Meet the Team — Arash

As someone who helped build several gaming communities throughout their career, I strongly believe that the best experts about your game are not the developers but rather the users who are most invested in it. Hence, why limit ourselves to listening to their advice when we can hire them to help deliver their own expectations?

Meet Arash Nouri, one of the most active and helpful people in our community and a very insightful person in the web3 industry as a whole, so much so that we decided to hire him and make him an integral member of the Directive Games team as Marketing & Community Specialist.

— Giorgio ‘Error 404’ Crosali

GM Arash! Can you briefly tell our community about yourself and your career?

Sure thing. I believe the majority of us started our early lives in quite the same fashion by repeating the same routine of waking up every day and going to school.

I got my BA and MA in English Translation since English has always been my strongest point. Not because I am special, but because I started learning it when I was 4. Nevertheless, aside from doing a lot of translations, my main passion was being around people and getting to know them, and therefore, I picked up teaching the language as the course of life and received my teaching certificate from Cambridge University.

For 15 years I continued teaching ESP (English for Specific Purposes) to university students and those who wished to use the language for (as the name suggests) specific purposes, like their businesses, university thesis, etc.

My web3 journey started when we were forced to sit at home when COVID hit the world, but instead of sitting at home doing nothing, I found out that I like learning more about DeFi, GameFi and Web3 in general. It was then that I came across Illuvium and started my learning from there. This was back in early 2020 and every day I realize there is more to learn about this space.

My passion brought me to know even more people and help them in any way I can, from setting up wallets to helping them with the blockchain and networks. Since the day I became a moderator, I have banned thousands of scammers in different discords and helped a lot of members with any questions that they’ve had, provided I knew the answers of course.

At the moment I am a Moderator in Illuvium Discord, Community Manager at Polemos, and Civitas and The Machines Arena Marketing & Community Specialist to help the communications department. I’m also pretty active in some other GameFi Discords as well.

What brought you to the web3 space, and what do you think the future holds for this industry?

DeFi became very interesting to me. Not that it would just bring financial freedom, but also that it was super fast, reliable, and to be honest, very easy to use.

On top of that, ownership of the assets is what caught my eye, especially in games. Why would I want to pay a lot of money for a web2 game when I know I own nothing and with their new version, I will lose whatever I had paid for and then I would have to buy everything back again? So, this is where NFTs and GameFi come to play their role.

Not saying every web3 game is worth it. GameFi and web3 in general are still pretty young and need adoption. However, if cash can turn into credit cards, then credit cards can definitely turn into digital currencies. That still needs a lot of work as we can see with the news and events happening around the world.

What are your favorite games? Both web3 and not!

Outside of Web3, I’m a fan of FPS games, so obviously, I play a lot of Call of Duty. But I also love story-driven games, like God of War, Dead Space, Mass Effect, The Witcher and of course, Max Payne. These games are not only works of art, but also works of pure and creative imagination which I value dearly.

In Web3, aside from Civitas and TMA, I try to follow and stay up to date about Shrapnel, Illuvium, Blocklords, Apeiron, and some other games many of which are yet to be launched publicly.

Do you think “traditional” NFT collections like PFP and such still have a purpose today?

In my opinion, it gets tricky when it comes to PFPs vs. in-game NFTs. Many PFPs have the first-mover advantage and are doing great. They are a work of art with unique IP, hence they are pretty pricy, like everything created by Yuga Labs. Even if they mess something up their products will most probably sell out.

Depending on what utility they offer their community, other PFP projects can do great as well or simply fade away. I am not a degen to trade NFTs to make a living because I am not a good trader. So instead, I am mostly into NFTs that I would like to hold for the long term depending on the utility they offer me. If it’s just art, I may just ignore it.

What advice would you give to someone entering the web3 space in this day and age?

One piece of advice I can give anyone new to web3 is to always learn about the space before throwing money at it and when they are ready, even if they feel super confident, never really invest everything they have into a project. If they ever come to a financial decision and feel it is time to invest, in my opinion, they should always put in the money they are ready to lose. I have seen people that have lost everything because of taking bad decisions and not having learned about the space before taking an investment step.

Want to know more about the Civitas team? Check our previous Meet the Team issues on our publication page: https://medium.com/playcivitas/tagged/meet-the-team