At the Brazil International Games Festival on Friday, game developer Mark Venturelli, best known for Chroma Squad, received standing ovations during the lecture “The Future of Game Design” when he surprised the audience with a new name for the lecture a few minutes later: “Why NFT- is a nightmare. ” It was a loud statement against blockchain’s push to play, one of the most divisive trends this year. The festival’s list of 2022 sponsors includes several NFT and blockchain companies, including Lakea and Ripio, and the festival’s programming included panels from these sponsors such as “Web3 and the new generation of games.”
Venturelli did not just push back on these conversations by calling the NFTs a nightmare: he offered a detailed, articulate case for why they are bad for gaming and directly contradict his vision for the future of gaming design.
In a follow-up interview with PC Gamer, Venturelli said that the event’s blockchain sponsors “must buy their relevance, because they are not relevant.”
“These people are outsiders here, they are not important,” Venturelli said. “They’re just trying to buy their relevance, because they have no real influence over the future of our industry. If you just give them this space undisputed, you give them exactly what they want, and buy their story that they are relevant. “
Before a recording was available at all, Venturelli’s lecture went viral thanks to one chirping described the moment he announced its real name and the standing ovation that followed his lecture. “It was a bit of a gimmick,” Venturelli admits. “I’m starting, ‘Hey, this talk is about the future of gaming.’ to talk about all the trends I’ve seen during my 15 years in the industry, and now we have new trends, let’s talk about them. That’s when I scratch the name of the conversation and say, “Why NFTs are a nightmare. “
Venturelli has now shared a recording of his presentation on YouTube, and while the lecture is in Portuguese you can read an English version of the slides that come with it.
The cheeky revelation of the title itself may have been a surprise to the audience, but Venturelli made sure to clarify it with the festival’s organizers in advance. Controversial as his lecture was apparently going to be, the BIG organizers did nothing to censor the lecture or prevent him from expressing his opinion, but that does not mean that it was popular with any of BIG’s Web3 sponsors. BIG had not yet given an official statement about the call at press time, although PC Gamer was told that one will be given on Monday.
“I have heard that the sponsors were very angry,” said Venturelli. “They tried to break into the conversation while I was talking, but the organization would not let them. This does not surprise me, because the organization did not at one point censor me, stopped me from putting what I wanted on the slides. I gave them access to the slides before the lecture. There was never any intention on their part to shut me up or anything like that. “
There are a lot of messages going around that the Big “short of transmission” and other conspiracy theories. There is no such thing. The auditor is the one who does not have the equipment to transmit.July 8, 2022
Venturellis nightmare
When Ubisoft announced that they were entering the world of NFTs and games to earn video games, and selling NFTs in the form of helmets players can use in Ghost Recon: Breakpoint, the video got a extraordinary amounts dislike. Even The French trade union Solidaires Informatique criticized the scheme. Nicolas Pouard, VP of Ubisoft’s Strategic Innovations Lab, defended it by saying “The endgame is about giving players the opportunity to resell their items when they are done with them or they have finished playing the game itself.”
“This is such a naive proposal,” Venturelli counters in our follow-up interview. “The expectation versus the reality here is so strangely far apart, because what is actually going to happen is that organized groups are going to operate and scale with ever-decreasing margins, and just push everyone else out. Because that is what is happening. If you play EVE Online or Runescape, or any other game that simulates economics, that’s what happens. Organized groups are going to crush you. What’s actually going to happen is that if you just naively play a game and have fun – imagine it – then you want to sell your stuff, your stuff is not going to be worth anything.It’s going to be worth fractions of a cent, but what you give in return for that fraction of a cent is that you are completely powerless now. Your imagination, your ability to be influential in the world as an individual is gone, because now it is controlled by these guys. “
An early criticism of NFTs and other uses of the blockchain was the environmental costs of their energy efficiency. In its criticism of Ubisoft’s plan, Solidaires Informatique called the blockchain “a useless, expensive, ecologically destructive technology.” NFT projects in particular quickly became knowledgeable enough to use phrases such as “environmentally friendly technology” in their press releases, but none of them struggled with deeper criticism of their ideas. That is what Venturelli zeroed in on in his lecture and in our follow-up interview.
