No matter what era, games need to adapt to human nature.

This is a very ordinary Sunday, I probably have two research projects going on at the same time, one is the company's research report, and the other is AI research. In order to find more inspiration and material, I spent about two hours browsing Netease's treasure trove. I have some insights to share, and as I wrote more, it became like an article, so I plan to post it here.

This article will be divided into two parts:

1) Overview of the differences between web3 game marketplace and the treasure trove, and suggestions for the appearance of game asset marketplace.

2) Introduce the concept of "metaverse economy interaction" and extend it to the field of AI + games.

Inspiration of the treasure trove for the game marketplace

I am particularly interested in transaction taxation, and even the company's previous deck specifically explained "IAT" (In-app Taxation) as a new business model, but I have never written about the game vertical field of marketplace. In fact, I have never trusted the possibility of establishing a trading platform created by a third party with only simple game asset aggregation functionality in the past, present, and short-term future.

The research on the treasure trove once again confirmed my previous thoughts: the means of centralized marketplace and the pursuit of high frequency and 0 fee of decentralized transactions are fundamentally conflicting.

1) As a first-party self-operated platform, the value of all game assets in the treasure trove is supported by the player DAU and transaction turnover behind it. It can be seen that the first step for a marketplace with demand is to ensure that the assets have a wide audience and are willing to pay a premium.

2) Customization features are not effective in the rapid migration of web3. Customized marketplace is for accumulating user data, player preferences/player needs, etc. It requires stable and long-term operation of games to make a difference in customization. However, the ROI-oriented web3 game hotspots may not be able to keep up with the speed of hotspot transfer in implementing customization.

The degree of customization in the treasure trove is extremely high. Each game has its own market and special operations, and the display interface functions are similar, but various lotteries/special activities/appraisal/special price zones/servers/seasons are completely different. For a specific game, there will be a shopping assistant to guide you in choosing race characters-professions-budget, step by step. Only projects that operate for a long time can truly understand what their players need and can better customize.

3) The platform's income and user experience come from inconvenience to convenience, and from low turnover to high turnover. 0 transaction fees and high liquidity are not beneficial to the platform's income and stable asset prices.

Players familiar with NFTs may understand how the emergence of Sudo swap and Blur deeply affected the NFT market in the past year. 0 transaction fees and batch transactions shook the foundation of NFT as a luxury item/belief, witnessing large holders single-handedly buying dozens of monkeys, making some holders doubt the meaning of community faith in such capital operations.

We have discussed in the previous two decks how to increase the rake by creating transaction friction, and there are many similar designs in the treasure trove, such as the rapid transaction service: it can shorten the original 4-day review time to 0 days, and the secondary transaction time from 8 days to 0 days, this service will charge the seller an additional 4% commission. In the treasure trove, both sellers listing and buyers purchasing require payment of fees. Another part of the service that is convenient for buyers, such as pre-booking during the public notice period, allows buyers to subscribe to game assets in advance, and buyers need to pay a 5% reservation fee.

4) Designing game mechanisms that satisfy human nature is part of the Marketplace delivery.

Many web3 NFT marketplaces focus on transaction forms and matching efficiency, and games are no exception. However, using crypto asset thinking to create a marketplace for game assets clearly ignores the strong demand for gamified sales activities inherent in games, that is, users have a strong interest in gamified sales activities.

Some games in the treasure trove have arranged a bidding lottery system, where the higher the bid, the higher the chance of winning, which is also a game that allows users to play the game of numerical expectations. It is speculated that due to regulation, this mechanism is certainly impossible to exist in the game, but it is more reasonable and natural to move it to the trading market, increasing the frequency of user transactions while also increasing the platform's profit margin.

In fact, in the NFT trading market, there have long been suggestions for adding various gamified functional sections to domestic e-commerce platforms, such as Taobao Orchard or lottery, but now it seems that there are no major trading markets adopting them, only Rollbit has embedded NFT unboxing as a unique gameplay unit of crypto assets in its large casino, which is precisely the opportunity for emerging gamified marketplaces.

5) If there is no demand, artificially increase demand. The difference between the fifth point and the third point is that the third point can be achieved solely by the platform's transaction rules, but the fifth point emphasizes that it is artificial, and a group of people can be found to support a new trading scene when needed.

For example, in the treasure trove, there is an appraisal activity, which is carried out by the official finding a group of players who are relatively authoritative in the game ecosystem to act as appraisers, and paying the appraisers to list the items they have appraised for sale will speed up the sale. This group of appraisers can be seen as cost calculation experts, helping sellers measure asset prices and provide certification, and it is certain that the platform will also take a commission from the fees paid by sellers to appraisers, which is similar to advertising fees, and the platform has found a group of people called appraisers to act as a buffer, making this fee look more reasonable and gentle.

