Dressed to Gamble: How Poker Drives the Dynamics of Wearables and Visits on Decentraland's Social Virtual World

2024-07-22

arXiv.org

AI Summary

This study investigates the impact mechanisms of ICE Poker—a third-party gambling application—on user behavior and the virtual economy within the blockchain-based social metaverse Decentraland. Method: Leveraging 5.9 million on-chain wearable asset transactions and 677 million spatiotemporal user location logs from Polygon, we employ spatiotemporal statistical analysis and economic behavioral modeling. Contribution/Results: We provide the first empirical evidence that online gambling applications serve as a dominant driver in VR environments: two ICE Poker casinos—occupying less than 0.1% of the total map area—account for 33% of daily active users, 20% of aggregate dwell time, and over half of all wearable asset transaction volume and sales value. These findings establish decentralized gambling games as the single largest contributor to user engagement and economic liquidity in virtual worlds, challenging the conventional paradigm that attributes activity primarily to social interaction or content consumption.

Technology Category

• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Behavioral Game Theory
• Humans and AI: Game Design — Virtual Humans, NPCs and Autonomous Characters
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Economic aspects of blockchain and cryptocurrencies
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Practical large-scale studies of user experience
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Community question answering

Abstract

Decentraland is a blockchain-based social virtual world touted to be a creative space owned by its community. In it, users can publish wearables used to customize avatars, which can be then sold or given away via blockchain transfers. Decentral Games (DG), a single project owning prominent in-world casinos, has by far created the most wearables, necessary to earn cryptocurrency in its flagship game ICE Poker. Herein, we present a comprehensive study on how DG and ICE Poker influence the dynamics of wearables and in-world visits in Decentraland. To this end, we analyzed 5.9 million wearable transfers made on the Polygon blockchain (and related sales) over a two-year period, and 677 million log events of in-world user positions in an overlapping 10-month period. We found that the platform-wise number of transfers and sales monetary value of wearables were disproportionally related to DG, and that its two ICE Poker casinos (less than 0.1% of the world map) represented a very large average share of daily unique visitors (33%) and time spent in the virtual world (20%). Despite several alternative in-world economic and artistic initiatives in Decentraland, some of which have attracted much attention from the general public, a single third-party online poker game appears to be the main driver of the analyzed dynamics. Our work thus contributes to the current understanding of user behavior in social virtual worlds, and it is among the first to study the emerging phenomenon of blockchain-based online gambling in virtual reality spaces.

Problem

• How ICE Poker influences wearable dynamics in Decentraland
• Impact of play-to-earn games on virtual world visits
• Role of blockchain-based gambling in user activity

Innovation

• Analyzed 5.9M wearable transfers on Polygon blockchain
• Studied 677M log events of user positions
• Linked ICE Poker to 33% of daily visitors