Dark games for a bright future | Alberto Granzotto (September 2023)

again thank you for being here so late it's about 1035 we're all tired but I try to be entertaining I mean I'm not the best but that's TR um and another thing is if you have questions during my talk please feel free to interrupt raise your hand and ask me so I like it there is a bit of interaction so if you're question specific to the slides feel free to ask if it's a longer discussion maybe let's look later after a couple of years okay before we start Al I want to have I want to tell you something so I'm a member of Social Distortion protocol or sdb for short we are collective spaes in the wayte products of social media virtual realities and psychic FRS maybe this doesn't help you understanding exactly what we're doing and this next slide is a bit better so we're eled from the year 2045 so if you wait 22 years we will be born okay and we were born to fight the corporations that are commodifying democracies uh manipulating governments and destroy the environment so this is the this is when we were born and just to give a rough idea on what it means to leaving the year 2045 I have some screenshots from some uh newspapers from some news place out there so I just want to warn that that jet jzos will be the president of the UN United States of America in 2044 one year after uh there will be a rebranding of USA to United States of amazon.com uh this was like people were not super happy about this but then everyone got Amazon Prime and they showed up the you mask plan to have these Max ex to Mars was actually for 1% of the people and the other 99% of us were left behind this is what Vice will write or vote depending on which side of the time and War but Vice vote the 99% left behind with nothing but LS and broken dreams so yes we will smoke some weed time and last but not least we as the the like Community we also up a things so during Devcon 41 inak 3 there was this new merch that we called the singularity we merged blockchain with AI and something like this happened I don't know if you saw this already but if yes you get reference and that was terrifying we still don't know exactly how we will solve this issue though and uh so as you understand the future is quite difficult to fix and and uh we pass the two size2 degrees uh two size2 degrees threshold for climate change so we can reverse this process anymore and uh we're too weak for this huge corporations so our new strategy instead of trying to fight the power is to travel back in time to warn you guys of the future uh you P you will face if you don't fight so that's our mission and that's why I'm here today uh we run quite some special operations and then we talk about these uh six ones uh I I will put a bit more focus on some technical stuff so maybe that's interesting for some of you and overall try to not talk too much because everyone is tired me too so the very first operation we run was called H saer and we did it in 2019 at the K communication Congress who have been to who goes to the Congress of CCC well not a lot of people but okay uh there will be a congress uh later this year so check it out CC Congress it's easy to it online not on Google please and uh so okay this game was inspired by an operation we we run in 2055 uh called H Zuckerberg and the our goal and we achieved that we were able to capture Mr zerar and turn him over the decentralized courts of cyber Justice and out of this experience we created this game called Han zberg and um it's a we call it a popup geocaching game on ethereum we say pop popup game because the game exists for the time of the conference or the Congress or the event and you can't play before or after you need to be physically there and this is also something important about our games you may need an an external device to interact with the game but the game itself is about uh like talking to people spending time you know in the mid space and exploring moving around walking all these kind of things that we're not used to and um okay so it's a b uping game and uh this game was running on your mobile wallet browser uh so you had to install that was a bit of a paino for us but consider it was 2018 and we didn't know a lot about development also I'm not even sure if B wallets were trust wallet Cypher trust wallet and and Cipher yes so yes but we that's exactly the point so in order to play this game that was okay that needed a a um a w you had to install a w on your phone that was a bit of a let's say obstacle for getting people p we asked people to install trust that was that had at the time a decent UI ux pardon me and in order to transact on ethereum this game was running on B so anyway you still need PP and what we were doing at the registration of the user we would help him or help help them installing the wallet and then give them a bit of recy to play the game the game itself was super super simple just cash do you know how it works right so you hide things around and uh then you get hints on where things are and the player needs to find them in our case uh Zuckerberg we chop Zuckerberg into 27 pieces I will this like the one I show you before so this you know the IM Park drinking right so we CH the image in 27 pieces and each piece was called a superar bit I don't know what we cre this made it was fun actually uh so sorry uh and each Zer was like two art that you had to find the first person to find the QR code was also the person to get point the game so after you redem one QR you no one else put reading the same and um if you how many of you are solidity deps or understand solidity okay we have some so I would spend a second here this is very basic this is the whole code for this smart contract that was checking the that was receiving this admissions by the by the players and uh you see like old version of solity 0424 uh we had a function for reset to uh basically t to the smart contract all the all the 37 ashes of the secrets okay of the codes and then you as a as a player you