Editing posts is one of the worst things that you can do if your interest is to keep the number of transactions and amount of data and which is needed to be transferred by the witness servers low. They hit hard not just when they change their committed, but for ever after whenever that post is read.
As hefty as a new post, it's technically a rewrite. Clients do not piece edits together, the current version is stored in witness node DB and there is a particular endpoint which just serves that.
In terms of "blockchain spam" it could be pretty bad though, true. I am more thinking about client level spam though, take a look at @simplegame and you'll see what I mean.
One of the things that goes into the blockchain is that you're subject to data bandwidth limits, so you probably want a hybrid on-off system.
Any software used would have to be designed more or less around Steem or whichever blockchain you want to use as your main method, though you could ostensibly have a client/server setup in which nodes only handle game-related content (which isolates you from general purpose networks and avoids spam).
IIRC it should be possible on Steem to make JSON entities that don't appear as posts but can be displayed in special ways; Steem Monsters does something like this, if I am thinking right.
Way Finder is what I was thinking of. I don't remember if that was the one I was looking for or not, but it's the one that I was able to recall today.