The Waypoint Radio crew welcomes Motherboard senior editor Jordan Pearson onto the show to talk about gaming NFTs. We discuss how some of the current trends portend a grim future, the NFT games that already exist and how they operate, and what a AAA developer might do with this technology. Come along and listen as we collectively stare into the abyss! After the break, Rob, Patrick, and Cado talk about two recent sci-fi epics: Foundation and Dune, and how they both tackle the way empires oppress people on different timescales.
Thinking back to Gita’s piece about the Dead Games Insult. Watch what happens when instead of a game being just your social space, it’s also your life’s savings. The toxicity of that is going to be beyond anything you could ever imagine. Somebody won’t be able to retire because Square Enix shuts down the NFT FFVII game early.
Although they also seem to have been genuinely surprised by how many people are totally upset with them for this, too. (And, of course, those people should be.) So there’s still possibly time for a climbdown, at least for the short term…
It’s hard to predict where the NFT thing will go. It’s a grift, and at some point the people with the most to gain will cash out and crash it. On the other hand, the only way to keep an MLM going is to get more members, and with everyone from the Royal Canadian Legion to Disney releasing these things, it’s certainly possible they’ll have room to grow for a while.
And while I’m heartened to see people cancelling their Nitros en masse, I will be surprised if everyone cancels - say - their FFXIV sub when Square Enix starts peddling some ugly gold Chocobo NFTs. I’m sure Konami is mere months from releasing three crisp JPEGs of Blue-Eyes White Dragon for the aspiring Seto Kaibas of the cryptobro scene. With every company dipping their toe in the cesspool, it could become a “there’s no ethical consumption under cryptocapitalism” situation.
Re: Foundation series, I grew up reading the books and as an adaptation its disappointing to the point of being depressing, BUT I can still appreciate Lee Pace.
Elaborating a little on my first point the writer seems to have no interest in exploring the themes in Asimovs books, like the idea of intelligence and planning being able to counter brute force, in fact the opposite as one of the characters uses a key line “violence is the last resort of the incompetent” as a joke throw away line.
In short the parts with the Empire and Lee Pace are OK, the Foundation section is terrible throw away sci fi. Keep in mind the Empire stuff is 100% new matierial and doesn’t need the Foundation license at all.
I don’t know where this distinction begins or ends exactly, but I also can’t shake the “they threw SO much money at this that it’s gross” feeling.
Who should bear the cost of this?
Well, it’s not gonna be me, because why would I do this — why would I spend literally billions of dollars so you can always keep your loot in future games with absolutely no compensation other than the first time you spend $60 on the first game decades ago?
So are you going to spend literally $50,000 to get your gun moved from one game to the other? If you are, I want you to at least consider how sustainable this business model is — because there are not Call of Duty player numbers with the kind of money to spend updating a gun for a new game.
If anything, I think Jordan and the pod didn’t go hard enough against NFTs. /shrug
I checked out Foundation’s first episode today and despite a lot of trepidation, really enjoyed it. I can already see a bit of a problem in that this the Lee Pace Emperor Show, not the Foundation Show, and I don’t care at all about the events on Terminus (…yet).
But Game of Thrones found a good stride as Lannister Dallas, so maybe this show can do the same. GoT actually collapsed as a narrative once it tried to not be a soap opera in the Red Keep.
We have no current plans to ship this internal concept. For now we’re focused on protecting users from spam, scams and fraud. Web3 has lots of good but also lots of problems we need to work through at our scale. More soon.
I still see this as them revisiting it in 4 months.
Ah. Abandoning an unpopular plan while everyone’s attention is focused on it and then rushing it through when people are distracted by something else. We like to call that The Conservative Party Method.
My beef with NFTs isn’t for ecological reasons. Those can change and many recent corporate merchandise NFTs are already on “green” platforms. The real issue is that they represent an attempt to re-impose artificial scarcity on culture.
People in tech, particularly in the Elon Musk bubble, seem to have the impression that technological hypotheticals, such as asteroid mining or mars colonization, would inherently bring broad human prosperity, but NFTs show that as scarcity is alleviated, capital finds ways to create new forms of it, if it’s necessary to preserve the existence of class differences. -nicodotgay
True but I think the argument against NFTs needs to foreclose against the future possibility of “actually green” crypto. NFTs are bad inherently, regardless of their carbon footprint.
