WEB3 | SENET : Games Connect the World
SENET was inspired by the board game invented by ancient Egyptians more than 5,000 years ago, which means “crossing”. They believed that the movement of chess pieces from one end of the board to the other was like a soul traveling through the underworld to the afterlife. At first, SENET was just a board game for entertainment, but soon extended with religious meanings.
Here, the term SENET takes on new significance:
▪️ Discover the value of the game. Games are common to all civilizations, as old as the origin of humanity.
▪️ Give connotation to the game. Integrate it into daily life like the ancient Egyptians did.
▪️ Use games to connect more people and a bigger world, finally create and remain traces of civilization in our era.
WHAT IS GAME
If you want to find commonalities between different civilizations in the long history of mankind, one of them must be games. why? Because there is no civilization without games. Our humans are Homo Ludens.
All activities that generate fun can be called “game”. Playing chess is a game, playing ball is a game, joining literary or artistic creation is also a game. Nevertheless, all things that seem serious and boring can also be a kind of game — war, law, and religion can all be abstracted into certain rules of the game. So, what exactly is game?
Broadly speaking, a game is a world view, the way we observe the world. Everyone can find the order of world he/she agrees with in a game, but no any game can define the entire world.
WHY GAMES MATTER
Games, though are usually defined as useless, superficial and time-consuming, play a significant role in human life. However, in the Internet age, ever-increasing data show that game industry has formed a huge global market. Players with similar needs in any corner of the earth are waiting for being connected, with the truth of such group is still expanding sharply.
Why are games so important?
In fact, it not only originates from the biological instinct of “play”, but also carries a wide range of social functions:
1. Fun. The pleasure produced by the game process is completely spontaneous since the element that constitutes the game is voluntary participation, otherwise it is not a game. Therefore, games are an act of free creation, philosophically, only a healthy and free mind has the urge to play.
2. Meaning. Human beings are required to find meaning and own an ability to give meaning to things, otherwise life will be lost in a sense of nothingness. From a psychological view, all meaningful actions should be regarded as self-defense that against chaos. Games, and all other behaviors generate fun, essentially provide a “flow” experience that focuses our consciousness and frees us from the interference of the external environment.
3. Cooperation. Another element of the game is to participate in the interaction. Even in stand-alone games, players have indirect interaction with designers through technical carriers. Anthropologists have shown that playing complex games together is a key skill that sets humans apart from other animals. This ability is called “shared intentionality”, that is, the ability to cooperate with others and achieve common goals. It is this cooperative ability to appreciate group goals that makes our social division of labor so different from that of chimpanzees.
All in all, the value of games is that they provide fun, create meaning, and foster cooperation between people.
HOW GAME DEVELOP
The history of games can be divided into two phases: video games and pre-video games. Before the popularization of information technology, games only existed as a small-scale amateur pastime. After entering the information age, computer and the Internet have greatly changed the participation mode of games, and also expanded the social functions of games in many ways.
The earliest video games were born in the US defense laboratories in the 1960s, by curious engineers who wanted to use technology to create fun things. At that time, the computer had just been invented with poor display technology so that it was a big luxury to play games with expensive memory. In the middle of the Cold War, in order to alleviate the huge financial burden, the U.S. government began to consider commercializing some military technologies. Soon video games became one of the civilian technologies invested by the U.S. military. In the 1970s, as the price of semiconductor components dropped remarkably, entrepreneurs smelled the business opportunities that gave birth to technology companies like Atari that specialized in the production of games. In the arcade age, these companies not only applied technology to make games prevailing, but also successfully popularized electronic technology through games.
However, technology is not at the heart of the game.
The huge profits in the game market have made manufacturers only satisfied with imitating and copying existing products, without thinking about how to create better content, even Atari was not exempt. Soon, players were unwilling to pay for the repetitive cassettes, then the entire North American game market fell into a crisis of collapse in the early 1980s.
