A while back, during the days when non-fungible tokens (NFTs) were a major point of speculation and being hailed as a revolution within gaming, I wrote a couple essays on the topic. Specifically tackling the ways in which these NFTs were not going to be able to live up to their hype. I focused on how Ubisoft at the time was trying to launch itself into the market by implementing NFTs into one of its Rainbow Six games, and then that plan turned out to produce absolutely nothing.
As nice as it is to just rest with that, I worry that this was not the end. NFTs and cryptocurrencies within gaming have lost a lot of the steam they had a couple years ago – and even that steam was pretty minor. And yet, these technologies are likely to crop up again because there are a lot of people who are heavily invested – economically, socially, and psychologically – in their success. They will surely get shot down again, but it’s worthwhile to stop now and then to think about them and why they’re bad for gaming.
It would be easy enough to point to all sorts of issues regarding how the games that surround these technologies are bad. Or the ways in which they are accompanied by scammy behavior.
But I think it is more useful to approach this topic through the lens of narrative. For this technology to take hold, it needs to tell a story about its utility. It needs to hook people with that story. And it has stories that, isolated from everything else, can feel compelling. A lot of people have become skeptical of the promises made, but breaking those stories down for the fantasies that they are is a helpful exercise.
I want to break those stories down into two core claims – one about ownership, and the other about money. The first has to do with the idea that something about a game becomes yours. In-game items adopt new meaning because they are your items, or because they bear a history. The second has to do with the way that players might make money off of their efforts. The idea of “play-to-earn” is the most common way to discuss this, but any concept that involves getting someone to pay you for your gaming would fit in here. These narratives are intertwined to some extent. Often these stories are presented in isolation, and yet rely on or imply the other. Which is why I wanted to take the time to really break them down in detail, rather than just tackling the concepts piecemeal.
Ownership
As products become enmeshed with a digital ecosystem, the concept of ownership becomes more and more nebulous. If you purchase a game digitally, you do not actually “own” that game in the sense that we commonly use it. Instead you are merely purchasing a license to use that piece of software. Theoretically your ability to use that software can be taken away at any moment. Generally in practice what this means is that if you violate the terms of service for some online game, then your ability to play that game will be revoked. But there are issues with the fact that if a given service – such as Steam – disappears or decides to stop hosting a game, you lose access to that game forever.
But ignoring those problems, we need to ask what it means to own something, and whether not properly owning something matters. Indeed, many purchases we make are not for the sake of owning something, but for an opportunity. Buying a movie ticket lets you see that movie during a specific time slot, but does not entitle you to view the movie whenever you like.
How we come down on the concept of digital licensing versus ownership and how we want the digital age to look is far outside the scope of this essay. The point is simply to help paint a picture. This is the soil from which something like NFTs can grow.
And helping that growth is the explosion of microtransactions – small purchases a player can make within a game. These purchases could be for clothes a character can wear, a gesture the character can perform, or even for equipment. Microtransactions have become something of a video game staple in part because they offer an additional revenue stream for developers (and publishers). If only so many people are going to purchase a game, that money might not be enough to sustain a developer through their next game’s cycle. Or it may be, but it’s not certain. Microtransactions can bring in additional cash to provide some extra cushion for those things. Or they can also just be flimsy cash grabs from people who just want more money.
One of the inherent problems of these microtransactions is that however much money you sink into a game for costumes or gestures or equipment, that money is fundamentally lost once the game ends. Whether you lose access to the game or you just stop playing, you don’t get a refund for those purchases. In one sense, that can dissuade people from buying into the system. Though that only has so much power, insofar as these games can let a sort of social pressure (or even mechanics of the game itself) to push players to make these purchases. In another sense, it can also keep players hooked into a game – even if you don’t want to keep playing, you’ve sunk so much into the game that you may as well keep going. Otherwise it all feels like a waste.
So NFTs offer a kind of promise. What if all that money you spent wasn’t thrown away? What if you could take your items from one game into another? That sounds rather appealing. You would feel more comfortable making purchases, and you wouldn’t feel stuck with a game just because you bought something for it.
