Chimaera: Gaming's Ascension of Developers and Players

Gaming has been an important part of my life ever since the 80's when I was a child disassembling game consoles (i.e. Atari) in a repair shop. Around this time, I remember reading about the U.S. Air Force using video games. The Defense Technical Information Center’s 40th Anniversary Issue of Simulation and Gaming discusses the personal gaming age. It details the use of Simulator Networking (SIMNET) and graphical tools from academic and commercial research labs. SIMNET would go on to be recreated and sold in the entertainment sector. Blockchain appears to be the final puzzle piece of a revolutionary, creative digital medium.

adapted from Chimaera website and whitepaper

Blockchain Technology for Gaming

Chimaera is a visionary blockchain poised to transform gaming. It focuses on streamlining development and asset management to facilitate new crypto games. This means that publishing, development, and the platform itself all benefit from the Chimaera blockchain. Developers can expect improved efficiency in terms of costs and time management. Users benefit from the blockchain as well through verified asset control and monetary opportunities. CHI coins are used to power the system for accounts, in-game purchases, and exchanges among users. It is developing a truly democratized gaming ecosystem that can be adopted by any game theory based platform.

Phases of Development

adapted from Chimaera whitepaper
A holistic approach is used to grow the ecosystem over three phases. Developers and their new games lead marketing efforts that will attract players in cycles. The first phase requires the smallest amount of funding to build the core blockchain client, developer hub, game studio, and a few other implementations. An advanced developer hub, community, trading platform, third-party games, and mobile integration make up the second phase. The third phase consists of a publisher and social virtual reality (VR) platforms, as well as, the development of AAA+ games. Quickly on-boarding developers, alongside building the core and developer hub, is imperative. The aim is speedy, high-quality game production.

adapted from Chimaera whitepaper

A Decentralized Autonomous Universe

The concept of a universal avatar was being thrown around during the early part of this millennia and seems to coincide with the advent of social media. A universal avatar (or character manager) requires further empowerment of players. Chimaera’s Decentralized Autonomous Universe (DAU) is being developed as a real-time, immutable place where players will gain complete control over their environment. It is a true community sandbox that is beyond outside tampering. The vision of the Chimaera team is one that encourages skill and intelligence for the harvesting a lucrative market known as tradable skins. Flourishing off the back of game development, this secondary market is valued at about $50 billion.

Screenshots of my avatar, MachnBird Sparo, at item (skin) trading hot spots in Entropia Universe (Calypso).

Chimaera Economy & CHI Coins

Chimaera is not satisfied with merely moving gaming onto the blockchain. The team wants to maximize decentralized and autonomous gaming. This means that development becomes more flexible, player interaction and trading more sophisticated, and the creation of a new market. It is a profitable venture for developers, players, and supporters alike.

Solving Transactions and Scalability Issues

Since 2013, the Chimaera team has been experimenting with game transactions for Namecoin (atomic) and Huntercoin. Scaling (i.e. lag) is a problem in gaming. Innovations in Game Channels and Ephemeral Timestamps are part of the solution. Using Bitcoin payment channels, players can interact over a trustless off-chain medium. Continued innovation in this area is important to the company's mission.


adapted from Chimaera website

Exciting Innovations in Game Channels and Assets Trading

For a long time, playability has been sacrificed to fit network scaling for massive game worlds. Chimaera uses Trustless Off-chain Scaling, also called Game Channels, in conjunction with Ephemeral Timestamps to overcome this problem. Chimaera builds upon Huntercoin’s pioneering ‘game state’ that advanced cryptographic consensus. Like Bitcoin’s recently released Lightning Network (LN), game channels isolate transactions, but for an entire gaming world. This is centered around turn-based data recordings on a “side chain”. Transactions use agreed-upon digital hashing prior to recording game results on the main chain.

Lightning Network provides an effective off-chain solution for instantaneous transactions. Game channels will incorporate LN, private side chains, and the public main chain for transactions between parties. This enables unlimited scalability in real-time. It facilitates game developer creativity without restricting complexity which has some exciting applications for an immersive VR universe. A DAU can be born out of the sharding of game channels (i.e. representing small civilizations or cities) on independent networks connected via VR.

Chimaera has some unique ideas for virtual asset ledger applications. Its payment gateway and asset storage is being designed so that any gaming platform can implement it. Scalability is a limitation shared by MMO games and blockchains. Traditional asset trading on current gaming platforms is not optimal. Items are not finite, rather, developers must pre-create or spawn them. There is a flaw of utility when developers can print items at will. Unregulated gaming assets that require third-party trust are inherently less valuable. Chimaera seeks to shift this dynamic to a method that is provably fair.

adapted from Chimaera website

Servers no Longer Required

In addition to innovating game channels and scalability, a full-time, serverless DAU eliminates recurring account costs and promotes efficient development. This is another innovation originating with Huntercoin. Developers can also expect more flexibility led by the founder of Huntercoin, Andrew Colosimo. His track record of origination in the gaming industry includes the first game built on the blockchain, server-less / decentralized / provably fair MMO, and human mineable cryptocurrency. Chimaera is light years beyond the 2013 version.

Gaming and VR of the Future

Play-to-Earn

Human Mining, or play-to-earn, is a new model for item (skin) discovery. In-game currencies gain real-world value directly and indirectly through supply and demand. Currency trading interacts across persistent worlds in accord with procedurally generated maps and connects to the CHI market. Unlike traditional games, developers will be personally vested before and after a game is deployed through the portion of the human mined coins “banked” for them.

Interacting with Virtual Worlds

Screenshot of my avatar, MachnBird Sparo on Rocktropia's real money virtual land plots created by Chimaera advisor Jon “NEVERDIE” Jacobs.

Gaming entrepreneur, Jon “NEVERDIE” Jacobs, is vested in VR. His establishment of a VR administrative portal called POVR, world creation in EU (Rocktropia), and social media campaigns make him a valued advisor to the Chimaera team. The author of this article, MachnBird Sparo, has interacted with NEVERDIE on the EU platform and can attest to his professionalism and commitment toward advancing gaming on a global scale. Those excited about gaming should regard the development team as a highly energetic, purposeful, and determined flock. A background of each core team member, as well as, other advisors can be found in the whitepaper.

Infinite Virtual Environments

DAU is envisioned as an infinite virtual environment where players can create anything they can imagine because they have full ownership of the gaming elements. Players govern and construct their universe by interacting directly with the Chimaera blockchain. Large organizations like elected governments, international conglomerates, underground mafias, and rogue individuals all compete to dominate the markets. Virtual economies demonstrate a correlation between increasing complexity and player opportunities. The outlook of combining virtual applications with real-world problems is promising. An AI environment is foreseen applied to space, travel, and colonization, or a mixture of real endeavors.

There are two sides to the human brain. Surprisingly, the unpopularity of mathematics still overshadows society’s philosophical statutes. No one can argue that innovation is of the creative side. A technological society is characterized by innovation, and yet, creativity is not often given much more value than comforting recreation. It should not take higher educated minds to realize the value of creativity. Humanity is much less subject to its environment than early civilizations. Exploring new ideas and experiences should dominate modern culture now. Decentralization can exist because education has been distributed across the globe. And every curriculum needs a recess. Chimaera is that playground on which we shall meet.

adapted from Chimaera whitepaper
Have a look at the whitepaper and contest.

chi2018