At this time, Japanese electronic equipment manufacturers are planning how to increase their game business, including technology companies such as Panasonic, Toshiba, Sharp and NEC. But only Nintendo, which started out as a card trader, rethought the essence of the game and took the content of the game instead of technology as a bargaining chip for the industry to reshuffle. For this reason, it bought out “Tetris” from Soviet mathematicians at a large price copyright, then fully devoted to building an IP that belongs to its own game empire.
Nintendo and its developer resources, as well as competitors such as Sega and Sony, jointly expanded the content and gameplay of the games at that time, making Japanese games synonymous with the console age, and sparking global players to follow this trend.
Although technology is not the value of the game itself, it determines the update and iteration of game industry. Every technological innovation will eliminate a large number of competitors and give opportunities to new entrants. Take South Korea as an example, before the turn of the millennium, the video game market was mainly divided by the United States and Japan. Some technology giants such as Microsoft and Apple have strengthened their game business. After the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s, the South Korean government began to realize the importance of developing a low-energy, high-tech Internet economy. With the vigorous support of the government, the game industry has successfully grasped the first wave of the Internet, and has gained a place in the field of online game development.
In the past two decades, online games have facilitated the online cooperation and interaction of global players on a large scale, and expanded more than millions of virtual communities. The game “World of Warcraft” alone has spent more than 50 billion hours for players around the world, about 6 million years, which is equivalent to the evolution time since humans walked upright. But that’s just the beginning. With the popularity of smartphones, mobile games have gradually become the main driving force for global market expansion, accounting for more than half of the market share. According to statistics, the number of players has exceeded 3 billion during the epidemic, and this number will continue to approach the total population of the earth.
However, looking at the development of games, whether they are arcade machines, home consoles, PCs, online games or smartphones, almost all WEB2 or earlier games are one-way, isolated and consumption-oriented.
One-way means that players passively accept products from game manufacturers and are subject to the rules and gameplay established by them. Isolation lies in the fact that there are completely isolated systems between games while players have to bear the consumption caused by the differences between different systems, not the other way around. In addition, the production of such games is too consumption-oriented, in order to stimulate players to buy more items and levels, or to draw their attention to endless advertisements. In this model, producers and consumers have clear and unequal boundaries.
SENET: GOAL AND MISSION
Right now, the WEB3 wave based on blockchain technology is reshaping the form of games, resulting in the GameFi model of play-2-earn. In a decentralized network, users can obtain income (game currency) after gaming operation, is obtained, and the game props realize value conversion and circulation in the form of NFT (non-homogeneous token), and finally form an economic system supported by game currency, NFT, and cryptocurrency. In theory, the entire economic system derived from blockchain technology and cryptocurrency can endow games with huge production potential.
WEB3 brings new opportunities to the game industry, but also exposes many problems in the current game mode:
First, the rights of players cannot be guaranteed. For example, game companies have unlimited control resulting in game props and rules can be released or changed at will. Virtual assets are hard confirmed, and the community lacks the power to participate in maintaining games. Also, account security has the risk of frequent theft/hacking attacks in virtual transactions. Besides, the data is not transparent enough, the content/quantity of props and the probability algorithm of the lottery are not fully disclosed. What’s more, the game economic system is isolated so that assets of different games cannot be interconnected.
The second is the “Matthew Effect” of game manufacturers. In traditional games, developing and publishing games is difficult while successful games are even more. Of all games that go into production, only 4% turn a profit, but almost 80% of released games are forgotten and make a net loss. The video game industry in the United States alone is worth $85 billion, but most of the profits go to the top game operators.
The third is the unsustainability of the current industry. The existing GameFi economic model on the market, whether it is a single-token or multi-token model, is only a zero-sum game between players, project owner and investors, but has not improved any social productivity. The end result is that one party will be exploited, resulting in Game crashes.
Based on this, SENET is actively building an aggregated blockchain game platform to promote game manufacturers and independent game developers transition to WEB3 in a compliant and convenient manner. We are also committed to providing players with a truly open game ecosystem, since the relationship between production and consumption in the game will be changed through the design of Senet Network. Our philosophy is “Games connect the world”, by focusing on user experience and helping more people discover and produce value. At the same time, we also look forward to more partner joining SENET together!
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