Building Digital Economies & Tokenizing Star Trek with Lucid Sight

Mecenkoy
Mecenkoy
Nov 3 · 5 min read

It’s no secret that I’m obsessed with productivity. Which makes my love for video games a tough pill for my psyche to swallow. Video games, at their core, have been historically categorized as an unproductive activity. Sure there are paradigm shifts we’re seeing with Twitch and eSports allowing skilled gamers to make a living (and sometimes a killing). Yet, the overall connotations of “gamer” haven’t changed that much.

As such, I’ve always tried to turn gaming into something productive, which doesn’t always work out (shoutout to Borderlands). My most recent effort to do so involved playing blockchain games. I already work in the (blockchain/cryptocurrency) industry, blockchain gaming was the logical next step. Why not play something where I can potentially earn crypto, as opposed to something where my hours dedicated to it don’t equate to anything of value.

Next thing I know, I’m falling down the blockchain gaming rabbit hole. Clicking through supply crate sales and NFTs of all rarity-denoting colors of the rainbow.

I loved it.

After about a week’s journey down the rabbit hole, a friend I met in a gaming Discord told me to check out a game called (CSC).

“It’s kind of like World of Warcraft if the in-game assets were owned by the players. So if you spend months playing a game towards getting a special item for example, then decide you don’t want to play the game anymore, you can just sell the item to another player through the in-game marketplace,” he said.

“I’m in,” I replied.

CSC consumed me in a matter of hours. I spent nearly a week researching the game before I booted it up. What really fascinated me was the concept of a “Player-Owned-Economy”, especially when juxtaposed with a time when more and more jobs are threatened by automation. A player-owned economy could essentially serve any function that a real economy serves, whether that be generating income for an individual or providing the infrastructure for a currency. Other blockchain games can also be considered to have player-owned-economies, but few of them are complex or reminiscent of real economies. The CSC universe is incredibly detailed, beyond their plans for an in-game marketplace where users will be able to buy, sell, and trade items without leveraging a third-party, there are intricate systems within the game that create opportunities for entire professions. You can specialize in a certain skill set and eventually sell your services in that profession to other players who have focused their specializations elsewhere. It’s a beautiful social experiment.

Blockchain games are, in a sense, a potential opportunity to escape the current limitations a physical economy presents. And if this sounds absolutely ridiculous to you, just look at the valuations and transactions already occurring in the realm of digital items. Fortnite generated $2.4 Billion USD in revenue in 2018, derived completely from the sale of digital items that can’t be removed from the game and resold. In other words, people spent $2.4 Billion American Dollars on digital items that they don’t technically own. Games like Fortnite (and 99.99% of games that currently exist) operate in a Closed System. Meaning the unit of value in that system can’t leave the system itself or has no value outside of the system. So, is it such a stretch to believe that people would spend money in a system where they could certify ownership of digital items, trade them for cryptocurrencies, and transfer value seamlessly in and out of the system?

At this point in my plunge down the blockchain gaming rabbit hole, it was apparent that I’d be spending a lot of time in the CSC universe. That coupled with the fact that I’m genuinely enthralled by the future that games like CSC can build compelled me to reach out to Lucid Sight (the game developer). In a frantically typed email that probably came off as borderline sociopathic, I asked that someone from Lucid reach out to me so I could learn and write about the company. I even offered to sell my soul to them for rare NFTs, but they ignored that part of my request.

I eventually found myself on the phone with Stephen, their studio manager. It seemed like he wanted to vet me and make sure I wasn’t a psychopath before letting me, a random internet stranger, speak to the development team.

“Well, who would you want to talk to?”

“Who’s baby is this?” I asked.

“I want to interview whoever it is whose eyes light up whenever someone asks about the game. Whoever will be able to match my excitement about the future of player-owned economies in general.”

Stephen laughed, “It sounds like you need to talk to Fazri.”

The following is the transcript from a call between myself (Reza) and Fazri Zubair, CTO of Lucid Sight, Blockchain Game development studio.

Reza: Do you mind telling me about the genesis of the game and where the idea came from?

Fazri: Yeah, absolutely. Basically, we’re Lucid Sight, founded in 2015 and we’re a Frontier Games Studio. By that, what we mean is we are looking at areas in gaming that haven’t gone mainstream yet, that we can contribute significantly to in one way or another. We did Virtual Reality in the early days, and we started doing some Augmented Reality (AR) products. When we were working on our AR product, we had this idea: wouldn’t it be cool if this AR figure was some type of unique collectible that you could trade and have ownership of?

That’s really what guided us to blockchain. We saw it as a solution. Then once I made the realization that blockchain can create true digital items, items that users can own and trade independently of the game developer, I was like, I think we might have something here.

The first thing that came to my mind was, it’d be amazing to have a game like Eve, where users had true ownership of their items. I was a big EVE Online player and played countless hours in college, probably wasted a lot of time, but I had a blast. I love the community and the economic aspects of the game. But there were limitations to what you could do and the freedom that you could have. I always thought if I could have a truly player-owned economy, more similar to Second Life or Entropy Universe, but with the game mechanics of EVE Online, that would be something I would play. And I’m assuming if I would play, there are probably dozens of people out there, if not thousands.

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