Crypto Games Script

Nov. 17, 2021

Crypto Games: Report from Hell

NOTHING IN THIS VIDEO IS FINANCIAL ADVICE.

ANYTHING LITIGABLE I SAY IS PARODY :)

THAT SAID: DON'T WASTE YOUR MONEY ON CRYPTO.

What is any of this?

The boring part

At this point you probably know at least a little bit about NFTs. Maybe that they're bad for the environment, maybe that they're aesthetically repellent, or maybe that they're a scam. The emerging genre of games I'll be talking about in this video sets itself apart by using cryptocurrencies and NFTs. Things will get funny, because a lot of this stuff is very stupid, but first we need some definitions.

NFT stands for 'non-fungible token.' I think its fair to call a token a container of value, like money or a product at a store. However, money and commodities are fungible, which means that any dollar is the same as any other dollar. If you exchanged one $20 bill for another $20 bill, you probably wouldn't feel ripped off, and that's because money is fungible.

If something is non-fungible it's unique and can't be exchanged for a similar thing. Paintings, for example, are valuable but not fungible. This is why forgeries are a big deal. We tend to value rare and historically important objects quite highly, and that's part of the reason famous art sells for so much at auction. The other is that rich people launder money with art.

It's very difficult to make something both digital and non-fungible; publishers and pirates have been at war basically as long as the internet has been around, because files are easy to copy and share. So the technology that runs these things isn't trivial. Bitcoin appeared in 2009, and it serves as the basis for all future crypto projects. It uses something called a decentralized blockchain, and we can discuss both those terms one at a time.

A blockchain acts as a ledger, a list of financial transactions in a definite order. In computing terms, it's a linked list, where each block of transactions contains information about the block before and after. This prevents double spending of the same money. Since anyone can use the blockchain, there needs to be some way to verify that the transactions are legitimate. If you centralize the authority, say in the hands of a bank, you've just invented extremely inefficient money. One of the goals of crypto is to eliminate trust from financial transactions, so a central authority goes against the ideology of cryptocurrencies.

Decentralizing authority is a novel idea. Each block needs to be verified, and the most popular cryptocurrencies use something callzed proof of work to do this. Adding a new block to the chain is called mining it, and miners prove their work by solving incredibly intensive numerical problems. They aren't meaningful problems, because the point is just to prove that a lot of computing power is being used. Miners compete to arrange transactions into blocks and add them permanently to the chain. If someone can get control of 51% of the computing power, they can do whatever they want to the cryptocurrency. In the case of the big blockchains this would be very difficult, but it has happened to smaller coins many times [1].

There's another method to audit blockchains, called proof of stake, but it gives power to whoever has the most tokens, and it is inherently less secure than proof of work. Proof of stake can and will lead to the centralization of power as the token accumulates in the hands of a few people, just like normal money.

{== on screen: I know I'm simplifying ==}

Compared to the traditional financial system, it takes a huge amount of time and power to move cryptocurrencies around [2]. And of course computing power isn't just some abstract idea, it translates to real electrical energy, which is why people rightly point out that these fun bucks consume countries worth of power and are aiding our quest to boil everyone on earth to death [3]. Even if crypto mining ran on renewables, that would still be energy wasted on a technology that, at best replicates the function of money. The supposed benefits of crypto are just outlandish speculation, like the claim that cryptocurrencies will displace fiat money. If governments don't want that to happen, it won't happen, and if they do want it, it probably isn't disrupting anything.

{== on screen: Bitcoin, DOGE, SHIB, or whatever scam is popular this week will never be money. They generate their value from hype and when Bitcoin supply stops increasing it will just slowly work its way down to $0. Same as the WSB short squeezes. ==}

When people say an NFT is a piece of digital property, they mean that it is secured in a single, specific place on the blockchain. A block can contain more-or-less whatever you want, and NFTs are generally links to pieces of content like an image or video. They also have attributes, which are just numbers with labels like "speed" or "colour" attached to them. So an NFT is a receipt, a record that points to a digital file.