There’s your core narrative, but the problem is that it doesn’t really work. In theory it could, but the problem is the practice.
Item History and Security
What does it really mean to “own” a digital item in the context of a video game?
Say you’re playing a game and you kill an enemy and an item drops. That item is now, at present, attached to your character. Let’s say in theory you could trade it if you wish, but you don’t. You really like this item.
Do you own it?
Obviously in a grand scheme you don’t. You are licensing the game, so you could be kicked off of it, and as such lose access to the item. The developer could also theoretically decide that this item is too powerful or is causing some kind of technical issue, and delete it from your account.
But what about as a practical matter? The likelihood of you losing access to the item is pretty low. You’d almost certainly have to do something that would get you banned, which surely you don’t intend to do. And usually developers don’t just delete items like that, they just tweak how the item works.
Sure, you could get your account hacked and the item could be stolen. But that is a problem you face with your physical property right now, and yet you don’t consider those things as “not owned.”
Your possession of the item is itself enough to serve as a function of ownership. You perceive the item to be “yours,” and treat it as such. No other player has a rightful claim to that item. The distinction crops in when we think about it in terms of the developers being able to take it from you. But then what distinguishes that case from an item in a non-online game? If a game like Baldur’s Gate 3 were to sell you some cool legendary weapons and you were to purchase them, would that be fundamentally different? You could, at any point, boot Baldur’s Gate 3 up again and still have access to those items in the game.
This is not meant to be a thorough definition of ownership itself, but to bring into question what the term really means. What does it really mean to “own” an item, whether it’s something that you earned from a quest in a game or purchased with real money?
Because often what people talk about in this context is one of two things.
The first is transferability. I will tackle this in more detail later, but the basic idea is that an item should not be locked down to a particular game – you should be able to take it with you. You don’t just have the item in the game, you have the item itself.
The second, and probably more important, is a sort of “meaning” or “purpose” to the item. That this is not just an item, but your item. Which really boils down to an item history. Sure, there may be hundreds of thousands of legendary swords in this game, but this one is yours. And we can see that on the item. The symbolism of ownership makes it feel special.
And insofar as we’re talking about ownership as really being tied to this kind of signifier, any kind of tokenization as was bandied about during the NFT craze is useless. All the NFT does in these circumstances is serve as a store of information, information that could easily be maintained in other ways.
What NFTs promised in this context was a complicated way of storing that information that was supposed to be “more secure.” That claim then creates a narrative – sure you can impart an item in a game with meaning outside of this technology, but that item is vulnerable. Someone could hack the game and take it from you. Wouldn’t you prefer something that protects that item?
The appeal is obvious, but the story has holes. Because the protection offered is one where someone hacks into a game’s servers to steal your item specifically. But that doesn’t really happen. When we think of hacking or stolen items, that theft comes from someone getting access to your account. If there’s a hack into the game’s servers, it’s to steal your password, not your item. Once they have access to your account, they can take what they want. And often these kinds of thefts occur because you are tricked into giving someone your information, not because someone breaks into a system. The actual threat isn’t really protected by this or any other technology, because the primary problem is about human behavior.
So there ends up being no real added value to the technology. The promise of ownership and the security of ownership is wrapped in the appeal of it being technological. That if we have a system that is complex and runs on computers that must make it good and useful and secure – and the more complex (like cryptocurrency and NFTs), the better.
Similarly, the promise of looking at an item’s “history” is a sort of smokescreen. That history is usually meaningless – a ledger stretching back however long it needs to – and also does not require any special technology. It would not be trivial, but a system that tracks within a game who has possessed a given item, and maybe even what special accomplishments were achieved while using that item, could be built with existing frameworks. But there’s likely not a lot of reason to do this in the first place.
Like with a lot of contemporary technology solutions, what we often see at best is a complicated solution where a simple one could exist or already existed. At worst it’s a solution to a problem that isn’t really there.
True Ownership and Game Exchange
Okay, so maybe item history isn’t enough. The real promise comes in when you start to imagine that the item can stay with you. That you can buy a sword in fantasy game, and then it becomes a gun in a shooter, and then a car in a racing game, and so on and so on.
