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

Abstract

Decentraland is a blockchain-based social virtual world where users can publish and sell wearables to customize avatars. In it, the thirdparty Decentral Games (DG) allows players of its flagship game ICE Poker to earn cryptocurrency only if they possess certain wearables. Herein, we present a comprehensive study on how DG and its game influence the dynamics of wearables and inworld visits in Decentraland. To this end, we analyzed 5.9 million wearable transfers made on the Polygon blockchain (and related sales) over a twoyear period, and 677 million log events of in-world user positions in an overlapping 10-month period. We found that these activities are disproportionately related to DG, with its ICE Poker casinos (less than 0.1% of the world map) representing a remarkable average share of daily unique visitors (33%) and time spent in the virtual world (20%). Despite several alternative initiatives within Decentraland, ICE Poker appears to drive user activity on the platform. Our work thus contributes to the understanding of how play-to-earn games influence user behavior in social virtual worlds, and it is among the first to study the emerging phenomenon of virtual blockchain-based gambling.

Keywords

• Social virtual worlds
• play-to-earn
• online gambling

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