How Video Games Could Help Steemit Expand and Grow

Video games. They are what drove the computer market expansion in the 1980's into the 1990's to become what they are today. We saw the crash of the early to mid 1980's and how Nintendo revived the console market - PC's were not all that effected because they were almost completely different. The only computer game publishers that lost out in the crash were the ones that relied on the arcade, or console ports, for their sales. In the 1990's we saw a boon in computers with the whole 3D graphics card push so that people could play Quake, Unreal and more at higher resolutions. The moral of the story is, games took computers to new heights, made many hardware manufacturers millions and revived consoles after nearly completely killing itself via suicide. Video games can help Steemit in a similar manner. These ideas would work with the Blockchain technology in general too, I would think

Brawlout by Angry Mob Games (new Super Smash Bros type game available on Steam).

This is an article that was stemmed from my discussion with whatageek and his thoughts on the subject. I wanted to throw my two cents in on it as my idea is slightly different than his on this subject.

Did you know that the original Tomb Raider is available to play in your browser?

Just imagine if we could get someone like XProger, the person behind the OpenLara project to work their programming magic here on Steemit, a platform that they could benefit from their talents. That would be great.

Considering Tomb Raider is an intellectual property owned by someone else, someone that probably would not appreciate a fan profiting from that property, it would make more sense to go "simpler" with games here on Steemit. Think arcade games that have scores and a scoreboard.

Imagine if we had clones of Space Invaders, Asteroids, Centipede, etc here on Steemit, playable right here and integrated with the rewards system. Hold the #1 score for a set period of time, earn some Steem and Steem Dollars. This could be set up similar to the voting system we have in place now - except it is tied the amount of time you hold each rank on the scoreboard.

The games could be offered like old arcade games used to be - 1 Steem or whatever portion there of, per play (or we could just have them be free to play - either way). I like the pay to play because it gets people using Steem, gives them a reason to convert some cash over (especially if they think they are good enough to hold rank and earn some).

This could open Steemit up to much more, even opening up the underlying currencies (Steem and Steem Dollars) to be used in gaming applications. Rather than simply playing a role playing game and finding yet more "gold" or whatever currency the game uses, users could find Steem or Steem Dollars depending on the support the game is getting from the community (more upvotes and more plays, more money distributed in the game world). This would bring more interaction and play time to games like Zelda or even Super Mario Bros (I know I would play A LOT more if I knew those "coins" were worth real world money).

What about fighting games like Street Fighter II and Tekken? Games could be streamed in a lobby style and fans could even throw upvotes behind their fighter of choice (sharing in the rewards). There could be two types of fighters, free and paid for with Steem or Steem Dollars (fights could be kept between the type of fighter chosen - free or paid or free for all/random).

These could be additional sources of revenue for Steemit and the game developer themselves. Now who knows a game developer that would be interested in this idea?