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A scamless P2E

Author: Youngjin Kang

Date: 2022.12

One of the reasons why P2E (Play To Earn) games are often being accused of either pulling off a Ponzi scheme or luring people into some kind of quasi-gambling is that they are zero-sum by nature. Playing a piece of entertainment usually does not produce anything valuable in our real world, and as a result, the joy of earning real money inside a game must be preceded by an act of taking it away from another player.

In order to create a P2E game which guarantees overall co-prosperity of players, we must ensure that playing the game actually produces real-life resources which can be exchanged with fiat currencies. But how? Well, the solution involves a bit of AR (Augmented Reality) and robotics.

All we need to do is gamify primary industries such as agriculture, forestry, fishing, mining, and others. Just allow players to rent their own robotic avatars and remotely control them via either VR/AR gears or their home computers. These remote-controlled robots will have the freedom to move however they want as long as they stay within designated playgrounds, such as farms, mines, and other areas in which various raw resources can be collected.

The game's graphics pipeline should be able to render these places as some sort of "dungeons", where crops are being displayed as enemy characters (such as monsters) that are programmed to play realistic death animations whenever they are being harvested by the player's robotic arms (The coarse mechanical features of which, of course, can be displayed as a mighty warrior's muscular arms holding a shiny sword and a shield).

Whenever a player completes an in-game quest such as "Harvest 10 avocados from a local farm" by putting them in a nearby bucket which is being monitored by a surveillance camera for score-tracking purposes, the game will pay that person a couple of pennies as a reward (which is possible because those who own the game will profit from the player's work). As long as the process of completing such a quest is fun enough, this mode of exchange will qualify as a P2E game.