would would use the redeem function through the app to send the QR code that you found to the smart contract and the smart contract would hash the QR the code and see if it was in the list of the Ved QR codes so that's the system we used and uh it worked really well actually so we were able to make a game with some JavaScript and uh and a bit of solidity and you see here the h so you see that over time on the left side Mark do appear and then by our great surprise people actually finished the game and the price was fform that in English is called mouth wash and it's actually good I mean I like to drink this more than and just for reference just to give you a rough understanding on our games uh we were in the Congress that is full of nerds okay and the last Z bits we put it in flocky pie and we as people to go up and someone to open the this with the Cod ins start and submitted and that's fun because you need to go around and interact with people and they they found someone with a floppy this drive and this have been the solution then one year after 2019 we made another game called planetary the tragedy of the commons and we we did this in partnership with li D that was we were building it was a d to create a scaling solution for eum B on plasma so solution and again here the bad story is that while we were distracted by technology by all the political stuns you see online on Tik Tok and whatever we actually up the planet because in 2045 as I mentioned before we reach the tertial temperature for uh GL for um um yeah so basically the environment cannot go back from from this situation we we reach the diing points and all of this created a lot of issues in our society white fires uh drought uh and tropical storms and everything so in this context we came back to uh to Berlin in 2019 and we played this game together with we this was a simulation game based on the tragedy of the commons who knows what the I'm just interacting with you guys you don't you don't fall as sleep who knows what the tragical Depon is let's seeit your hands yay okay I will tell you in a second what is while I'm scaming the game and uh but for now just think about this game is a simulation game it runs on a burner wallet so this time we upgraded from asking players to install a wallet in their phone they were able to just they were able to just visit a website and they have the wallet in the website okay and um to on board users we would also give them a password with some funds the password was like an NFP like a unique token and they got some we call them goers the game was running on gly so we have goers with and with this money you were able to buy uh for example we run the game here at C days you were able to buy a okay so you would actually have a real item out of your goers now the f starts the game again uh you use uh uh your mobile phone but you also need to interact with people so you start with a small amount of funds and you're not able to buy a beer with this money so what you need to do your business you go around and you do business so you hand shake with others and shaking was simulated by scanning two arodes between two PHS and uh every time you do business with someone you generate fums new you generate new value and you get more money in your wallet as well as the other person we're doing business okay we both great value so we both get more money in our wet at the end of the day and then you can use the PS to pay beer but there is a small problem that every time you do business you emit CO2 in the atmosphere of the game what does it mean if the level of CO2 is too high the price of the beer will start Rising as well so what do you do you can keep doing business in order to afford more Geer but if everyone does if everyone is doing this I think we end up in a not great situation right and so this is the tragedy of the Commons in this is an example of tra of the com we have a shared resource and if we all have used it everyone L and uh that's by the way what we call also this I call this talk dark games because our games usually like you can't win you don't tell people or even if you win then in the end something bad happens and we like to have this kind of twist um on the other side if you want instead of my beer you can plant trees and by planting trees you're lowering the amount of suit in the atmosphere but there is again it's it's really weird because if I buy a beer I can enjoy it if I plan trees and spending money for whom if everyone is doing this then I'm doing this right so that's again about the Dynamics of talking to others TR to synchronized and uh for us what is fascinating is how much like uh how many even with a small amount of code you can have a lot of different outcomes and uh just to add also a bit more fun to the game in our simulation we have two uh two countries USB USA USB United States of osia and United States on balloon and for even more fun your your passport had a name on it that was chosen from the top carbon producers in 2017 so the for example I was Shadow I think and yeah that was my w we also have a dashboard so when in the game you would see how CO2 would change over time and in the simulation we run here at cbas things went bad so we started the game at uh I don't this is UTC around like 910 and in like 15 minutes we just like went to total Destruction and the beer that was I think1 and half something like this went to to okay this is just this B for me 6.66 uh but then it went up to I think 10 or20 it was like impossible to buy when you destroy the environment so good job everyone there some technical things about the game uh this this run on L2 on a plasma test Network developed by leow and uh the game is utxo based so who knows what you do is I mean we don't need to go into details but it's painful that's why I put this emoi uh we use the uh o g burner wallet source code uh we upcycle diagnosis save that's not that interesting but for me it is so instead of deployment we needed we needed a a Multistate wallet and