I have been in that space since before the advent of Huntercoin, with my endgame being the full-immersion 3-D interface but starting first with what it is that will eventually be illustrated with full 3-D immersive graphics.
I aimed at strategic / tactical games rather than "twitch games", that is, I aimed for characters whose accuracy, combat abilities and so on are part of the character rather than part of the player.
Part of the reason for that is of course to keep things easier to make "accessibile" to "handicapped" players, but part is also that it seemed (and still seems to me) easier to first figure out what happened then let client interfaces determine how to present what happened to the player than to first draw in 3D something like a bullet traversing a trajectory or a sword swinging through certain parts of 3-D space then from that try to figure out whether anything happened to be in its path and, if so, what the effect would be upon the bullet or sword and upon whatever it intercepted.
The latter approach seemed like it would require some kind of Artificial Intelligence and/or Image Recognition for a client interface to try to figure out what happened based on what was depicted in a 3-D image, whereas the former approach lets text mode clients simply say what happened and let graphical interfaces depict it however they choose based on the graphical powers and resources available to them.
(Tile based 2-D using the most similar tiles, clients equipped with libraries of 3-D models choosing the most appropriate or similar models to deploy and so on.)
I also chose to build from free open-source resources, so basically I periodically examine what free open-source games and virtual reality tools are available that support (hopefully massively) multi-user and actually work, and look for ways to incorporate them into the game.
As I explain on the Devtome wiki page
https://www.devtome.com/galactic_milieu ultimately the economics have to work, at least the part of the economics that pays for hosting and bandwidth, else the whole edifice is unlikely to work or last.
So I started from the observation that to many people, at least the kind of people we see a lot on Bitcointalk forums, simply having something to trade is game enough; in fact I expect that a lot of them actually far prefer simply directly trading on an "exchange" to having to first have a character in a place on a planet make its way to a place where things can be traded, possibly being "mugged" on the way to or from the exchange. So I started with currencies.
In order that the game need not depend of having "enough" players trading each "pair" to allow "price discovery", I developed the "treasuries" system whereby the galactic currencies each have a "treasury" from which the currency's value per coin or share can be calculated simply by dividing the total value of the "treasury" by the number of coins or shares minted.
That also allowed me to adopt various ancient cryptocoins from the dawn of crypto simply by building a "treasury" for each coin I wanted to adopt and dividing the total value of that treasury by the number of coins minted.
Those who followed Facebook's idea to create a currency of their own will recall that Facebook proposed much the same idea for their own "stable" currency: it would have a "treasury" of assets behind it. I regarded that as somewhat of a validation of my approach.
As you can see from the tables and plots at
http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html which show historical value data going back to 2012, this system has been running for quite some time and has seemed reasonably effective.
Each currency or asset also has at least one "slush fund" account, if only as a place to keep any of itself that it happens to own, such as ones it never parted with and ones it has bought back. Each asset's value is counted as zero when computing the value of its own treasury, and in any case it is intended that it not be necessary to dig things back out of the treasury in order to buy back the asset or coin, the slush fund should ideally suffice to buy back the whole lot without having to dig into the treasury to do so.
The initial worlds were FreeCiv worlds, with the monthly hosting fee to control a nation on such a world being based on the so-called "square miles" that FreeCiv reports the nation as controlling. The intent is that those "square miles" cost enough that a full array of OpenSimulator "regions" can be hosted to represent all of those "square miles".
Since we are still a long way from actually spinning-up immersive 3-D interfaces, those "hosting fees" the nations are paying mostly just accumulate in the treasury of GHC, a Corp known outside the game as General Hosting Corp and inside the game as Galactic Holding Corp. Nations should not mind that they are paying a heck of a lot more than it costs to host a FreeCiv world and some Crossfire RPG maps of selected portions of it (hopefully eventually all cities and any FreeCiv tile that has a FreeCiv unit on it), because they should aim to own a proportion of the shares of GHC commensurate with their proportion of all FreeCiv "square miles" in the multiverse so that almost all the value they pay out as hosting fees accrues into the value of the shares of GHC that they own, until some future time when GHC starts paying out huge sums to host 3-D immersive representations of (viewports into, rabbitholes into) the game.
For text mode we use CoffeeMUD, as most early MUD code had restrictive licenses forbidding using it commercially without making some kind of deal with their developer.
Limiting bandwidth of the initial interfaces allows a lot more room for player profit than if everything every character did had to be presented in full immersive 3-D at high framerate, so play-to-earn players should appreciate that even if twitch-game advocates have reservations about it or objections to it. It also makes deployment of large numbers of scripted characters more practical.
I am not sure whether it is a good thing or a bad thing that Facebook seems to be coming around to some of my ideas.
-MarkM-