There is the eerie similarity between these profit-driven abuses and the pyramid schemes, but there is also the philosophical concern that things like cryptocurrency represent a libertarian ideal founded on paranoia about institutions and about other people. Which, says Venturelli, is a big part of why they’s so inefficient in the first place.
“Calculatively, as in real life, if you do not trust the people you work with, you have to use a lot more energy to achieve the same things,” he explains. “If I live with you in the same house and we do not trust each other, every time before I leave my house, I have to hide my valuables. I have to make inventory of the things I own, and maybe put cameras or locks inside things. When I get home I have to check everything and see if you’ve messed up with any of my stuff, and make sure you do not come into my room when I sleep and all that shit.
“There’s so much energy I have to use just to exist in a room with you, because I do not trust you. I feel that is a very good metaphor for how computational blockchain works, and what is the underlying philosophical idea behind it. ., which is, “we want a world without any kind of centralized authority because we can never trust any of them.” And that is the opposite of what we want as a society, in my opinion. “
The BIG festival’s sponsorship of NFT and blockchain companies was brought to light before the event in an article by Rique Sampaio, the journalist whose tweet about Venturelli’s talk went viral. Venturelli says that indie designers in the Brazilian scene were in favor of boycotting BIG in response. Venturelli obviously disagreed – so strongly that he gave his lecture even though he had Covid (via video conference, of course.)
“If we boycott it and we do not go for it, we are largely admitting losses. We are just saying we are losing. We can not do this. We must do the opposite. In fact, I do not think the event organization is pro-crypto, pro- I know them personally, I serve as an advisor to the board of Abragames [the Association of Brazilian Game Developers Companies]. My opinion against crypto and NFT is not the majority of Abragames, but it is important that I represent this view over there. In the same way, it is important that we go and we take up the space that is offered to us. Not just for me, but for many people in the indie scene in Brazil. I was on the side of: ‘Hi, let’s dispute this, let’s use the space, let’s say our opinion against it. Else [blockchain companies] going to hold a monologue over there. ‘”
That was largely the case with BIG’s sponsored talks. “They basically squirted the shit out on the main stage, and just said, ‘Hey, cryptocurrencies are super cool, they’re going to be amazing. Only people do not understand it, or the previous generation of crypto games gave it a bad reputation, but a new generation coming up is going to be great! ‘”
By contesting the space, Venturelli and everyone else who speaks publicly about NFTs and the big blockchain hype that has moved into gaming space, makes that monologue a dialogue. If the cost bothers some sponsors, there is a small one to pay.
“I do not feel I have hurt BIG by talking shit about NFTs,” Venturelli says, “because BIG does not need these guys. It’s the other way around.”
In addition, investors are currently seeing potential values in South America due to instability in the region. It makes visibility more important than ever. “If we do not take any place, and we let such people take these places, they suddenly dictate what the future is, suddenly they take the investments so that they build our next big projects. That’s when it starts to get very dangerous, because it “can put our future as an industry at risk, in my opinion. Because I do not feel that these things have long legs. I feel that they can succeed in the short term, but they will certainly fall in the long term.”
Venturelli eventually brought the lecture back to the future of game design, and rudely added that he had tricked everyone again – he was not there just to rag on Web3. Venturelli’s indie studio Rogue Snail is working on a loot shooter called Relic Hunter Legend it is putting some of his ideals into practice, trying to build trust and community between players with “more humane” F2P revenue generation and a look-for-group system built around helping others.
“Right now we are living in a crisis of confidence in Western society – trust in each other, in institutions, and even in our future together is in decline,” says Venturelli. “We should build systems that help connect people and build trust, build sustainable solutions and build infinitely scalable human solutions.” We should not shift away from culture, entertainment and storytelling to economic activity. We should not just eliminate the ultimate hiding places from which we must flee from the oppression of capitalist society. “
You can find the lecture The Future of Game Design on YouTube.
