A Fork In Gaming
Crypto gaming deserves suspicion.
I hear people talking about crypto gaming that haven't really played a game since they were kids, people who certainly aren't hanging out for the latest release or on forums discussing game play. The people in crypto gaming are often developers and finance types. Some are suddenly in gaming because they're interested in what they can build. Still others are here because they're interested in making a lot of money from an established market. It's like Disney making Star Wars films, or Amazon buying The Lord of the Rings. It is a gold rush, and these gold miners have a new tool in web3 to extract value.
Gamers have good reason to be suspicious of these new game builders, these developers and blockchain/ web3 builders. So much of the financial industry was about keeping out as many people as possible and extracting as much value as possible from the public. Finance is an industry that delivered such bad products and practiced such blatant profiteering that a group of disrupters is welcomed.
Gaming, although it has it's problems, it's leeches, is by and large delivering on entertainment, story telling, enjoyment, escapism. The last 10 years have seem gaming do what Hollywood once did, tell amazing stories and give people what they want. There's disruption to be had but it is not in need of a revolution.
There is the potential for the evolution in gaming to be a negative one, ushering in a new age of gaming dominated by finance, by fads, by marketing and hype. Hollywood is all but dead and the new generation of 20+ somethings are open to active entertainment. There is so much money to be made in gaming as people cry out for good stories, engaging digital activities. Not just passive watching, not just binge watching TV series, but something more involved. Gaming has expanded its audience in the past 10 years, getting more people, more different kinds of people, more women, and of course children into the fold. It feels as if gaming is due for a great leap forward, for something that establishes it as the dominant entertainment medium. NFT's and play to earn, or any variation of in game investment and asset ownership could be that evolution.
Metaverse is the current catchword, and it has been the destination for decades. The metaverse is not a new thing, merely an expanding abstraction from the physical world, no beginning - perhaps - and no end. Gaming presents the best possible gateway activity into the current iteration of the metaverse, into a metaverse much more immersive, more detailed, more controlled and controllable. Gaming has always been a metaverse. The games we have now are simply, potentially, a better map of the terrain, metaverses that simulate reality, or any imagined world, to a greater depth. Ownership, and a sense of permanency, of continuation beyond one engagement, like going to work, to school, playing a sport. There is a longevity, this is what blockchain gives to gaming, making the player in a game more physical, permanent, living long enough to feel immortal, to forget about death, to take the game world seriously and thereby invest more in it. I play a game and then it goes away. Now, with a triple ledger, I play a game and I can come back to it and the effort I put in is still there, it remains, I remain. I am alive in the game. I have value and I can store value there, in the game world. I now take this world more seriously. The game world respects me so I respect it.
There is an impending fork in the gaming world. One path leading to a deepening and expansion of all that is good in gaming. And another that bleeds in all that is rotten and destructive in surveillance and corporate capitalism.