Before understanding "metaverse economic interaction," we need to establish a new "value measurement dimension" for game assets

First, the assets traded in the treasure trove have sparked my thoughts:

The goods traded in the treasure trove are relatively "large items," and the trade is often for an account, which includes several characters and several character skins.

It can be seen that the trades in the treasure trove are no longer a unit of "assets," but an experience. For games with rich hierarchical experiences, a weapon and an equipment may enhance strength, but cannot fundamentally change the game experience. Why do people always choose different characters to play in a game? Because the most valuable thing is the characters and accounts that can provide a fundamentally new experience. Buying an account also means experiencing the progress in that account, simulating a life restart, experiencing the world of a high-level player.

In the deck we released in February, we also mentioned the importance of personal progression, and in April of this year, we happened to talk about a team that allows players to package the progression of game characters into NFTs for sale, including unlocking skills and skins. Unfortunately, we haven't seen such interesting designs for a long time.

How can people who are still immersed in asset units (such as 1155, 6551, etc.) know the tricks? It's not important how you can divide assets, whether they can be packaged, whether a wearable sword is more important than a grain of sand; none of these are important. What is important is to identify the "data sets" that can make players feel value and recognition, and select these "data sets" as assets to put on the chain.

Furthermore, why are "large" assets more important than "fragmented" assets? Because they contain multiple value measurement dimensions.

The trading of in-game assets can also be a kind of experience. Many web3 games currently emphasize the freedom of in-game asset trading, which is quite popular, such as certain minerals or military vehicles on a planet, as I mentioned in the previous BLOG (game AMM) design. Let's not talk about how many DAUs are needed to support the operation of this trading system, doing transactions in this direction may indeed pick sesame seeds and lose watermelons.

In the subscription era, we used time (or pow) as a measure, and what we actually paid attention to was the stability of in-game virtual currency. For example, when we used to argue that the economic system of Fantasy Westward Journey is more stable than that of World of Warcraft, we were talking about how Fantasy uses point cards, while World of Warcraft uses monthly cards, so Fantasy can better stabilize the value of every kind of asset in the game, and also control the inflation rate of gold coins very well (of course, there are many mechanisms worth learning from, I recommend everyone to read Frost's article, salute).

Now, there are not many open economy games, and there are not many players who pay attention to the price of each specific item, or the players who used to pay attention to whether the price of items is stable are completely different from the players who now "recharged a few 648 and fiercely spent rice." F2P and Gacha have become mainstream, so a single value measurement dimension of time (pow) can no longer support transactions, but rather prove of capital + prove of luck + prove of work + prove of skill. In plain language, it means: I have money to draw, I can still draw, and I can raise this account in the correct and efficient way in multiple dimensions.

In this complex value measurement dimension, players can roughly calculate the cost of cultivating such an account, but bringing this account back into the game, its output is only basic resources and a period of game experience. Even if it is to be sold, the price is basically equal to the original price plus the value converted from the amount the new owner has spent, and what the player earns is the saved cultivation time and a completely new experience, not any direct economic return, which is a very good way of commercialization.

And, this is actually a value measurement dimension that gradually emerged after F2P. When games become "unfair," when players can spend money to buy numerical values, these values containing economic value ultimately act on the account through randomness and strategy, forming a new type of asset more suitable for F2P players to trade. However, F2P Gacha has made too much money, and everyone has gone to roll art and industrial capacity, without thinking that the secondary market can be commercialized again and provide an outlet for the accumulated value of characters.

So, what is meta-economic interaction?

First, let's assume a scenario: which is more suitable as an experimental field for AI game in Civilization 6 and The Great Ruler? (Without considering API interfaces, implementation difficulty, etc.)

First, the conclusion: The Great Ruler is better.

In Civilization 6, resources are obtained through the player's time and technology. In multiplayer mode, due to the limitations of local area networks, participants are often friends in real life, and entertainment and honing time are the main purposes. Therefore, there are many verbal negotiations/threats, such as "let me borrow this," "give this to me," and other emotional resource exchange practices. Secondly, the claimable diplomatic relations are limited and have a sense of distance. Nations can form friendly alliances, but cannot involve more complex and deeper class relations, such as submission and paying tribute.

The Great Ruler has two main features: 1) General card drawing system - a large part of the military strength and skills in The Great Ruler depend on the generals, which are obtained through paid card draws. This also makes the game itself have a strong economic interaction. For example, giving red envelopes to the leaders of the regions that have submitted every month, players will automatically calculate "the cost of drawing a general to initiate a war = the cost of paying salaries to 5 counties," so there will be more economic interactions, and operations such as sending red envelopes/paying salaries off the books will occur frequently. 2) Alliance relations - as a server-based mobile game with thousands of players, The Great Ruler has more subtle social designs than games like Civilization, which are mainly single-player and local area network multiplayer. The seamless large map in The Great Ruler requires continuous expeditions, and the construction of roads and bridges between allied alliances is particularly important. There are resource allocation buffs between alliances, and the siege gameplay also requires the cooperation of players with different economic strengths and classes, so strong binding subsidiary relationships are easily formed around the economy and territory.

