Writing Competition by @originalworks: Mindsport IO, A Steam Like Board Game Platform

First of all, this is indeed an exciting news for a board gamer like me. I am a chess, Xiang Qi and sudoku player. To integrate blockchain technology with these games make the experience of playing it a whole new level. Personally, I think this could be an unicorn as well which can gather board gamers around the world, especially the masters.

Before I go into the talk about Mindsport IO, let me share some experience of playing board games.

1 Playing board games train my patience. It is undeniable a great tool for people to train patience as a board game usually requires us to sit and focus for a long period of time. A usual chess play takes around half an hour to an hour to finish.

2 Trained to be predictive of others and plan ahead. It is good to play chess (strategy games) whereby we need to anticipate what others will move and how to win. The better we can plan and anticipate, the better the chance. It is also about the training and experience for the game. The more we are exposed with, the better we are in identify the pattern of the game.

3 Great insomnia cure. Trust me, after 2 or 3 games of chess. That night will be a good night sleep. It really drained your brain. However, this process is very satisfying!

4 Emotional control. Board games that are played face to face often involved psychology play. Usually the masters are looking for mistakes rather than making great moves. So, to provoke the opponent by showing confidence or faking some emotion may alter the performance of the opponent. This is fun when play face to face, but through computer, it is dull. (Hopefully, Mindsport IO does not only bring people to play online but offline as well! Perhaps link both up together)

Here are some thoughts that I would like to share regarding this platform:

1. The platform can make an appreciation for the masters to oversee the platform, just like each kungfu has its own master.

2. But to note that people may play with the help of AI, so it is good if this platform can have categories of AI combining with human to play, rather just pure human to human kind of competition. I remembered reading about a chess tournament that involved chess masters, AI and even non chess players. At the end of the tournament, the winning team was two computer engineers with minimal chess skill won. Note that there are chess masters that utilize AI as well, and they lose.

3. Hosting game can be easier and gain more respond due to the extra reward. The host will be much transparent due to blockchain technology and hence people can have better trust to decide whether or not to join.

4. Governing the game can be done by different ‘witnesses’ like in Steemit. It is more like a community rather than a monarch society. This also can significantly reduce the cost of administrating the platform for misconduct.

5. Trust is the main factor for the whole idea to work. From what I get through the white paper. The proposed mechanism has different types of smart contracts to govern different issues like funds, dispute, game play, tournament and others. What I see is that it is a board game platform like Steam but in a blockchain way!

Again, I’m personally not a very technical guy. However, through the perspective of a gamer, I know a few things:

**1) We want to win, some desparately. **
Therefore, sometime there are cheating case due to over desperately focus on winning. Some are taking advantage of illegal tools to win as in the conventional platform, it is centralized and gamers always can stay anonymous and recreate their account again for the next cheat.

**2) We want fair and exciting game. **
Gamers always hope for a fair fight, and I think blockchain could do the work by bonding the identity of the gamer with the account. With reputation on stake and probably with the fund in it, there are less possibility that people will misuse the trust. Eventually, this leads to a self supervised kind of game play whereby from time to time, we are also the referee to judge whether each of the gamers are playing fairly or not.
As a conclusion for this, I am positive that this idea can work as more and more people are attracted to mind games. People are more involved to improve their life and board game is part of the element that could elevate our quality of life! Trust me :)

Here is the link for the competition shoutout by @originalworks
Hey! Checkout blog post on eSteem!esteem://cryptocurrency/@originalworks/150-sbd-sponsored-writing-contest-mindsports-io

mindsports2017