I’m writing this as someone who builds first and theorizes later, because theory without a compiler nearby is just a way to feel smart without shipping. I learn by moving. I learn by wiring things together until they creak, then listening closely to where they creak. Right now I happen to be deep in Roblox, but what I’m really doing is game development in the oldest sense: designing rules, incentives, economies, persistence, identity, and trust under constraints. Roblox is a medium, not a destiny. The same instincts apply whether the surface is Lua, JavaScript, Rust, or something that hasn’t been named yet.
Let me start from first principles, because everything interesting lives there.
A game is not graphics. A game is not even interaction. A game is a bounded system of meaning: a place where actions matter because they are remembered, rewarded, or punished. Memory is the core. Persistence is the lever. Scarcity is the tension. When you strip the genre skin off, what you are left with is state: who did what, when, and what it implies next. That’s it. Everything else is presentation.
Traditional games keep this memory on a server you don’t control, operated by a company whose incentives eventually diverge from yours. That’s fine for most things. But when players invest real time, reputation, creativity, or social capital, cracks appear. Cheating, rollbacks, bans, wipes, exploits, favoritism. Not because developers are evil, but because centralized memory is fragile in human ways.
This is where blockchains enter the picture—not as “crypto,” not as speculation, not as vibes, but as shared memory with teeth.
A blockchain, defined plainly, is a ledger that many parties agree on without trusting a single operator. “Ledger” just means a history of events. “Agree” means consensus: a process by which participants decide what counts as true. The cleverness is not mystical. It is social engineering expressed in math. Proof of Work (PoW) means “agreement costs electricity.” Proof of Stake (PoS) means “agreement costs capital.” Neither is magic. Both are ways to make lying expensive.
Solana, Ethereum, and others are not ideologies; they are tradeoffs. Solana emphasizes speed and low cost. Ethereum emphasizes stability and social legitimacy. Layer Two (L2) systems—secondary networks that settle back to a main chain—try to split the difference, often by increasing complexity. None are “the best.” Each chooses where pain shows up.
What matters for builders like me is not which chain wins Twitter arguments, but which one lets you express intent cheaply enough that you can experiment without permission.
Cheap here means more than money. It means cognitive cost. Setup cost. Time to first meaningful mistake.
I don’t want to ask for grants. I don’t want to write pitch decks. I want to open a repo, run something locally, and see state change in a way that cannot be quietly rewritten later. If I decide tomorrow that a player’s artifact, world seed, or authored structure should outlive my interest in the project, I want that to be possible. Not guaranteed. Possible.
This is why high-throughput, low-fee chains pair well with games, even if the game itself never touches the chain directly. The chain is not the game loop. It is not physics. It is not animation. It is not latency-sensitive. Treating it that way is a category error. The chain is the court of record.
In Roblox terms: your experience runs fast, feels good, and cheats will happen. That’s life. But certain moments—minting a rare item, winning a seasonal tournament, publishing a player-created world, establishing authorship—are ceremonies. Ceremonies want witnesses. A blockchain is a witness that doesn’t forget and doesn’t play favorites.
This is the concrete application: separating play from proof.
Play stays where it belongs: real-time engines, cheap servers, elastic infrastructure. Proof moves slower. Proof is boring. Proof is where you put things you want to survive arguments, migrations, or the eventual shutdown of a platform. When you design with this separation, the fog lifts.
The killer app is not “NFT swords” or “on-chain movement.” The killer app is portable meaning.
A player spends 200 hours building something. Not grinding—building. Designing a dungeon. Composing a ruleset. Curating a social space. That work deserves the option to exist outside the gravity well of a single platform. A chain gives you a neutral place to anchor authorship and lineage, even if the actual experience remains elsewhere.
Another killer app is credibly boring leaderboards. Most leaderboards are theater. When stakes rise, trust collapses. A ledger that everyone can audit changes the tone. Suddenly the argument is not “do you believe us,” but “did this event occur.” Subtle difference. Huge cultural shift.
Another is deferred ownership. Players don’t need wallets to play. They play first. Later—if they care—they claim. This reverses the usual crypto mistake of front-loading complexity before value.
Now, taste. This is the part most tutorials skip, because taste can’t be copied.
You need to develop a feel for when permanence matters and when it absolutely does not. Permanence is expensive socially, not just technically. Writing something into a shared ledger is like carving into stone. Do it too often and you numb people. Do it too rarely and you lose the point.
You need to feel the difference between scarcity and friction. Scarcity creates meaning. Friction just annoys. Many systems confuse the two.
You need to distinguish identity from account. An account is a login. An identity is a story that persists across contexts. Blockchains are good at identities, bad at logins. Design accordingly.
You need to understand the opposite of decentralization, which is not centralization, but arbitrariness. A system can be centralized and fair, or decentralized and arbitrary. Don’t worship topology. Worship predictability.
You also need restraint. Just because something can be written to a chain does not mean it should be. The chain is the slow drumbeat underneath the music, not the melody.
As for tools: you don’t need money. You need patience and a machine that doesn’t blink. Free test networks exist. Local validators exist. Open-source frameworks exist. Documentation will always lag reality; this is where learning on the fly is not a weakness but an advantage. With modern code assistants, the learning curve is no longer a cliff—it’s a slope you traverse while building something real.
If speculation vanished tomorrow, this way of building would still make sense. That’s my north star. Anything that only works if prices go up is not infrastructure; it’s a mood.
The purpose, for me, is simple: to give builders and players more leverage over the meaning they create, without demanding belief, loyalty, or hype. Just options. Just exits. Just memory that outlives platforms.
I don’t claim certainty. I claim orientation.
Build games as systems of meaning. Use blockchains as witnesses, not engines. Choose cheap experimentation over perfect theory. Develop taste for permanence.
Everything else is implementation detail.
— Brian Edwards brian.mabry.edwards@gmail.com 512-584-6841 Waco, Texas, USA December 26, 2025