The NFT itself keeps track of who owns the receipt, but NFT enthusiasts are starting to face the serious problem that no normal person respects the authority of the blockchain. Because if I'm not invested in Ethereum there's no difference between an NFT I took a screenshot of and a real one. The crypto community hates centralized authority, but there's no way to enforce token ownership if your army is a bunch of nerds and some websites. That's without getting into the fact that ownership of digital files makes no sense, but I'll leave that for another day.

Is NFT art good?

Let's laugh at NFT art.

NFTs gained popularity from a few high-value sales that were widely reported on. Beeple, a hack whose art sucks, sold an NFT at the formerly respected auction house Christie's for $69mil [4]. The bread and butter of NFTs is their supposed value as art.

{~~ So how about the art? ~> Because of a few big sales ~~} NFTs have been sold as a great way for artists to make money from their work. In reality, very few artists are making any money from their NFTs. The buyer of the Beeple piece I mentioned happened to be one of Beeple's business partners [5] [6], so its unclear if any of the hype around NFTs is even organic. Either way, the adoption and sale of NFTs is driven by hype--creating and exploiting a sense of community is a big part of how they're sold--so an artist who is not already popular stands to gain nothing from an NFT drop. I don't want to dig too deep into the art side of things, but one massive issue with NFTs is that they are the easiest things in history to forge. Because they're just files.

{== on screen: Every ETH transaction uses over 41000x more energy than a Visa transaction [7] ==}

As a quick demonstration, here's how to steal someone's art and mint it as an NFT. I think my Gaia Online avatar is as good or better than anything Beeple has ever come up with. Looking good. I can just save this and then go onto OpenSea, which is basically a big auction house for digital collectibles, and mint it right from there. OpenSea has proven in the past that they don't care if you steal someone's art, so the artists that made all my character art have no recourse if I start making money from this [8] [9].

{== I know they can sue me we're talking about artists that can't afford that ==}

NFTs that do make money represent totally commoditized art that is subject to the demands of a market. Meaningful, challenging art is more often than not unpopular, and most successful NFT drops are permutations on a single, bad idea. The Cryptopunks are 10,000 generated characters with different attributes that supposedly make them more or less valuable. They're essentially profile pictures that offer 10,000 variations on a theme. And they're huge. They've been covered in dozens of news outlets, and they've had more than one and a half billion in sales as I'm writing this [10].

Cryptopunks are randomly generated non-art with no inner meaning. They're little more than a tech demo. And since they're so easy to make, there are as many copycats as there are Cryptopunks. For example:

Grumpy Grandpas, Big Bugs, Baby Ghosts, Dino Punks, Seoul Stars, Cheeky Corgis, Broken Lollies, Hipster Hamsters, Lazy Lions, Cuddly Cats, Bored Apes, Fat Apes, Desperate Ape Wives, Mutant Apes, CrypToadz, Cosmic Ducks, Doodles, Cool Cats, Adjective Nouns, Rabbitars, These ones are just called DOGGIES, CyberKongs, Shiboshis, Magic Mushrooms, and so on, and so on, and so on. Often the creators of these things promise communities and future developments; the promise of a future game where you can play as your Maladroit Monkey or whatever is a popular one. So far I haven't seen any of these games materialize.

Crypto Games

This game does not exist

Now that I've thoroughly poisoned the well, and gotten my gripes with NFTs off my chest, we can talk about crypto games. They've existed in some form for years now; gambling sites have been around as long as Bitcoin has. Bitcoin was a new financial instrument, and as far as the law was concerned it was on the same footing as V-Bucks.

But more substantial video games that aren't just about gambling have only picked up steam recently. A lot of people have seen the earning potential of crypto as an opportunity to combine NFTs with games.

Remember, NFTs are unique digital items. The idea is that digital land, weapons, or whatever are owned by players; they exist in a wallet that the developer can't tamper with. I think the first, most obvious issue with this idea is that systems like this take a lot of work to set up and function basically the same as, say, the inventory system in TF2. My 3 Backburners, for example, could be three different NFTs with unique attributes attached to them. But that's just a more difficult way to solve the problem that Valve already solved with its inventory system in a game that came out 14 years ago.

