Garden of Forking Paths: A game built on conditional tokens
Here we'll focus on how conditional tokens can be used in play: from a maze game to a collective Futarchy AI player in games like Tic Tac Toe, Chess, and Go.
Many of us are familiar with the Choose Your Own Adventure series, or the recent Netflix series Bandersnatch, which allowed viewers to make key decisions in the TV show's outcome. Their underlying mechanism is simple, yet compelling: the audience becomes participatory players in a narrative, essentially adding a game-like component to traditionally consumptive media.
Conditional tokens, which essentially allow users to "invest" in differing outcomes, could be one tool to make narrative games more compelling, and immediately create interoperable, secondary markets on an event's outcome.
"Whosoever would undertake some atrocious enterprise should act as if it were already accomplished, should impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past."
Let's start with an example maze game, which we'll call here Forking Gardens, inspired by Jorge Luis Borges's short story "The Garden of Forking Paths." Envision a story that involves you foreseeing an outcome; in which you know you must achieve certain objectives before reaching an end state. You begin from a single starting point, and the game offers different paths. Those paths could lead to a dead end, guide you to a mysterious opponent, deposit you back at the beginning, or other obstacles. Only one route will be the easiest and fastest route to the "endpoint."
In this game built on conditional tokens, the players would all share an initial starting point, and must decide, commit, and invest at the beginning which route to take. Technically, this means they take a position and purchase, using any collateral token, the conditional tokens that represent their chosen route. Then, the adventure starts, and the players are guided through the maze according to their decision. At the end of the sequence, only one of the potential routes will lead you to the endpoint in time. If you've reached this moment in time successfully, the conditional outcome token you invested in will now act as the access right to progress onto the next level: another maze and another point in time.
One could imagine different iterations on this game; wherein players must research and investigate a level's narrative, to gain expert information beforehand on the path they will choose. Perhaps players could invest in multiple outcomes or "endpoints," and diversify their narrative commitments.
Given the market mechanism and open framework underlying the game, it would be quite easy to then imagine secondary or interoperable e-gaming markets, wherein spectators invest in their favorite player or specified paths through the maze, opening participation to an even greater general audience.