https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2021-12-24/nft-in-axie-infinity-ubisoft-quartz-test-gamers-patience
Too bad Marx failed to consider how capitalism turns social relationships into transactions. :marx-goth:
I'm getting really sick of "articles" that just barely start presenting their premise before coming to an abrupt end.
Famously non-manipulative games EVE and WoW which are not regarded as like having a second job
Tangentially, I recall the Diablo auction house being a response to black market transactions. This concept carries over to WoW and Runescape where you can buy your subscription with in game currency and vice versa you can pay $$$ for gold in a market. I think, fundamentally, pay to win sucks and even pay for convenience cheapens the game. But on the other hand I can search runescape gold on ebay and get a bunch of hits. In my opinion, since it's not a necessity like housing or healthcare, if you had a market for skins, pets, cosmetics, etc. to flex on noobs I wouldn't be opposed. And if that's the case, taking the company out as a middle man on a transaction would be cool (e.g. diablo AH where Blizz doesn't get a cut). Runescape has been the testing ground for these sorts of dynamics. They tried heavy handed monitoring of how players transacted and it made the game intensely less fun. The fact of the matter is that the moment you can transact with other players, bots and farmers are going to swarm the place looking to make money. Their techniques are like water and will conform to precisely what they can get away with. The only solution in my eyes would be a system of production in which people's lives aren't so alienated and poverty-stricken that they would have more dignified work than providing digital treats to children with their mom's credit cards (and then bot friendly servers where you're encouraged to learn how to code but that's neither here nor there). But a multiplayer game with an economy will always produce this effect as far as I can see.
What I was thinking is that a blockchain introduces the possibility that an NFT contract doesn't have a company in the middle. Beforehand it just isn't going to happen. Now there's a chance. I can imagine a world where NFTs serve a purpose beyond tax evasion.
That's the thing, though. It can and has happened before - through paypal etc. What makes it "illegal" or "black market" trading is the fact that no company wants to put out a game and then be left out of the profits to be made. You can introduce decentralized anonymized currency transactions all you want, at the end of the day the company controlling the servers isn't just the landlord, they're fucking god in their digital world. And you better believe they'll be taking their rent.
It's funny that a lot of gamers have latched onto crypto when the promise of "web-three-point-oh" is to turn the entire internet into those mobile phone games that do everything they can to squeeze money out of you.
Ugh, mobile games are just greedy cash grabs that no real gamer would ever play!
What's that? An internet 'currency' that requires a real money buy in? Artificial scarcity? Fear-Of-Missing-Out scams as far as the eye can see? Sign me the fuck up!
Political economy, this science of wealth, is therefore simultaneously the science of renunciation, of want, of saving and it actually reaches the point where it spares man the need of either fresh air or physical exercise. This science of marvellous industry is simultaneously the science of asceticism, and its true ideal is the ascetic but extortionate miser and the ascetic but productive slave. Its moral ideal is the worker who takes part of his wages to the savings-bank, and it has even found ready-made a servile art which embodies this pet idea: it has been presented, bathed in sentimentality, on the stage. Thus political economy – despite its worldly and voluptuous appearance – is a true moral science, the most moral of all the sciences. Self-renunciation, the renunciation of life and of all human needs, is its principal thesis. The less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save – the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour – your capital. The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being. Everything which the political economist takes from you in life and in humanity, he replaces for you in money and in wealth; and all the things which you cannot do, your money can do. It can eat and, drink, go to the dance hall and the theatre; it can travel, it can appropriate art, learning, the treasures of the past, political power – all this it can appropriate for you – it can buy all this: it is true endowment. Yet being all this, it wants to do nothing but create itself, buy itself; for everything else is after all its servant, and when I have the master I have the servant and do not need his servant. All passions and all activity must therefore be submerged in avarice.
from https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/needs.htm
There is no economic difference between a freely tradable digital item in a game and an NFT. The only difference is the technical implementation, which nobody really cares about. NFTs bring nothing new to video games, games could have always had primary and secondary markets for items because they own the database and they allow the transaction. That being said, there are plenty of people who use video games for work like people farming gold on wow or selling rare pokemon go pokemon on ebay, mostly to sell to dumb rich westerners who have more money than sense.
This is part of a series of articles and thinking about games, fun and trust/safety.
It’s a topic that comes up regularly about how when games get transactional, the fun goes away because of paranoia about being ripped off.
Will NFT items in Ghost recon give the same bad taste as xp doublers? Maybe, maybe not. Are they stupid things? Yes.
