I'm having trouble sleeping. The last time I remember having this much trouble sleeping was when I realized that the light-fighters in a spaceship videogame I was spending too much time playing and thinking about should be faster than the higher level fighters. I lay in bed struggling with it for hours and finally ended up writing a post about it on the game's forums before I was able to get any sleep.
Oddly enough, that same game is running through my head tonight. I got back into it's current incarnation earlier this year, and if you've been following me you may have seen some of my ramblings/posts about it. It's in a sorry state of nursing-home resurrection at the moment, a pirate edition set up by Russians who seem unwilling or unable to proceed with development - which means the mechanics the final dev was half-way through implementing remain half-implemented.
I have fantasies about saving it from its current state, but perhaps more interestingly through its discord I was connected with one of the original developers and invited to the alpha phase of his current project. It's a little frustrating, because I don't think he ever 'got' what made the original great - but it is contact with a guy who has a team of game coders working on a style of game I'm interested in.
That's one of the circles I currently see the Venn of: sustained game development.
Thanks to my time on steemit, one of the other circles I see in this Venn is cryptocurrency and digital identity. A lot of people here have a much more in-depth understanding of cryptocurrency than I do. Like most, my understanding primarily comes from a passing understanding of Bitcoin - but with my gaming background, I'm aware that people can become lethally attached to digital assets. These assets can be digitally "mined" and in space games you can "mine" asteroids. Part of the Venn I see is how functionally similar setting a rig to solve BTCs block-making equation and setting up a rig to fly a virtual spaceship to an asteroid to extract virtual ore can be.
With the "token craze" of SMT and steem-engine I see going on around here, I can't help but think that these tokens might Venn with game development. One of the best things JumpGate had going for it was a player-dependent economy. Stations made ship parts, but only if they had the materials to do so. Sometimes that meant a cargo mission from one station to another, sometimes that meant you had to go space-mining. Couldn't it be a thing where the in-game currency you got for doing the space mining was a crypto-token of one flavor or another? Couldn't it also be that you could buy the tokens? Trade your currency for in-game currency or trade your in-game labor for in-game currency.
Then, could not token sales be a method of funding game development? So long as players had a method of adding their in-game currency to the lot that was sold to people buying the in-game currency, wouldn't digital labor have the potential to translate into the type of currency you buy groceries with?
That's part of the Venn I see. Goldfarming is already a thing in major MMOs, can it not be co-opted? Wouldn't tying in-game credits explicitly to the development economy (rather than the game pulling a limitless currency out of the ether) change the bug/problem into a feature?
Who's already doing experiments in this vein?
Okay, now I can sleep :)