There’s an immediate story that can be understood from this. As games shift more and more to offering microtransactions, those small purchases add up in a way that drastically changes how we relate to games. A game purchased for a set price with a distinct gameplay experience is something that you can choose how attached you want to be to it. If you don’t like it, you might have lost out on the purchase, but there’s nothing further that can be squeezed out. Perhaps you can resell it, but that’s about it. If you love it, you can play it over and over. And if you fall somewhere in between, you play it and you’re done, and doesn’t that feel like a worthwhile purchase at the end of the day?
Microtransactions, though, slowly increase the cost of a game for a player. A game might even be free, but through battlepasses or cosmetics or lootboxes or any other sort of small purchase the cost can rise to hundreds of dollars. Even something as basic as purchasing new seasons for a live service game can balloon the price.
It’s not as though you’re getting nothing for all of those purchases. But you are slowly getting locked into that game. Each skin or battlepass is a chain that weighs you down, preventing you from leaving. Because when you leave you lose all of that stuff you’ve put both time and money into.
But what if you could take that stuff with you? Stop playing one game because you’re bored or your friends have moved on or there’s no one to play with or you’ve exhausted the content, and you can just start up another. And all of your cool items travel with you. And then to the next game. And the next one.
If this were the case, you’d probably be more inclined to make purchases. Because you’re not just buying an item for this game, you’re buying it for dozens or maybe even hundreds of games all at once. No more sunk costs. No more worries about wasted money.
This story has a lot to offer players. Especially as publishers push the kind of predatory monetization practices that are meant to tap into our psychology and push us to spend.
But this story runs into three key issues.
The first is a technological problem. Game developers often don’t use a singular system where every object has a universal set of rules that allow them to be picked up from one game and placed in another. Tools like Unity help standardize some things a bit, but something as simple as the relative size of two objects could cause problems for mapping a sword in one game to a different sword in another. In order for this to work, you would either need all developers to have a shared set of rules for designing objects to make them easily transferable, or else create a technology which could easily reconfigure an item to match the specifications for every game it could be transferred into.
The second is an economic problem. There’s not really any incentive for a developer to incorporate these kinds of transferable items into their games. At best, there might be use if all of the games are made by the same developer, since all of that money stays with them. But if you were developing a game and had all sorts of items for players to purchase, would you want those players instead importing items from elsewhere? Each item they can import in is an item they won’t buy from you.
And indeed, what we generally see from the most prominent examples of NFT implementation became walled gardens. Ubisoft was the publisher that leaned hardest into the craze, and its rather limited rollouts were a series of equipment items for a single game. Meanwhile the various games based around NFTs largely kept everything self-contained, because that allowed their internal markets to function.
Even if you overcome the technological issue and can buy an item to transfer from game to game, there’s no incentive for a given developer to support this system. The infrastructure in place would require massive amounts of cooperation between competing developers and publishers, to create a technologically complicated system and set standards that could potentially lead to less overall player spending.[1]
The third is a balancing problem. Or maybe we could call it a value problem. Because again the premise is that these items aren’t contained to the games made by a single developer. We should be thinking of these items as existing across a multitude of games.
And assuming we can get past the question of how we take a sword from one game and program its data to become a gun in another game, we still have to deal with the functionality of those items. Because that sword in game A isn’t just a collection of pixels and a hitbox. It’s a series of rules about how quickly it attacks and how much damage it does with each hit and maybe some special modifiers.
So when you turn it into a gun or a car, or even a sword in a different game with different rules and damage scaling and modifiers, how does that get translated? In one sense, we’re just right back to the technological problem – in order to make this feasible, there needs to be a kind of flattening of game development, where all games operate by a set of rules that can then be equated. The alternative would be to just guess, perhaps even create some kind of default. Sure, your sword will turn into a gun – it will just be a pretty boring gun, one of thousands of boring guns made to accommodate all of these transferable items.
