KittyCollector: CryptoKitty 30~ish days in and Crypto Games Reflection

This is Bonjour, Mr Fromage!

It's been over a month since CryptoKitties(CK) launched and so much has happened. Did you know there is a kitty in a ufo? There are kitties with antlers, serpent eyes, festive themes, and a whole rainbow of colours. New cattributes keep rolling out and we can really see the fun the team put into the game. The relationship between cryptos and currency definitely fueled some kitty fever, but there's also a lot of genuine love for this quirky, adorable game.

(That also somehow managed to earn me a decent return in eth and spawned over a dozen imitations.)

There's a lot of websites and projects that have sprung up around CK. The KittyExplorer team is actually on their second project with the adorable KittyHats.co browser plugin. As you can see in Bonjour's photo above, the hats are actually "stickers" that are usable once and whose ownership information is stored in a smart contract. While they are tokens like kitties, you don't actually hold them like you do your kitties. They're paired to the kitty through the smart contract, which holds the sticker token. If you sell a kitty, the sticker goes with them. And once you take it off it's done. It can't be reused.

Third-party development is definitely being encouraged by the CK team. There was an excellent medium post asking questions about ownership and a member of the team took time to respond and share some of the big questions they're asking in this new crypto collectible realm. It's hard to remember but CK is really only less than 2 months into its release so a lot has happened in that time. I'm excited to see how the conversation evolves around ownership.

We've seen with Counterparty games and the cross-chain cooperation with other blockchain projects like Ethereum that the more games that can use the assets, the higher the value of the asset becomes. It'll be interesting to see where we go from here with asset ownership.

We have a variety of games to pick from. We can go geocaching with takara using BTC and XCP tokens. We can can play games like CK that write every action to a blockchain which is so neat (and also sometimes expensive lol). We can play mobile games like Spells of Genesis (and earn blockchain tokens) or SaruTobi (and earn btc). We can even play MMORPGs on Steem or get crypto games at the Steam store. This is an exciting time for crypto games.

It's been very fun to get to explore cryptokitties, though it has required a fair amount of patience and impulse control. It can be really easy sometimes to overspend or lose eth. But it's exciting too because I learn how to interact much more with smart contracts. I learned about a wide variety of ethereum tools I had never used before like metamask, the gas station, and etherscan. Through it all, there were always more and more kitties.

(If you're wondering, yes the internet is telling you you should design a crypto game for dollars.)

30 days post-CK is looking very fine indeed. Still no sign of dragonkitty, but we remain ever watchful.