A Decentralized Approach to Award Game Achievements

Blockchain technology has the potential to transform the gaming industry by enabling players to own in-game assets and receive NFTs or tokens as rewards for their accomplishments. However, one critical issue is determining how to ensure that achievement conditions are met (e.g., that the player completed level number 10). Current approaches either open cheating backdoors (e.g., if the client checks the conditions) or introduce centralization points and limitations (if a backend checks the condition). To overcome these problems a potential solution may seem to execute games directly on-chain, but the high computational cost (especially on Ethereum) and latency has made it impossible so far; however, the development of new technologies like proofs of computation enables new approaches. In this article we employ succinct proofs of computation to allow the player to prove to a smart contract on a blockchain that he reached (achieved) a certain state in an action game, that can then be played directly in the client; this allows to implement decentralized systems that can ensure fair and transparent rewarding. Moreover, we address the problem of proving that a certain game on the client has taken no more than a specific amount of time.