But take the opposite example where we try to make these items equivalent. Your powerful sword in game A becomes a powerful gun in game B. That’s what we’d want, but in that world we now have a host of bad actors waiting in the wings to take advantage of this system. Because I can make a game with a bunch of items that are incredibly cool and powerful specifically so that people will flock to them. My game doesn’t even need to be good – I just need to entice people with the allure of the items themselves.
As a result, games would be flooded with all sorts of items that wreck the balancing. What’s the value of any given game in this ecosystem if everyone can just bring in whatever they wish, especially if using those items becomes the dominant strategy for play?
Of course, you could try to limit how many people have access to this ecosystem, but we’re now back to creating the various walled gardens from before. Why should my studio allow items in from your game, when those items could ruin the experience for my players?
Returning to the Concept of “True Ownership”
And with that I want us to circle back around to that idea of what it means to “own” something.
Because remember that all of these stories revolve around these items actually being yours. And yet what does that really entail? Because the most likely way you’re going to see NFTs or any similar kind of “permanent ownership” implemented in games is as a walled garden. Sure, maybe you can “truly own” an item, but that item will be locked to a specific game. If you’re really fortunate, maybe you can use it in a few games.
But is that what was really promised? Even in the best case scenario, you’re purchasing an item that you can use in one of a small collection of games. There’s not even a guarantee they might all be games you’d want to play. If a developer makes a shooter, an RPG, and a survival game, what do you do if you only like shooters?
The idea of owning items within the context of video game items is only as powerful as your actual ability to make use of those items. All of your digital stuff is likely to be trapped – why does it matter if it’s trapped behind one game or four?
And that’s why I wanted to take this narrative apart so thoroughly. The idea of ownership sounds nice, but the actual nuts and bolts of how that will work in practice is far more complicated.
Indeed, the reason we want to be skeptical of the idea itself is that it’s a marketing tactic. That perfect system is how people making the underlying technology of cryptocurrency and NFTs or whatever technology attempts to do the same thing sell that service. Once the technology gets adopted and meets the realities of development and balancing and economics, those people have stopped caring. They already got what they wanted.
And your new system is going to feel eerily like the old one. Because the underlying problem was never really about technology. It was a problem of human systems – markets and politics and capitalism and money and all of the things surrounding it. Technology doesn’t save us from these problems, it just puts a new coat of paint on them.
Money
It’s impossible to talk about NFTs and this concept of ownership without diving into the topic of money. Because on a fundamental level this is what the narrative is about. You spend money to purchase in-game items. You hope to sell those items when you’re done using them. And maybe you can even make money off of those items.
Not every player has the same goals in mind. But money hangs over this whole narrative and paints much of how we interact with these systems. And the technology that underlies “true ownership” pushes us in this direction. Because when you “truly own” an in-game item, there’s only two things to do with it: use it or sell it. After all, if you’re just sitting with a stack of junk items in your various game inventories, does it really matter to you that you “truly own” them?
And yet that emphasis on money and especially the ability to make money from these items is not just destructive to our engagement with games but also largely untrue. These systems are designed to make money for the people that run the systems, but not players. A few lucky people might make big bucks, but the vast majority of people will get next to nothing.
Trading
Let’s begin with trading, because I think it’s the most obvious use case that is discussed and the one that is less immediately horrible. Trading is a function that has existed in numerous online games and has been a bit of a sticking point over the years. Allowing players to trade items invites a bit of an imbalance, letting certain players acquire high-tier equipment through having the right friends or purchasing things outright. Depending on how valuable those items are from a competitive standpoint, this might pose a problem for less fortunate players. From a design standpoint, letting players trade also reduces playtime – if you can make a new character and get all sorts of cool gear immediately, you won’t bother getting the items yourself. And when items have a value by being tradeable, it encourages practices of duplicating items in order to make them easier to trade (or even sell).
Now whether trading in and of itself is a function that games should allow isn’t the point. The point is how trading as an actual market works and how the concept of “true ownership” fits into that market. Or more appropriately, how it doesn’t.
It’s important to note that since trading has already existed prior to any technology that was able to confer this “true ownership,” there’s not really any value added for that purpose. If you have a cool sword and you want to trade with another player for their cool armor, the thing standing in the way is whether the game allows you to do that. Whether or not some code says that this sword is truly yours doesn’t matter.