The argument for NFTs is, like I said, that I would own those Backburners in some more substantial way than I do now. That even if TF2 ceased to exist they would still be mine. But, if TF2 gets shut down what do I really own? It's a receipt for something that no longer exists; the context that makes the item meaningful is still in the hands of the developer. Even if the game isn't shut down, the developer can nerf items, or remove them from the game, or put a slur on the texture, whatever they want.

People who promote crypto games either know this or are getting scammed. The real value that comes from NFT items is in the markets that spring up around them. Coincidentally, most crypto game developers helpfully provide their own item exchanges with their own fees. A game we'll look at in a minute takes 4-and-a-quarter percent of every sale.

The guy who made Paratopic [11] wrote a great essay about NFT games from a developer's perspective, and they don't look great from that angle either. Although the NFT owner has a kind of symbolic power, the meaningful stuff is still in the hands of the developer who, according to the essay, would have to make the game worse for NFTs to have any instrumental role in the game. The truth is that they're usually just glorified Counter-Strike skins.

But if the games are good maybe it's worth scamming a bunch of people and burning down rainforests.

Axie Infinity

Axie Infinity is the most popular crypto game {++ at time of writing ++}, but I can't play it, because you need to own at least three Axies before you can play. From what I've seen, Axie Infinity is {== clip: Axie infinity how to earn money fast ==} with some card game mechanics mixed in. As of writing this, the cheapest buy-in would be around $500 but from what I hear you won't be winning any battles without paying extra.

Axie looks very much like a mobile game, and it asks the bold question: what if Pokemon designs were less inspired? All Axies are barely animated blobs with some randomly selected parts placed on them. NFTs incentivize this kind of design, because if you need tens of thousands of unique creatures, they literally cannot be interesting. If some of the characters were too interesting, the game would risk alienating people who couldn't get their hands on the super-rare Axies. Its design is strategically generic; the cheap Axies are similar enough to the expensive ones that people don't get disheartened, but there's still demand for the expensive ones.

There are some interesting ideas on offer, though. Breeding is the main way people make money through Axie Infinity, and the game has a pretty complex system of genes that effect what body parts, stats, and moves each new creature gets. It could be a fun little game about doing eugenics with monsters, but it's plugged into this parasitic market where every step of the process costs a ridiculous amount of money. The stakes are so high that there's no room to actually have fun. When the Axie market fails in a few months or years, there's a pretty good chance the developers will just pull the plug before anyone gets to play with the mechanics {== ponzi scheme clip ==}.

The developers are also promising to add digital land, resource gathering, and crafting to the game. Those have supposedly been in the works since at least September 2019 [12]. I'm not going to accuse the developers of lying, but I have to wonder why it's taking them so long to release what amounts to a FarmVille clone. Even if you literally can't do anything with them, land and items are available to buy on the game's marketplace. The cheapest plot I found was over $15,000. That would net a $637.50 commission, by the way.

Despite their love of the free market, crypto evangelists seem to have a blind spot around how crypto game markets incentivize boring character designs, pay-to-win mechanics, and perpetually unfulfilled promises. The most asinine opinion on crypto games I've seen was published in Bloomberg, wherein the author waxes poetic on the truly staggeringly bad idea: what if Mario was an NFT?

{== Mario Kart DD footage over this, with the article luma-keyed over ==}

>Imagine being able to earn money by playing Mario Kart ... You wouldn't have to be all that good at it. You wouldn't have to play it 24/7. Because, in this mind experiment, you get to be Mario for as long as you like {== you can already do this in M.K. ==}. You get to be him because you own him.

>Because your Mario is an NFT, he's impossible to duplicate. You and you alone own him. And because you own Mario, your go-kart is always better and faster than the ones piloted by other familiar faces in the Mushroom Kingdom like Luigi, Toad and Princess Peach. So off you go, earning the kingdom's digital money - Mariocoins, let's call them.

>Given market economics, you might have to pay more for NFT Mario than for, say, NFT Peach. But then you'd also earn more, because here in the Mushroom Kingdom, Mario is the fastest player. When you step out of the game and back into your day job, you still own Mario. When you start playing again, Mario is there, waiting for you. Waiting to earn you Mariocoins.

