constant on Nostr: Now what I am thinking of is a Nostr based open massive multiplayer RPG, where your ...

Now what I am thinking of is a Nostr based open massive multiplayer RPG, where your perception determines with whom you share this world / play the game with. Now if you were to do this strictly among your friends, there is no reason to do all this Nostr stuff; the point is for it to be open. How far can we extend trust until things break? How good can we make our assessments, by which honest behavior builds reputation, whilst dishonest behavior is perceived as suspicious and undermines reputation. Could it get to a point where everyone is actually sharing the ‘same’ world in their perceptions, and cheating is only happening in the margins.

I both want this type of game on Nostr, but I also want us to realize that knowing if you can trust a taxi review when you are on holiday in a country far away you have never been before; is the same type of problem.

We are going to need this stuff either way is what I am saying, so why not make it fun :)
Besides, getting cheated in a game sucks, but it is less serious than getting abducted by the fake taxi service owned by the local crime syndicate. So might be useful to know how good our assessment capabilities actually are, before we start trusting all sorts of wild things like taxi reviews.

quoting nevent1q…jzhk

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.