instead of again everything we do is about up cycling right so instead of deploying a new one uh Jo that was in in out told us oh I have I have one I don't use anymore you can tag it so I don't know it's it's weird maybe not that useful but we enjoy the idea of up cying no this days so you can just remove yourself from the signers and then safe right was it was it last gas you say gas sorry gas actually I don't I would I I hope so but it's still it's more for the um a couple of interesting things oh what you see here it's a really tiny form that was playing the game in the camp was really like you see the fingers they're not hug they're actually normal just like this size uh one thing that we found uh quite uh challenging about the game is that it's difficult for this kind of game to define the right parameters uh there was a talk before about mechanics of like this kind of systems and this is a difficult problem most for us because uh the like amount of CO2 youit when hand shaking with others like can increase or decrease Bas on the amount of play players you have otherwise the game like it's too fast in like Ping Let say and uh we played this game at cbase here for the first time and then it SP and at CCC came together and it was also exhibited at inaka for uh um at crypto Gren trees so not exhibition and that's actually pretty cool I would say that was a really really nice result and of course people had fun like people had a lot of fun losing then planc another game we did for 2019 for the Congress uh uh these games are like we just do them it's something that they're pay us so if I say CCC Congress is this CCC is giving us money great I also don't know if they like us um so this is our third time travel operation called planetscape and again is g to raise awareness on defs of climate change and uh again we play this at the Congress uh just to give you an overview uh again you have all it's a treasure hunt game it means that there are a story that develops over different chapters and the story is linear so if you you start at chapter zero then when you find the solution for chapter zal to chapter one and then there is puzzle you need to solve and then you if you solve it you go to two three and so on in the end uh this game is multiplayer so like multiple well everything we do is play saying that this game is played by like different teams at the same time in parallel this is what I wanted to say and it doesn't require any registration we had our own burner wallet so we created a custom app for this and we also had the automatic funding function that was terrible but it worked I mean this was on rink again so the that was just asking funds to a force it we deploy it if the funds were low it's terrible I know I watch there terrible see and but it works and if it's test it's fine now you can use Gata you can use other GSM but for us that was fun um just as an example this is the game everything is must be mobile ready because the mobile enir you say responsive it's for sorry so we need to play the game and go around the the Congress so you use your phone and uh this is an example of a chapter you don't need to read all of this but in this part of the story you wake up you don't know where you are you find a smartphone in your pocket you try to unlock it with your finger you cannot unlock it and then it's asking you for a 4digit code okay what is the four digit code this is chapter one so it's very busy so we're asking you without any clue we're asking the clue here to guess before before digit CL you have suggest two thank you you go to chapter two so when you start things are quite easy but still like you have this nice feeling of finding something that like okay here we don't put any reference on what the number could be but you think maybe 0 or 1 2 34 right and then you go to the next L and we start SP we put some Clues and some uh things around the Congress uh again our goal uh is also okay of course to raise awareness on these topics but also to let people explore and find something new and discover and have new experiences one thing about nice about the Congress is that you have a lot of different assemblies and people bringing different things and one of the assemblies is the for example the Lo pecking one okay so you can learn about Lo pecking in that assembly so we put this kind of secure safe uh with a really uh simple padlock here that I sto from a bridge but it was a l block you know the on that you just it and uh that was a very simple log to open because again we don't want to stress people too much we just want them to learn something new and uh we put log piix on this side and the solution was inside so you open it there is a piece of paper saying can you please close it after thank you you get the code and then you progress with the game wow I know it's late okay I'll try to be fast we also got some uh all transactions are in blockchain so we got some of these data to understand how fast like how many people ended the journey at which at the given chapter we also took some steps on how long it took for them to solve each different chapter and uh we had uh for this game 2504 players or I would say addresses but you don't know if behind an address there is one person if there are five people of there is of or if there is like 0.1 person because they have 30 bus then out of this experience whenc is it like uh we created THC that stands for treasure hunt Creator as you may guess and and uh this is our given that we like this concept of treasure hunts we just like took the like uh we Tred to we we printed a framework that that would allow you given a list of chapters to create the smart contract provide the smart contract with the data and create also the the dep to play the game then of course you need to customize you need to write your story and you need to customiz that but at least the nor part is done for you and uh we try to do this in the most centralized way as possible so all the assets are in VFS the game logic and