Why my lack of skill is good news for Shardbound

Challenge is the thing

Whisper it but I’m not very good at games.

This is something seven years in blockchain games and a prior decade in mobile games has done little to remedy.

The games I play involve spending time and money not gaining skill, at least in terms of anything approaching twitch skills or deep meta cognition.

And yet if the thesis that games generate sufficient psychological value in terms of the relationship between players and their assets that they will be able to support large real-value economies is correct, it seems unlikely time or money alone will be sufficient.

For, at a general level, time and money are similarly distributed across the three billion people who play games; certainly time but even money in terms of how much disposable income most of us can or will spend.

Notably, only a tiny fraction of payers generate the majority of the $80 billion mobile gaming market. Most of us spend about as much time and as much money as each other — a couple of hours a day, and zero dollars.

Skill, however, is not so equally distributed and the only way you can become substantively better at something is by throwing a lot of time at the process, and even then you’re unlikely to improve your rank into the top tier of the naturally skilled.

But the commitment and the challenge is the thing. That’s what I’ve been telling myself as I struggle with Shardbound, the deck-building turn-based strategy game from Bazooka Tango that’s just released its second playable version.

You can watch me failing (again) in the following video.

For my failure has awakened a desire to get better, by which I mean losing a lot of games in order to get better, and that isn’t something I’ve experienced with many blockchain games.

Of course, Shardbound is not the only such candidate. I will be playing extraction shooter Shrapnel again soon but I have no illusions I’m ever going to be anything other than cannon fodder in that particular twitch experience.

I have also bought a proper gaming mouse to see if action battler Champions Ascension is something I could try to become better at. I’m sure there will be other titles too because the first wave of blockchain games that could just be called ‘games’ is now incoming.

The emergence of these two things — blockchain games based on skill and blockchain games that could primarily be seen as games — seems related.

Not that all blockchain games need to be based on skill or employ traditional genres, however. In the longterm, I think the most interesting and successful blockchain games will likely be highly innovative, creating new experiences and ways for us to demonstrate mastery.

But, in the meantime, it seems like progress to see familiar tropes within these novel economics, even if they are challenging in term of actual gameplay.

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