The only value “true ownership” can confer with a market is monetary. Indeed, when the discussions about NFTs were going around it was hard to avoid a promised use case without the idea that the things you bought could be resold to someone else.
Of course, again, this already exists, just with extra steps. Games with trading systems often have secondary markets where players can buy or sell items for cash. If there exists sufficient desire for certain in-game objects, there will be players willing to spend money for them, and players willing to sell them. It is only a matter of time until that marketplace is formalized. The only thing that these systems could offer is a kind of security in one’s purchase – since you have to go through back channels to buy something, there’s always the worry that one party might renege on the deal. But that is a problem that is solvable through other means – “true ownership” doesn’t actually provide a specific value.
Back when I first wrote about this topic I explored the concept of trading and making money through these NFTs by way of Ubisoft’s tepid entry into the ecosystem. Because money was a core promise, it was important to ask whether people were actually getting rich off of these things. And the answer seemed to be “not really.”
And the cause was pretty simple – why should anyone care? NFTs offered nothing to players besides an object. If the object itself wasn’t really desirable, no one was going to pay serious money for it. So if the source of desirability didn’t come from the object itself, it would have to come from elsewhere. I posited that one potential source was provenance: it might be cool to own an item that you could prove was owned by someone else who was deemed socially important. Anyone can own a helmet, but you might have a helmet that was once owned by a celebrity. But even that narrative would reveal the core problem. It wasn’t anyone who could make money from this stuff, it was only those with sufficient social capital. Your NFT of a helmet is just as worthless from a monetary standpoint as your other non-NFT items.
The most common source of desirability outside of actual function was rarity. If something is incredibly rare, people will likely seek it out purely for that selectiveness. But rarity is dictated by the game, rather than any system of ownership. The technology behind “true ownership” could never add anything to the process.
As such, making money by reselling items – or even recouping some of the costs – would not be a viable strategy. At best you could only make money is you had something incredibly rare that would thus go for a lot of money. But this can be done now, and if it was something that was genuinely healthy for games we would be urging developers to create systems to allow for these kinds of trades inside of their games.
Play to Earn
Would cryptocurrency in games have made any headway if the concept of “play to earn” wasn’t attached to it? If there wasn’t the allure that simply by playing a game you might be able to earn the money you need to live?
That idea isn’t really unique to cryptocurrency. I think it’s true that just about everyone who grew up playing video games a lot wondered in some way if they could turn that into a career. No need to go to college or work at an office. Just play some games, get money, and then clock off to…play more games, maybe? Whether it’s testing games (either playtesting or searching for bugs), putting a playthrough on YouTube, or streaming on Twitch, the very fact that you might be able to make a comfortable (or even extravagant) living off of something that is fun was incredibly appealing.
So cryptocurrency offered another avenue to accomplish that same goal. Maybe you don’t find the actual work of quality assurance as engaging as you first thought. Maybe your video editing skills aren’t all that great, or you have a poor stage presence. The promises of making money from playing games are limited by virtue of the fact that you aren’t making money simply from playing games. You need to bring something to the process. And so a lot of those dreams die.
But cryptocurrency at least aligned with this idea that you might not need to have all of these additional skills. Earning money from in-game items might be as simple as grinding for materials to make valuable objects. Or maybe you just need to learn the mechanics well enough to efficiently use your resources and make a profit. Or maybe you just need to play long enough and you’ll get lucky with some kind of amazing drop. Whatever the case may be, if you just play the game, you’ll get to walk away with lots of cash. Maybe not immediately, but at some point. Even when the gate is skill – you need to beat other players to get a payout – the promise is simply that if you play more you’ll get better, and thus get your money.
Back during some of the NFT craze I did an essay on the game Axie Infinity, which was at the time one of the more prominent games in this play-to-earn space. The mechanics of the game aren’t important except for the fact that the only way to earn currency that you could turn into real money was by winning matches against other players. Keep that fact in the back of your head.