leaderboard in the smart contuct uh there is no indexing at the time we didn't have any the or anything like that but anyway uh the game is simple enough that you can just bury the the directly and one thing I would like mention is that the in blockchain no transactions are public right so you can go and see who send the transaction what is the content and this is a problem if you think about uh this can be a problem for us because if we have multiple people playing the game and you're at chapter and this chapter one as before in the solution is 1 2 3 4 You don't want to submit the code directly to the smart B Tru because then anyone can read it and uh so we needed something like a zero knowledge proof scheme and I'm not saying we invented anything new this is just basic like uh asymmetric cryptography but what we do I think it's quite fun and simple so I will summarize it for the uh for the people that are into solidity here and if you will about this later but R speaking work this I'm a player I find this solution it is again 1 2 3 4 uh then I from the dep I need to submit the solution right so when I put the code 1 2 3 4 in the input box and they submit that takes this the code creates and uses the de codes as the product key of a wallet okay so from the code you're able to generate a wallet and given that you have a wallet then you can sign a statement saying yes this player found this uh found me and then when you submit you submit a signature to this smart contract and then this smart contract can verify that the you actually found the solution so in this way we're able to submit the solution or sorry not the solution we're able to prove with the smart conract that I I know the solution because I'm signing a statement from a wallet that is generated by this solution that that's my address and the smart contract of course knows all the addresses of the chapters that is the Public Public the more public uh if you want I can explain it again but otherwise we will just move forward then we did another treasure P called 2121 for 2020 CC Congress that was a fully remote game uh because of the pandemic so uh we decid the Congress was fully online so we also decided to do something that was of course online uh that was was much more technical sen captur the flag more less and uh that was the first just to give you again about a taste about the mood we try to put in the games we open with this image we cyber Punk is late evening it's raining outside and dark inside you take a last look at the city before before before times non lights are turned off your flight located at the B FL of a top 20 stories building in the mes very illuminated by the lights of the four screens covering over your laptop so we try to create this images of you in the future and like it's cool but also quite dystopian and uh I don't know why I wrote a masterpiece in 21 chapter actually the story is quite cool I would say um let's say it's a master yes it wasn't really a master bie in 21 chapters um again very technical people took one and one and half days to solve uh to solve it and uh okay we eat also the three quarter in Pura that was extremely painful uh I will tell you three later and uh in general I think the game suffered I want to tell you the fun part but also the part that we uh would for example now would improve this game was fully online and what we're doing is not fully online so I think there was a bit of a clash between what we tried to do and the medium here uh but still like people had fun then in 2022 together with the missing people from the industries uh we created no time to die that is a treasure hun that's uh we deployed in with dry and that from six and and uh the treasure hunt was about encryption spage and we had a lot of physical puzzles developed by these guys we had like a chess board with different with two pieces that you have to put in a specific position in order to open the chest the chess board and phones rotary phones like a lot of really cool stuff um we had this team e panda Ops sold the treasure hunting 12 hours and they were like three six eight people including very fastly and they had a lot of fun and I think they said it was quite a challenging fure H we also played the same game Sorry an updated version of the game at oaka is sorry vot for 6 uh part of this work has been also sponsored by that by the way well all the other games not just to give you an understanding how it works and uh so we again this is uh an evolution of the other game for still bu built with on THC or with THC you see that uh the framework would allow you now to also set Yours name set your avatar as you can see here on the left side this is the leaderboard of all the people working uh playing with the game we were working play and uh we also had secret keys for to get even more points that was also a super nice feature and uh we also were able to live up P chapters so if we found an error or something like in the text that people were reading we were also able to update this world before it was immutable and uh side not the game had 23 chapters but some people some players got to chapter 24 okay and uh that was actually really fun so this is the see this person reached level 33 and all these other guys they went past the last level and I was like what how can this happen and then just a side because I think is interesting in THC each chapter is just a directory with two files quest. it is what to read and solution that is the solution to the next lever the last chapter usually has no solution initially you don't put the file in the last chapter but unless you forget in there of course and there was this empty file so the solution to the last chapter was the empty string that you couldn't submit from the dep so they went to either SP I think to just talk with us but I love this so I'm done I just want to give you uh some last thoughts on what it was for us to play this kind of games in the last years um people love driver hunts and people love to really to