(On Legitimacy of Blockchains - 17)
So far, P2E (Play to Earn) games have not been anything more than an attractive-looking facade devised to promote the usage of the Web3 infrastructure. Such a superficial form of marketing, however, has long been hiding the true potential of gameplay-oriented dApps (Distributed Applications).
Let us imagine a blockchain which bases its logical foundation upon countless interactions between videogame players as well as a virtual space in which they participate in the act of play, all happening inside a collective gameplay ecosystem. And let us venture ourselves into a hypothetical model of consensus in which the game's internal gameplay interactions act as the blockchain's primary means of validating transactions.
In a PoW (Proof of Work) network, agents must rely on the black magic of a cryptographic hash function for growing the chain of transactions and thus have no choice but yield the integrity of the decision-making process to those who have enough computational power to quickly grind through its pseudorandom table of input/output pairs. In a PoS (Proof of Stake) network, agents must yield transactional integrity to those who have the highest percentages of wealth to stake. Other kindred protocols, too, are not entirely free from accusations which claim that they are being "unfair" in terms of giving everybody a fair amount of voice when validating transactions.
A P2E-driven blockchain, on the other hand, is a radically different breed in its own right because its medium of validation is a complex interactive system (aka "game world") that is being shared among every one of its participating players, all collaboratively engaging themselves in the process of creating and amending every mechanical aspect of it.
What I am mentioning here is a perpetual feedback system that can be devised to operate as a self-evolving organic engine of the blockchain. A traditional blockchain framework would have merely established a fixed consensus algorithm and driven itself on top of it, which would have given opportunities for anyone who is insurmountably rich to simply grind one's capital for the purpose of occupying an unfairly enormous share of the network's dictatorial power, either by buying a large number of mining devices (e.g. graphics cards, ASICs) or by simply staking one's disproportionately high wallet balances. A P2E-blockchain is nothing like this; instead of depending its means of consensus on a fixed numerical algorithm, it leverages the dynamics of an ever-growing multiplayer gameplay ecosystem as the method of ensuring the integrity of transactions.