Anyway, Axie Infinity basically imploded back in early 2022 both because the value of its currency crashed (largely due to crashes in cryptocurrency more broadly as the whole NFT craze wore out its welcome), and because over half a billion dollars worth of cryptocurrency was stolen from the developer. It seems like the game still exists, but is likely a shell of itself.
At its height, players of Axie Infinity could earn some money if they played well enough. Not a lot, but some. Let’s even give the game the benefit of the doubt and say that an extremely skilled player could have made hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.
It might be tempting to look at what a given player could earn as some kind of proof for this narrative. Look, this person became rich off of this, therefore it is a viable way to spend your time! Focusing on successful individuals is easy, but obscures the bigger picture.
Let’s say you make money by playing this game, or any similar game. That money doesn’t simply appear from nowhere. It almost certainly came from someone else putting money into the ecosystem in the first place. Every dollar you get is a dollar from someone else that’s in a similar position.
But moreover, to get money by playing the game you first need to put money in. Axie Infinity required an upfront cost so that you could build a team, perhaps requiring hundreds of dollars just to get something very basic. For those who couldn’t afford to pay that upfront cost, various agencies offered “scholarship” programs where the agency would give you a team for free, but then take a portion of your earnings. Those scholarship programs in turn would keep players chained to the game – if your remaining cut is enough to let you get by, then you aren’t going to have the savings to get out of the system, whatever that escape may look like.
But even if we ignore the scholarship system and assume you can buy your own team, you’re still engaging in a system where the money you put in is not necessarily equivalent to what you get out. Because of course at the top of all of this is a company that has equipment to maintain and employees to pay and executives who want to make obscene amounts of wealth. So a significant chunk of the money in the ecosystem needs to be directly funneled to the top, meaning that there’s less for everyone else. You can get your initial investment back, but it will take more effort just to break even than doing just about anything else.
The only promise for a big payout – if there is one – exists for the best players. And ranking is naturally exclusive. There can only be so many “best players” at any one time. So putting in your initial investment means that you’re likely fighting over scraps with this hope that maybe you’ll be naturally skilled enough to climb the ranks quickly (important note: people get to those top spots by pouring massive amounts of time and energy and even money into the process, so if you’re hoping to get by on your natural talent you’ll likely crash and burn).
All of this is to say that the basic economics of play-to-earn is a bunch of smoke and mirrors. It relies on you focusing simply on the idea that you can make money from a game, without asking where that money comes from. As long as the abstract concept of “play to earn” exists, it is appealing. But once you dig into the details it collapses.
And then there’s the fact that by turning playing a game into a job you cease to engage with the game as a game. It is a task that you must perform in order to earn money, just like any other job. Are you no longer enjoying the matches that you play? Did you encounter a fun little bug that makes the game a little interesting, but doesn’t impact your win rate? Do you have a team that you find more visually appealing or with cool abilities, but which is overall weaker? Too bad. You’re not playing the game to have fun, you’re playing it to get money. The two goals end up being at odds with one another.
One of the core problems with the story of “play to earn” is that it’s not really “play.” It is in the strictest sense that the way you engage with a video game – the process of pushing buttons – is labeled as “play.” But to actually earn you need to approach the game in a way that is devoid of the spontaneity or curiosity or even joy that we associate with games. It is a meticulous process of learning mechanics and poring over stat sheets and tracking changes in game updates and how they impact the game’s meta. It is as much work as any standard desk job. The difference is that rather than going in with the knowledge that you will get paid, you turn on the game with the mere hope that you might get paid.
Because the broader economic problems persist regardless of the technology. In order to get money out, there must be money coming in. In fact, there must be more money coming in than going out. And if you as a player are not putting your money right back into the system, then the only way you can keep getting paid is if more and more new players join up and start putting their money into the system (which they then need to lose, because if they start winning then that’s less money for you). And if the game gets stale, if the player base starts to dwindle, if the company doesn’t have as much money in its accounts as it needs, then one day you could find the whole thing shut down. Even if it doesn’t shut down, the volatility may mean that within days or weeks the value of all of those items you hold plummets. Thousands of dollars reduced to mere cents.
