I will do a full write up later, but to quickly comment: Why this and why build it on Nostr? Well, building a game leveraging Nostr has been on my mind for a while now. I have many fancy ideas, but non that i can personally execute. So i though 'what is the simplest thing that i actually can do'. Text-based choose your own adventure style came to mind, after all, this is where a lot of the computer game stuff finds its origins with things like Zork. I figured out a mechanic that would allow most of the social clients to be used to "play", the game. Then I needed a way to actually produce it, so i used shakespeare.diy to create a tool that would allow me to upload a spreadsheet full of Nostr profiles and posts, that it would process automatically. It took a bit of effort still, mostly because my plans innitially were to grand, so i scaled it down and simplified it....its a dark lord in a castle and it needs to die, obviously. Now the idea behind it, is that any/most nostr(social) client can be used to play the game, but also that anyone can simply fork and extend the story by adding their own replies. Currently there is no good way for filtering, so the random comments from people now, will wreck the experience....it is what it is. As for the viewing client i made: This is funny, the spreadsheet-batch-processing tool was one-shotted and cheap. This viewing client was an expensive disaster with many failed attempts. I gave up on it. But when i finished what i just shared, i managed to rework one of the early attempts into something usefull and it looks so damn good haha. On desktop, mobile struggles to load the page nicely. Anyway, i had fun building it, however trivial and silly the thing may be :) View quoted note →

This is for your consideration Nostr. Here is a mechanism to play ‘games’ on Nostr. Now ‘games’ here means any sequence of events by an actor or between actors, which is relevant to a third actor. As far as I am aware it is impossible to create a ‘perfect’ system that can’t be cheated/exploited. Yet perhaps there is way in which cheating is both difficult and as obvious as possible. Everything is done simply by publishing Nostr events. Variation of this mechanism can be used to create open ladder systems to keep track of a players relative score (like an ELO-rating), but the example of a simple game of ‘higher or lower’ will be used to illustrate the mechanism. The first part of the mechanism is to ensure a consistent sequence. This is done by using a linked-list, where every action references the previous action. The existence of mutually exclusive actions or parallel sequences is clear proof of cheating. This allows one to go through the players history and calculate their current score. The second part is removing the ability for post-hoc actions, i.e. performing an action after the fact pretending this action was performed in the past. This is done via the use of NIP-03 opentimestamps, committing the linked-list sequence of actions to moments in time. This does not actually do a whole lot other than forcing cheaters to premeditate their fraud. The third part is the use of multisignature, such that two or more actors sign off on the (inter)action going on. In this system, a cheater has to conspire in order to sign and timestamp both option before the fact, and only publish the preferred one after the fact. This means that you trust at least one of the players to be honest in the way that they don’t go along with a conspiracy to cheat. All well and good, but by using bots, which are more than willing to both cooperate in any conspiracy, and don’t mind sacrificing their own score for the greater good of the bot-master, any cheater can still trivially rig their score. Hence lastly the mechanism relies on subjective valuation of the trustworthiness of the other players. So despite all the formal bells and whistles, it ultimately hinges on your ability to asses ‘the world’, whether you fall victim to cheaters. Will this work? We can ponder, we can think of all kinds of ways sophisticated botnets could infiltrate trust-networks in order to later be leveraged in schemes without raising suspicion. But my meta-point here is that this is true for everything; be it a games core or ‘social status’. Therefor, games on Nostr are not just a potentially ‘fun’ thing onto themselves, they could be the battlegrounds for WoT attack and defense; forcing attackers into more and more sophistication by developing better methods of assessment which can be leveraged in Nostr more broadly. A place where cheating can actually be encouraged, for it show where all of our collective blind spots are.