Bots are often seen as antagonistic characters – they are hackers and deceivers lurking within systems built by humans. But is that the whole story?
In real life, bots are the unsung heroes of games, working behind the scenes to make systems more dynamic and engaging. They may not be heroes in the traditional sense, but their contributions are vital and should not be overlooked. And when combined with the decentralized deployment and data availability of blockchain, they become even more intriguing.
At their core, bots are simply sets of automated processes. In theory, they can handle tasks that humans can do, but their scale and efficiency are unparalleled. Most bots are not autonomous intelligent beings – they are scripts that react to specific input data and adjust based on changes in status or data flow. They are tools, and whether they are good or bad depends on the people using them.
Take Googlebot, for example. This ubiquitous web crawler does not launch any vulnerability attacks on websites. It functions like an anonymous worker, indexing the internet and maintaining the relevance of our search results. Similarly, email spam filters or arbitrage algorithms that keep financial markets running efficiently are hardly ever chastised. While humans can sift through their inboxes to delete spam or mark websites in a long list, it is not something people want to do in their daily lives.
In games, many people are not fully aware of the existence of bots. They can provide services within the game, such as NPCs in single-player games. Whether they are quest givers, enemies, or allies, they greatly enrich the game world and provide content for players to interact with. Imagine games like Zelda or Dark Souls without bots – these virtual worlds would feel empty.
Bots can also masquerade as humans, filling empty slots in matchmaking to ensure quick game starts. More importantly, they can serve as cannon fodder for less skilled players. In Fortnite, for example, the majority of players in any match are bots, balancing the difficulty of the game and ensuring that human players experience the thrill of victory over opponents, whether human or bot. Other games like Clash Royale or Marvel Snap employ similar tactics.
However, when bots transition from facilitators to direct competitors of human players, the “ban hammer” is often brought down. The issue lies not with bots themselves, but with their operating environment.
Firstly, they exploit unique advantages different from humans, namely speed and endurance. They can react to game state changes in milliseconds and remain focused without the need for sleep or breaks.
Secondly, they compete with humans for some form of scarce reward. Nobody complains about slow-reacting training bots in Fortnite, or why the highly efficient Googlebot doesn’t care about things humans are interested in. They are simply performing mundane tasks for our benefit. But when these two functions coexist, bots steal away our “fun”.
Blockchain Bots
Let’s take a look at MEV bots (Maximal Extractable Value bots) in the blockchain environment. These bots operate in highly competitive decentralized financial systems, leveraging their ability to read memory pools and execute transactions faster than humans to profit.
However, the issue is that MEV bots do not violate any rules. Their existence is precisely because of the rules – the scarcity of block space, the visibility of memory pool transactions, and the prioritization of transactions through gas fees. They are simply playing the game as designed. When bots suddenly seize opportunities that humans desire, people may feel cheated, much like factory workers who feel replaced by machines. But bots are simply more efficient at utilizing the existing system. They operate within the framework created by humans.
If we carefully examine the core mechanics of a game, we can see the tension between humans and bots. Games are built around goal, challenge, and reward loops (referred to as the OCR loop in game design terminology). Players need to complete tasks, overcome challenges, and earn rewards. Usually, players are more focused on the rewards themselves – experience points, coins, loot – rather than the challenges. But the real satisfaction comes from overcoming challenges, even if players don’t always realize it at the time.
Depending on the nature of the challenges and the composition of player abilities, bots may easily bypass challenges and go straight for the rewards. This conflicts with the interests of human players who are striving to complete game challenges. For example, in MMOs, there are bots that collect in-game currency by performing repetitive tasks, which can be sold to other players. While this may not directly harm other players, it disrupts the game economy and bypasses the game loop, causing headaches for game developers.
Bots as Content
However, the real missed opportunity is that bots – especially in blockchain games – can be the content themselves.
By carefully considering the design of the game, we can transform bots from exploiters to targets – players can compete with bots for resources, strategize against them, or even collaborate with them in new creative ways. The issue is not whether bots are efficient, but that the system they exist in has not yet adapted to view them as part of the fun.
Let’s take an MMO game as an example. In this game, players collect resources at certain locations and convert them into items to attack other entities (players). This is a very common system, seen in different forms (fantasy, pirates, spaceships, etc.) with varying levels of complexity. My point is that if the system has constraints and rules that limit bots, they can become part of the game content. At the end of the game, they are subject to the same rules as human players, so the challenge we face is to create rules that leave space for vulnerable and interesting automation. These are the most basic principles I believe, and there may be more rules, but these are the more obvious ones.
– Vulnerability and Ownership: A wallet (or entity) can lose what it owns if its health reaches zero. This means that any bot is a potential target that can be robbed of its loot. If they carry rewards, they can become valuable challenges.
– Geographical Limitations: Wallets (or entities) are bound to specific locations and can only interact with elements adjacent to them. This creates a significant constraint where bots have to move around to interact with different game elements.
– Inventory Limitations: Wallets (or entities) have limitations on the assets they can carry. This further limits the influence of bots, especially when combined with geographical limitations, forcing them to make choices.
– Energy Consumption: Wallets (or entities) must consume energy to perform actions. This introduces another necessary choice, and most importantly, it involves a shift in priorities. As energy depletes, priority shifts higher than the bot’s initial goals, forcing it to change behavior and adapt.
This is not a recipe for a perfect game that solves all bot issues and creates entirely new User-Generated Content (UGC). These are just some ideas about rules that can constrain the overwhelming advantages of bots and make them another way to play the game. We should not design rules that weaken or eliminate bots; instead, we should focus on creating systems that encourage interaction between human players and bots – whether through combat, trade, or cooperation.
When it comes down to it, bots are created by us humans. They can be faceless competitors, exploiting vulnerabilities and frustrating human players, or they can be integrated into the game system, providing content and creating new opportunities for interaction. Especially in blockchain games, this shift in perspective could turn bots from annoying characters into powerful tools for innovation, uncovering even more enjoyment.
