In New Year day, Square Enix president Yosuke Matsuda publish an open letter. In it, he expresses his love for blockchain technology and token is not replaceable (NFTs), join Ubisoft, Peter Molyneux and Stalker 2 GSC Game World developers in similar common interventions. He said that he hopes that these technologies will become a “major trend in gaming in the future”. The letter went by as well as you might expect.
Commentators have pointed out that Matsuda’s letter is unintelligible, used in sludge technology terms. However, he makes a revealing difference. In Matsuda’s eyes, on the one hand, playing for fun, or “‘playing for fun’ … is driven purely by inconsistent personal feelings such as goodwill and formed volunteerism. because of each individual’s desire for self-expression “and, on the other hand, “playing for the sake of”, a goal pursued needs to be nourished by a “clear motive”—namely money. The first, Matsuda suggested, seemed incomprehensible and strange; the second is smart, normal and productivity.
Matsuda is equating games with work – namely, paid labor. And framing them this way, in terms of productivity and worker empowerment, is a tool to get you to adopt technologies like NFT. You will face this more in the coming years, as some games become really indistinguishable from work.
As we often describe the game as work, using terms like grind and reward, take care of the farm in Farming Simulator, login to complete “daily tasks”, etc., Critics have certainly questioned whether what we do in video games is play or not.
Sure, play and work are mirrored. Their differences are both superficial and personal: Killing Silver Knights all day on Anor Londo’s steps to get the Darkmoon Blade is work because I hate it. But some crazy people might do it for fun, just like we pursue recreational activities, like fishing, for which other people get paid. Scholars have tagged modified a form of unpaid labor; it can easily be viewed as a hobby, like painting. Game designers often distinguish between inner enjoyment (play Halo for 100 hours because you love the feeling of having great photos) and external rewards (do the same thing because you want to level up your battle pass for a camo weapon skin). The following section explores what anthropologist David Graeber called people “inclination to compute,“and it’s often inappropriate, but social scoring isn’t inherently bad or unscientific to play. Really, I think the average player doesn’t care if a game is closer to working principles. or not.
NFTs consider this desire for an external reward as its logical conclusion: a financial incentive. Outwardly the idea looks appealing. After all, the game has the economy, the notoriously lucrative games. You play all day, paying for Gabe Newell’s extended vacation in New Zealand, however, unless you’re a lucky streamer, you only get loot boxes in return. Academic often talk about unpaid non-physical labor“login to Facebook and mine your interests for advertising money. Isn’t gaming the same? You can follow the following logic: Developers are merging, why shouldn’t gaming? Developers developers should treat players like companies treat workers. We play to contribute.’ We work efficiently. As well as players demand a more fair progression system, they should also ask for payment in hard cash.
Axie Infinity, a blockchain-based video game where players collect Pokémon-like pets, tied to NFTs, demonstrates how these “play to earn” systems work. Players participate in their Axes in battle to win crypto tokens. In 2020, someone paid $130,000 in crypto for a particularly rare cryptocurrency. My colleagues pointed out that this is essentially a capitalist simulation, and that some individuals have actually escaped poverty by playing this game.
Tom Brock, lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Manchester Metropolitan, explains that gaming differs from our day-to-day work in a number of critically important ways, and these differences cause serious problems. In the beginning, game companies don’t have to treat you like employees. “Work is not just about getting paid,” he said. “It’s also about the different forms of financial, pastoral and cultural support — being part of a union is part of that, as well as having certain rights and protections.”