>You can sell Mario to another player if you like. If you've played Mario right, he might be worth more now than when you bought him. Maybe you've demonstrated how lucrative Mario can be. Maybe more people want to play Mario Kart. Maybe Mariocoin has soared in value because everybody is talking about it on social media.

[13]

Hey Charlie Wells and Name I Can't Pronounce, {== Misyrlena Egkolfopoulou ==} your game idea sucks and you don't understand crypto. If only one person can own each character, only ten people will play your game. If the characters are available in limited runs of, say, ten thousand, everyone who didn't get Mario will quit after an hour because Mario wins every race. Crypto games benefit from making the actual relation between the market and the game as obscure and difficult to understand as possible. That's why the breeding in Axie Infinity is so complex, and why all of the monsters look the same.

Real NFT Mario Kart, which I actually think is a possibility, would have karts randomly generated from a set of possible parts. After so many races, or after speculating on a market, players could throw their karts plus some Mariocoins into a machine to generate a new, possibly better, kart. The original karts would be preserved but would lose some value, the same way Axies who have been bred are worth less than virgin ones.

Anyway, of all the games I'll be looking at, Axie Infinity is the closest to being a real game. The developers supply a lot of fluff about viewing players as partners and the game being the Pokemon they wish they had as kids, but Axie Infinity is ultimately about breeding and selling Axies with a high perceived value. The real game is extracting as much money as possible from whoever decides to buy in next and playing hot potato until the whole thing collapses. {== I'm not a gamer clip ==}

ChainCade

ChainCade promises to be a "one-of-a-kind blockchain arcade ecosystem" which, from videos they've posted, seems to translate to a room made in Unity where you can play some knockoff arcade games with crypto integration somewhere along the line. Their project roadmap includes a virtual hangout, an NFT marketplace, and, apparently, lore. I think their idea is to have a place like Steam for arcade-style games where people can earn crypto rewards for playing but it's all very vague.

There are two games available on ChainCade right now, and neither of them involve crypto at all.

Moonwar is a space shooter where you can only move left and right. The controls are responsive, and I like the way the wave power-up synergizes with the other ones. The game requires very little skill to play, but you need to get lucky to win. If you get power-ups it's too easy, and if you don't get them it's impossible. Enemy health bars don't really indicate anything, and several enemies with identical bars have different amounts of health. If they had taken a cue from Galaxian and used movement patterns to make enemies difficult instead of health, I think the game would have been better. There are mountains of space shooters out there, and Moonwar definitely isn't one of the better ones. You can play all already play all the classic space shooters in a browser.

Chainman is a bad Pac-Man clone. It looks like the assets come from five different places, the settings menu is coming soon, and you have to press the movement key at precisely the right moment to make a turn. It feels unresponsive. In Pac-Man, when you eat a ghost it becomes aggressive when it respawns, but Chainman doesn't bother recreating that.

Since we're talking Pac-Man, there's a really awesome demake of Pac-Man Championship Addition in this Namco Museum Archives pack. It runs on a real NES! Anyway.

ChainCade is only getting attention because it has a token associated with it, and that seems to be a theme with crypto games. The CHAINCADE coin doesn't tie into the games at all--though the developers are promising "play to earn" features in the future. It's obvious just from looking that the developers don't care about games. The point of getting in on these projects is that if they get popular for a day or two, the price rises by ten thousand percent and you can cash out.

Splinterlands

Splinterlands is more like your usual predatory mobile game. It's an auto-chess game with cards and three distinct currencies. You put down your cards and watch them interact with your opponent's. Card packs are a popular way of parting impressionable people from their money, but Splinterlands ups the ante by making the cards NFTs and giving people a market.

You can buy and sell cards of course, but there's also a card rental market that, according to their website, rakes in around $70,000 a day. Like Axie, they also sold a bunch of fake land with the promise of resource gathering and item crafting.

According to their FAQ, every single action in Splinterlands is on the blockchain. They don't really specify what an action is, but I think the ideas is that you could make your own interface to battle with, or even play the game over email. Another advantage, according to them, is that everything in the game is provably fair.

