It’s been several months since I shared my thoughts about the world of NFT-based games and digital collectibles.
Since then, we’ve seen an explosion of interest in the category of games — as well as a huge increase in the amount of misinformation, confusion and downright cynicism.
Image by Sebastiaan Stam.
I don’t have a “dog in the fight” with games built on blockchains, other than being very enthusiastic about the potential it offers to create new types of games and experiences around open economies.
What I hope to share here is primarily for game developers who might be considering it, as well as to provide a “behind the scenes” view into anyone who is curious about the dangers and opportunities within the sector.
Some of the skepticism and cynicism is well-earned. I hope to be even-handed in this post, and cover some of that as well. But let’s start with a core belief that some seem to have:
At its core, a blockchain game is nothing more than a game that has an “open economy.” Before there were digital games, you could buy a board game and resell it afterwards. In fact, for most of videogame history you could buy a game cartridge, box or machine and resell it to anyone you want — just like any other piece of personal property. Games like Magic: The Gathering (MtG) and Pokémon were designed specifically around our real-world open economy where players would end up trading (and yes, speculating on) individual cards.
It was only with the more recent advent of online games based on virtual worlds where we started to see games where the gameplay was constructed around closed economies. For example, most MMORPGs don’t let you trade important items with other players — and most mobile games won’t even let you trade currencies. That’s because the experience (and business models) of those games is entirely based on a finely-tuned progression system.
Blockchains are replicated ledgers that enable open economies around games. They do it by providing transparent, provable and consensus-based mechanisms to allow games to exchange virtual property through decentralized markets and exchanges, and could even provide an ecosystem for interoperable items across constellations of games that choose to cooperate.
These games will be different than most current digital games.
I consider open economies to be ethically and morally neutral. Now, if you want to argue about whether capitalism and the right to trade private property in markets is unethical — then you can fight that philosophical battle if you want to. But it isn’t a battle that’s specific to game making.
Now, some people have indicated that they don’t actually like the open economy of games like Magic: The Gathering either — that they’d prefer not to have the meta constantly evolving and invalidating previous decks. Or that cards like Black Lotus should not be so scarce. It’s perfectly reasonable to debate the merits of any game design, although I’d urge you to think about what it takes to make a game sustainable over the long-run; there are plenty of CCGs other than MtG that nobody plays anymore, and it is usually because they couldn’t sustain their ecosystems longer-term. But the potential to have designs that some people dislike is not what makes an open economy into an evil one.
Although open economies are ethically neutral — you can’t say the same of some of the market participants, which brings us to…
This really sucks, but it’s true that there are just a lot of charlatans out there right now. They’re ripping people off, and spoiling it for the many people doing honest, hard work.
It resembles some of the early crowdfunded games; no doubt, if you’ve been watching game development for a while, you can think of a crowdfunded game that got some money and then left town. The difference with crypto projects is they tend to enable more anonymity along with the lure of liquidity (i.e., backers think they can exit or speculate in addition to supporting a game they’re excited about) and that’s exacerbated the problem.
Ultimately, crowdfunding for games became a lot less popular because so many games were unsuccessfully backed. In some respects, this is what you should expect to happen — game development projects fail at an alarming rate, because shipping a game (let alone building a good one) is so damn hard to do.