About the Steem Monsters thing, you are actually somewhat right about it running on its own website. It does interact with the blockchain in a similar way to steem-state does, posting transactions to indicate actions (steem-state was partially inspired by SM and its methods) here's a Steem Monsters transactions in steemd:
which is sm_team_reveal custom_json transaction type, which has some data of:
{
"trx_id":"b1d7375df592162a61d3f1b726173884e5b49a37",
"summoner":"C1-5-2YO11FWTZK",
"monsters":["C1-8-EDFE79Q400","C1-68-0LU0PNUKW0","G1-1-7TXNIMTE6O","G1-4-GKOAFA4T5C","G1-9-NRMMI3IL3K"],
"secret":"d7igSyIFip",
"app":"steemmonsters/0.4.4.1"
}
This actually includes NFTs and everything! Steem Monsters is 99% there to full decentralization, but misses one key step which brings it all down and makes it centralized... Only the Steem Monsters company can run a node! That's right, if they simply open-sourced and released their Steem Monsters node application, it would be a fully decentralized game... That's my only big gripe with SM...