Gods Unchained

Gods Unchained is a Hearthstone clone with packs you can open, and a token that has all the usual selling points of crypto attached to it. A guy who worked for Wizards of the Coast worked on it. It runs like shit and I don't even like Hearthstone.

OK, if it's not clear there is absolutely nothing special about these games. They are universally below average and they cost many times more than the games they're ripping off. All of the ones I could play for free were either lazy and bad or in genres that are already known for exploiting players who buy card packs. The production quality sometimes reaches that of slot machines, but never manages to exceed it.

EA is an ethical corporation that makes good games (This Will Be Mainstream)

Meta, the fervor with which corporations embrace NFT shit.

Trying to play these games points to only one thing: that this isn't really about the games. {== clip: I don't play games... ==} It's like when the mob owns a laundromat, if you know what I mean. I think we should take these games as a kind of warning: this is the future we're being promised. There is serious money behind these projects, and they threaten to reduce many games to glorified casinos with these parasitic, hype-based markets bolted on.

Games that have a big impact become part of the mechanical background for all other games. For a long time you couldn't get away from crafting and skill trees. Now everything has to have a Dark Souls dodge roll. In the future, we may have to reckon with "play to earn" mechanics. Whether or not that happens depends on how long these things manage to last before they burn themselves out, but it looks likely.

EA recently released a transcript of an earnings call from November 3rd where the CEO mentions NFTs by name three times [14]. I'm not going to say that that's proof of anything, but if you're bringing this stuff up in a call with Barclays and Goldman Sachs it must carry some weight. Executives can see the huge numbers coming out of crypto, and they want to get in on it. Whether or not they really know anything is up for debate, but if the CEO wants NFTs in a game, it'll probably get done.

EA is already quite good at exploiting people with microtransactions, especially in games like FIFA where card packs are such a huge thing. Using a market controlled by EA to take commissions and drive up the price of cards is probably appealing.

Ubisoft has a similar sentiment [15]. They're a member of an organization called the Blockchain Game Alliance [16] and they recently funded a crypto game called the Sandbox by Pixowl. They've actually made games before, like the critically acclaimed "Addams Family: Mystery Mansion." Right now, the Sandbox has a level editor, an asset editor, and markets for items and land. They even got dead mao five in on it. All the assets are NFTs with artificial scarcity built in, and you need to be verified to actually make models for the game.

Going by the level editor the Sandbox has half the possibilities of ROBLOX Studio with a much worse user experience. As with most crypto games you're prevented from making anything fun by the fact that every item that's not a brick or garbage can costs a significant amount of real money.

If the Sandbox ever gets released I doubt it'll last. It looks and feels like a game for kids, but only on the consumption side of things. I'm not sure how it is now, but I loved ROBLOX as a kid because I had access to an endless stream of cool cars and bombs and structures that I could screw around with in my own levels. Kids playing the Sandbox are, I guess, either meant to spend thousands of dollars or program stuff from scratch. Kids suck at programming, and they're poor, so they get to either make boring levels or walk around other people's boring levels.

Honestly it doesn't make sense to even think about the game design because, despite a bigger budget than the other games, the Sandbox is a financial instrument first and a game second. There might be one obligatory Dead Mouse concert because of some contract he signed five years ago, but the Sandbox is just a thinly veiled profit generator.

{++ speed up as you read through these ++}

Zynga's getting into NFTs too [17], and some mobile game called Cookie Run [18], and the Epic Games store isn't banning crypto games either [19]. And why stop at games? Twitter's developing NFT support [20] [21] [22], and Reddit is tokenizing karma [23]. You can bet Facebook's new Metaverse is going to have crypto in it, they tried to start a cryptocurrency years ago [24] [25]. Tim Cook's got Bitcoin [26], and Amazon's hiring people who know about blockchain [27]. Universal Music is creating a virtual band based on Bored Ape Yacht Club [28]. TIME, the Economist, Vogue, Fortune, and Rolling Stone have all released NFT magazine covers [29]. NBA Top Shots has over half a million members [30]

{++ Pronounced sigh... ++}

A pseudo-world apart (Decantraland, big rant)

"Digital land" ownership as an expression of an inner desire for real power, and the expression of a lack of power. The profound wrong-ness of all of this.