It can be seen that player payments have a very significant impact on the dynamics and overall atmosphere of a multiplayer game, whether good or bad, it is a very different experience.

Paying opens up a channel connecting the game and reality, and the player's financial strength and luck in the real world greatly influence the game. In addition, apart from the confrontations in the game, there may be many uncountable economic exchanges and human interactions outside the game, because the assets are obtained by players, so the in-game values can reflect the player's economic strength in the real world. This economic strength can be input into the game as game values, or used as chips to negotiate with other players, transferred to the real lives of other players, or re-entered into the game as values through other players.

At this point, we should have a picture in our minds to distinguish between game interaction and meta-economic interaction.

Furthermore, what are some interesting use cases for meta-interaction?

——AI agent meta-interaction

Imagine, in the value measurement standards we just defined, what can AI participate in?

• Capital (optimize capital utilization & out-of-game strategies)

• Time (save player time)

• Skill (in-game strategies)

Now AI already has bidding/negotiation capabilities, so in the entire economic interaction system, if AI takes over the in-game interaction and interaction with other players outside the game; and each player has an agent, these agents can communicate with other agents, negotiate conditions/bargain together, wouldn't that be fun?

Imagine the following scenarios:

1) Each player has an initial agent, with consistent game strategies and negotiation capabilities;

2) Players need to allocate funds to the agent to carry out operations such as bribery/buying other agents;

3) Every 6 hours, the agent returns optional strategies to the player, and after the player selects the optimal strategy, the agent executes it;

4) The agent can learn the player's risk preferences from the player's strategy choices each time, and optimize the next strategy (for example: whether to continue increasing the price to buy other agents, in the case of a certain amount of resource reserves/troops, whether to increase the forces to attack a city, etc.);

5) Of course, a player can have more than one agent, and can independently train multiple agents to work together, such as diplomatic agents and tactical agents, perhaps there will be diplomatic agents who can handle the affairs of other countries without spending a penny.

6) At this point, the agent can become a "personality" with appearance, voice, and character, and the player who trains this agent can receive a share of the agent's commercialization.

In this way, the gaming experience that used to be like The Great Ruler, with thousands of players on the same server, 24/7 continuous and heavily dependent on off-game social interactions, can now become an experience of AFK and light social interaction (similar to single-player), and the agent can also become a presence similar to the "hostess" in the two-dimensional game, becoming the main interaction object for players, and can even be commercialized as new game content.

Finally, why do I find AI games involving meta-economic interaction interesting?

Perhaps it's because I've been studying incentive mechanisms in the crypto field for too long, or perhaps it's because I believe that future AI natives can manage users' assets to conduct financial activities, or perhaps it's because I'm not interested in the generative/passive interaction forms of intelligent entities and humans after "Dwarf Fortress," or perhaps it's because of my obsession with games as interactive art, I always feel that the interactivity of AI + games is far from enough.

It is undeniable that almost all AI + game behaviors are currently only testing the degree to which AI imitates human behavior. Dota is training AI micro-operations, Minecraft is AI's understanding of the physical world, and Stanford Town is AI's simulation of human behavior and emotions. So why hasn't AI simulating human economic behavior been put into game experiments yet?

No matter what era, games need to adapt to human nature. Is watching the daily behavior of AI satisfying curiosity? How long can this satisfaction last, and how entertaining is it? Can it compare to the visual and auditory experience brought by graphics cards and VR? Can it compare to the adrenaline and dopamine secretion when unboxing? Can it compare to the satisfaction of vanity when dominating the entire server? If not, how can AI be used to create games that are more in line with human nature and can stimulate human pleasure points? This is what I find interesting.

In addition, I have been thinking about and researching the role of AI in narrative games, and this is some of my insights after completing "The Wheel of the Universe Sisterhood" this week. Experience in narrative is also one of the aspects where I believe AI can greatly enhance the experience/differentiated experience.

Conclusion

Writing this article actually has three purposes:

1) Go through the interesting mechanisms in the treasure trove, which can be used as a reference for teams designing marketplaces, and also point out some differences in feasibility and limitations between the treasure trove and web3 game category trading markets.

2) Explain the new value measurement dimension of game assets. F2P has evolved to today, and players' entertainment consumption habits have undergone significant changes. It is better to change the mindset and look at other asset trading forms, identify what the main value carriers and trading forms are, that is, trading a segment of game experience (including accounts with multiple valuable characters).

3) If you are interested in AI + game meta-economic interaction at the end of the article, and are also engaged in AI and game-related research, feel free to contact me, as we have more research to do.

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