Given the example I have covered and the amount of reporting on crypto game projects failing, it would be easy to say that this really just a problem with the specific technology. Sure, the cryptocurrency underlying NFTs was faulty, but a new technology might appear that can solve it.
It won’t.
Because this problem is not technological. It’s a problem of math. “Play to earn” as a selling point is a way to bring in suckers. There’s not enough money in the ecosystem for so many players to be successful, because it would essentially require infinite money. The only way it could have enough money is if a small number of people just kept throwing billions or even trillions of dollars into the pit.
It doesn’t matter if underlying currency is literal dollars, a cryptocurrency, or anything else. It all runs into the same problems. It’s all a lie.
Concluding Remarks
Money is tied to games because they are products. They are things that are made, and in being made require labor. The ones doing the labor need to eat and live, so they need money. Unless and until there’s a wider system in place that basically removes the need for a given individual to sell their labor, games will require money to make and thus be things that are bought and sold.
Which is to say that the fundamental issue at the heart of all of this is not that games involve money in any way whatsoever. The issue is instead twofold. First, that a variety of technologies will arise that are bandied about as “enhancements” to the gaming experience. Sometimes those technologies will actually be useful, and sometimes the promises will be empty because the person making the promise just wants to sell something. Second, that it is possible for us as consumers to be overly conscious of the relationship between money and products, such that we lose focus on the actual experience of the game. The game ceases to be a piece of art or entertainment, and instead is turned into a monied object – either it symbolizes that we spent money, or becomes something that we can turn into money.
Learning to be skeptical of these promises is important because rhetoric is inherently tied to obfuscation. Words can hide the truth of something by highlighting some things and ignoring others. By selecting specific examples and removing them from a wider context. And even by just outright lying.
The more appealing a promise is, the more skeptical we should be. Cryptocurrency wasn’t going to upend the way we think of money. NFTs weren’t going to completely overturn how in-game items worked. The people making the claims that they would were hoping to sell something. Because if you buy into that story and adopt their technology, then you’re now stuck in the ecosystem. It is as important for you that these revolutions occur as it was for the person who sold the tech to you. You have been converted and must now proselytize.
It’s usually by digging into examples and getting specific that we can break down these kinds of stories. What does “true ownership” of a digital item really look like? What are the specific attributes that we would want? What does a given technology offer for that vision? Is it something only that technology can accomplish? How do you make money from these things? Who is going to give you that money? Why would they give you money? Where does that money come from?
I’ve put my focus on NFTs and cryptocurrency because the idea of ownership and money is the real focus of what I wanted to explore here. But we could do this with any other hot technology by using a different lens. What kind of promises are made about the role of generative AI in video games, and how well would those promises hold up under scrutiny? How well would their promises about anything hold up under scrutiny?
Because this narrow focus is merely a single facet of a much larger problem. Cryptocurrency still exists, but the hype has largely subsided. NFTs no longer hold the sway over the public consciousness that they did a few years ago. But that doesn’t mean the core promises are gone. Either those technologies will rear their ugly heads again and try to sell the same drivel they did before, or another technology will pop up to take their place.
Games are something that we need to spend money on, but with the state of things – economic instability, rising costs, etc. – the prices of those games can feel like they hit harder than they used to. Sometimes that’s purely psychological, sometimes we actually are more strapped for cash now and have to make decisions we didn’t have to before. Whatever the case may be, people feel this sense that they would like to get something back from the process. And so there will always be someone who wants to take advantage of that desire, to sell a scheme that will ease the burden – and maybe even let you get wealthy. All you need to do is just buy into the story.
[1] This point might seem counterintuitive at first. I mentioned earlier that a system of permanent ownership and exchange should make people more willing to purchase items than before, so wouldn’t we get more purchases? But the likely problem is that if you’re playing a dozen different games and transferring items between them, each item you buy is something that you presumably want to make use of. And by making use of it, you should have less use for any of the other purchasable items. You might buy a couple dozen items to carry with you across a dozen games. But conversely you might purchase two or three items in a dozen games apiece, which results in you spending more total.
Abstracting Games 