Decentraland was an early shot at making a Metaverse, which, despite its sci-fi connotations seems to just mean "a worse version of Second Life." Decentraland has been around since 2017, and its token, called MANA, was stagnant for a while but shot up in value the day Facebook announced it was rebranding itself [31]. Its value has been declining slowly since.

The game is, I think, a prime example of what the shift toward crypto and so-called "Metaverses" represents. Decentraland is different from the other games I talked about because it actually got finished; it realizes this dream of digital land and it's one of the most depressing things I've ever experienced. Almost all of the land is owned by people speculating on it. The game is this endless green nothing with the inoffensive low-detail graphics of a tech startup's website.

The buildings that occasionally jut from the landscape, slowing you down as they load from this hulking environmental disaster of a blockchain, are without fail galleries to show off NFT art, or a commercial for a less successful scam. Decentraland is a world with no humanity left in it. There's no love or higher intent to the stuff people make, just unfettered greed eating itself and shitting itself out for all to see. The only conclusion worth giving about crypto games is that they're not fun, and they're not supposed to be.

Something is profoundly wrong in Decentraland, and in the real world that created it. Crypto supporters believe that innovation is an absolute good, but the issue is deeper than a stupid idea. What brings someone to buy a fake deed for fake land? Well, I can't prove it, but I think crypto's popularity comes from the belief that we don't really have a say in the future anymore. There are no possibilities for things to get better, no hope in these systems that just fail time after time, making everyone poorer and more miserable while CEOs and the bankers get to go on living, and living well.

There's no hope for a just world, where our leaders serve our interests rather than the demands of fucking Nabisco or Deutsche Bank, and cryptocurrencies appeal to this feeling. They promise to disrupt the financial system, to bring power to the people {== Floki ==}, and to make life better by making you rich. And some people have gotten lucky, but the vast, vast majority haven't.

Decentralized finance doesn't solve anything if it just replicates what we already have. When the bubble bursts, it's not going to be Elon Musk or Tim Cook losing all their money, it's going to be a regular guy who thought crypto might save his life, and his family's life. What pisses me off isn't a bunch of nerds building dumb apps to sell each other fursonas {==lazy lion on screen or something==}, it's that so many desperate people get caught up in these scams.

The question of art really doesn't matter with crypto. Nothing with crypto attached to it has gotten stuck in my head, or changed my life, or made me feel anything other than a sort of cold dread. But the real problem is that crypto is going to destroy people's lives.

Decentraland is just another smiling face painted over the blockchain. That's all any of these projects are. The promoters promise games, or art, or community to whoever is desperate enough to listen. They hype up Discord channels full of hundreds and hundreds of people who buy in to this project that will help them out or make them happy and soon the rug will be pulled and the freaks leave with their money to do it all again. Decentraland exists to sell itself. Nobody actually likes it, and everyone involved is involved to make money.

Large corporations are adopting this technology, so don't believe people who say it's disrupting anything. Crypto is another fucking carrot on a stick, another way to turn works of art like games into commoditized slime, and another way to part people from their money. Its ideal world is just a market, just endless work for you and endless speculation for them and profit toward no end. Crypto is flat-out disgusting, and it poisons everything it touches.

I don't want to let earnest crypto holders off the hook. They are unequivocally stupid, and are doing a bad thing. You should continue bullying everyone you see with an NFT profile picture. But I've seen people invested in these things whose lives would be made immeasurably better by a few thousand dollars, and I've seen that money go down the drain because some Redditor promised them 100x gains on a Surly Squirrel or a Crazy Capybara. It's funny, but it's not.

If you're considering investing in crypto, or an NFT, please don't. It won't make your life better, it won't give you a community or a return or anything other than a number in a crypto wallet that won't be worth anything in five years. If all our systems have abandoned you, please just try to talk to somebody around you. People are more loving and generous than we give each other credit for. The blockchain is a system that removes trust in people from its equation, but you don't have to accept that that's the way things are. Nobody is powerful alone.