What blockchain games can learn from New York City

The power of anticipation

“It takes many years of practice and some taste and intelligence to make a buck do the things New York makes it do.”

I’ve been thinking about this phrase — which comes from the book Manhattan 45 by travel writer Jan Morris — a lot over the past days, while I’ve been in Manhattan for the NFT.NYC 2020 conference.

It’s a brilliant phrase, which says so much about how experiences are sold to us. In particular, while money is a key part of the logic — the subject even — the “buck” isn’t what’s most important.

What’s most important is how New York contextualizes “the things” that get us to spend the buck — indeed, enjoy spending the buck; that is intelligence and taste.

Or put another way: If blockchain is so great, giving everyone the ability to own their own money and digital items, why aren’t more people using it?

If you’re so smart…

It’s a good question. Perhaps even a brilliant one.

For those of us way down this particular rabbit hole, it’s getting harder to understand why everyone isn’t buying bitcoin, ethereum and whatever follows CryptoKitties.

Personally I’m long on CryptoPunks. Pure NFTs, fixed scarcity with only 10,000 minted, plus an emerging bottom-up valuation model derived from a combination of aesthetics and cultural memes. Have you seen the uplift on #medicalmasks since Coronavirus hit?

But aside from the 30 of us trading CryptoPunks, what’s wrong with the rest of you people?

Don’t you realise blockchain is the future of pretty much everything, especially digital ownership?

Instead of giving your money to the man for access to digital stuff you don’t own and which they can take away from you at any time, why aren’t you dropping crypto to buy unique items you truly own and can sell for profit anytime you want? Screw the man.

All you need to do is download some software, create a wallet, write down a 12 word recovery phrase, load up on ETH (perhaps directly on your credit card), pay the gas fee, and a unique Star Trek spaceship, Ferrari F1 car or any manner of pixelated RPG characters could be yours; all assuming you never lose your recovery phrase. Screw the blockchain.

It’s a wonder anyone’s using blockchain.

Confirmation bias

Personally I love all this stuff. For me it’s more impossible to think how it won’t take over the world than it will.

Building incentivised business models for players and users within applications, games and other services solves many problems, and enables communities to take a meaningful stake — financial and otherwise — in the things they do and care about.

For example, why shouldn’t players be able to resell their unwanted games, in-game items or even their entire accounts? Of course, they’re already doing it, and have been doing so — badly and illegally — since games went online.

Using decentralized public blockchains to provide ownership rights, trading transparency, and cryptocurrencies for frictionless payments, will see the games industry moving from $150 billion of annual revenue (direct into the pockets of content creators) to crossing $1 trillion in annual transactional value (shared between everyone).

Just as tool companies such as Unity rightly talk up their role in democratizing game development, so blockchain will democratize value creation and revenue in the game sector. That’s everything from making and playing games, to streaming, esports, advertising revenues and beyond.

The pie is going to get much, much bigger and everyone’s going to get a slice. What’s not to like?

Don’t rock the boat

Well, for one thing, if I was EA, Activision Blizzard, Take-Two, Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo etc quite a lot.

These companies are doing very well out of the status quo. Even if in the long run they end up with more absolute revenue from this much bigger pie, the disruption, uncertainty and loss of control that’s required to get there is not anything they would encourage. Just think of the share price.

But what’s more important to think about is our original question. If blockchain is so great, why aren’t more people using it?

Sure, there are plenty of hard technical and soft usability reasons why this is the case. But, fundamentally if blockchain was delivering on even 1% of its promise, 12 word recovery phrases would be the least of our problems.

Then the most popular blockchain dapps would have millions not thousands of daily active users and 1 ethereum (not 1 bitcoin) would be worth $1 million.

Maybe it’s time to forget “Not your private key, not your bitcoin” and think rather more seriously about how human beings interact with complex systems, concepts and products, and start rebuilding on that basis.

In other words, focus on taste and intelligence, making a buck on the blockchain do the things New York makes it do.