Get Paid to Game! Sign me up!!!

Did you know that you can earn real (crypto)money playing a game on Steemit?

I’ve always loved games! But growing up as an only child I didn’t always have somebody to play with and we didn’t have the internet yet, so I was forced to get creative. I can’t tell you how many games of Monopoly I played against myself in my formative years. Luckily technology has come a long way since those analog days, and we now have all kinds of outlets for the hardcore gamer at heart. We are even starting to see people being taken seriously when they say that they are a ”professional gamer”; it was the internet that made this possible. What a wonderful time to be alive!

Now with the advent and proliferation of Blockchain technology (Internet 3.0) a new era of gaming is just beginning. You may have heard of CryptoKitties, the Ethereum based “game” that brought the network to its knees. Some might suggest that CryptoKitties isn’t a game, and that would be fair, it is more of a collectables trading platform than a game. However it has paved the way for World of Ether, which will have the same collectible aspects, but also promises to be a game in which the creatures you have collected will be able to battle against one another...kinda like Pokemon (COOL!).

Thinking back, some of my first online multiplayer experiences were on Yahoo Games, and before I knew it games were added to Facebook. What better place to play games with your friends over distance than on the platform that is also letting you know what is on their mind, or what they ate for dinner. Facebook now has hundreds of games accessible on their platform. It just goes to show how easily a social media platform can become a gaming platform.

Enter Steemit, one of the first social media platforms to meet blockchain technology, and the platform that you are probably reading this on. What better place to stage the next wave of gaming? And it’s already happening! It would appear that a wonderful human being (or sophisticated A.I.) named @steemplayroom has done the noble deed of setting up an hourly game of Agar.io, and is using Steemit to facilitate the reward distribution.

Agar.io isn’t a new game, it started as a browser based game in April 2015, and was soon thereafter brought to mobile platforms in the summer of the same year. It is a simple game where players are spawned onto a white 2D world map which has been speckled with small coloured circles. You start out as a circle yourself, only slightly bigger than the circles scattered around the map. Once the match starts, you are free to travel around, led by your mouse cursor on the browser version, and by your finger on mobile. As you travel around, you can “eat” any circles smaller than you by passing over it, as you do, you grow bigger and bigger. The object of the game is to be the last one standing, or be the biggest circle when the match ends. A few more mechanics you need to know:

1. The smaller you are the faster you move about the map. So smaller circles can outrun or dodge larger ones.

2. You can hit the spacebar (or the “split” button on mobile) to divide your circle in half, and launch one half in the direction that you are traveling. So larger players can try and capture the faster, more nimble smaller players with a quick attack. This is risky though, because these smaller pieces of yourself can now be gobbled up players that would normally be the same size as you. Don’t worry though, after a short while the split off pieces will begin to move back toward each other, and eventually will congeal back into one large circle.

3. There are stationary lime green circles that are kind of ruffled around the edges to set them apart from player circles. These are essentially mines. If your player circle is larger than one of these mines, and you try to pass over one, you will be scattered into several smaller parts leaving you even more vulnerable than if you had only split yourself in half, like in the previous mechanic.

That’s basically it...eat or be eaten, don’t blow yourself up, survive to win!

Since @steemplaroom has married Agar.io to Steemit, it has taken on the new name of Steemgar. Players are able to sign up for a Steemgar match 6 and a half minutes after it has been announced through a post by @steemplayroom. In order to do that though, you will have to login using SteemConnect V2, which will allow the system to automatically reply on the game announcement post using your account. This is how the participants are tracked, and how the top 3 will be acknowledged, and rewarded (Don’t worry this is not a phishing scam...I thought that at first too). There is then another 30 seconds for all players to get loaded onto the map before the game will start. Once underway, the game plays just like Agar.io.

Once the match is over the top 3 players will be rewarded via upvotes on the game announcement post 30 minutes later. At the moment the prize pool for each match is around $10, but that is sure to grow as more people start participating, and with that more whales will come along as benefactors (Shout out to @crypoctopus for being the first!!).

In the week or so that I have known about this game, I’ve played a dozen or so games, and I have already seen some updates being made to it. From small U.I. changes to the addition of an ongoing leaderboard, the signs are there that this game has not yet made it to its final form. I am eager to see where it ends up. But I am most excited to be around to see this new era of gaming in its infancy.

I hope to see you all in my next match!!!

Follow @steemplayroom to get notified when a match is about to start (currently hourly)

Find me on Twitter - https://twitter.com/cryptorrin