go around explore and connect also with other people we had teams that were merging uh during during the game because they found each other at a specific location try to solve a puzzle and they then put their forces together to progress with the game it it's really simple also to in in this kind of environments for people to get to start talking with someone else it's really really cool then again this is random and it's not it's not ordered in any specific way story line writing the story line for a treasure hunt it's extremely more difficult than Tech and writing chapters each each single chapter is much much more difficult for S engineer not the writer and no but really uh um because if you think about a story line then you need to really fill all the tiny gaps in the story and should make sense at the end of the day and you need to eventually adapt the story to the puzzle but the puzzle is also related to the location where you driver so there are many many factors you need to to control um then zero friction on boarding is possible as I said before we started with asking people to install trust then we had uh a vulnerable wallet then we have our own custom wallets zero friction boing is possible in this kind of games so it's not that people are playing the on the internet people are playing the game in a room or in event so you can give them you can Avo them or don't be scared about like an most people joining the game because maybe maybe it would happen not happen pay attention to free Bas as I said before we were using Aura but then the game stopped working and it was an idea s and people had anfs hash to open it was a really aive and so pay attention to fre Portos and uh side note INF fur they were really nice because they give us a vouer for the iPhone 6 that we could use with like really huge amount of requests uh but anyway yes pay attention to this uh this other thing not the best way to make money Lo uh I just want again I just want to say that um these are collecting we are like we just do this for fun for real and uh we also noticed that if we if you like if this is a service we offer to a general companies or whatever they would have to pay really lot of money but it's a lot of work and uh I'm saying that not the best way to make money because maybe if you want to make money out of this it to be asked for a lot of money and I'm not sure people will pay I don't know few thousand and I don't know someone put yeah I think they won be super happy to pay all of this customer service is essential in these games we always gave a phone number to call really and people called us and we're like hi Social Distortion protocol I can help you today like also laring a bit with SP I mean we're not Ling you know but no customer service is essential okay like your phone or a chat uh just make sure you talk to the your players because they're investing a lot of time in the puzzles and if after two three hours of like banging their head on the wall because they cannot they they're unable to find a solution they last thing they want is to know exactly what the solution is they just want a p so you need to play well with them because maybe they're a bit frustrated and this happens anyone I can totally understand this I also created the new term a thin line between fun ation concentration if you want to use uh also writing good balance puzzles is very difficult and uh what is obvious to me is like maybe not obvious for someone else and uh that's that's probably the most difficult part and again there will be mistakes and errors for example about planet a the game with the that I told you before about the tragedy of the hormos finding the right balance about CO2 emission and the number of players it will require probably a PhD thesis and uh or anyway a way for us to adapt the game while people are playing and we didn't have this let's say back door to change some moves of the game so again consider this and be ready because some stuff works some some other stuff doesn't but that's okay and that's all guys thank you again thank you very much are there any questions or you should have asked them in between anyway yeah to be it's not a question just a comment like what he said about it's that's a lot of work it's true I I helped at this B game and I've never worked so hard at a devc ever and the respon I give multiple talks um and we specifically requested the feature to be able to update chapters while the game was going because we realized you know we're not ready in time and there's mistakes and we felt like we're constantly fixing things while all the players were catching up to us and then the joke was you're making this treasure hunt and you're always one level ahead of the players at the top and as soon as they've reached you theyve condemned to join the team and we puzzles for the once in thank you he's one of these Mark guys from IND a lot of so thank you also for yeah working with this yeah it was fun but tying any other question so what's next uh we would like to make another game for the uh for the Congress this year uh but I cannot compete so maybe yes maybe not let's see if the time machine works Congress happy sorry will the Congress happen actually uh at the Congress we had a lot of fun also with the with the players and they every time they tell us yeah let's do this again that was super fun so let's see maybe yes just some curiosity what is the bulk of the work like what is the hardest part in a way just for me because I don't know about the other people that participated but for me was in a way try to fix the puzzle in the story because sometimes you need something that is very simple like finding something in a specific area and you need to put you need to in a way reframe this area that is in in the real world in the story in a way that makes sense you need to make this transition in a way of physical and real things the story this for me is like difficult any last question that is not the case then give a big round of applause to