Dev surprises blockchain-sponsored game festival with talk branding NFTs a “nightmare”

A game developer who was to talk about “Future of Game Design” at the Brazil International Games Festival instead surprised the participants with a lecture on “Why NFTs are a nightmare”.

Sponsors of the festival included a number of NFT and blockchain companies, such as Lakea and Ripio, as well as panels from sponsors such as “Web3 and the New Generation of Games”.

However, Mark Venturelli – best known for developing the game Chroma Squad – surprised both participants and sponsors with his statement against cryptocurrency.

“These people are outsiders here, they are not important,” Venturelli told PCGamer after the event. “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. ”

The title change was a gimmick, where the developer started talking about new trends in games before scraping out the title and changing the topic, which was met with applause from the audience.

And although the theme change was controversial, it was clarified with the festival’s organizers in advance and was not censored – despite the sponsorship.

“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 censor me at any point, stopped me from putting what I wanted on the slides. I gave them access to the slides before the speech. There was never any intention on their part to shut me up or anything like that. ”

Venturelli’s presentation has been posted on YouTube, with his slides translated into English. It notes how “everything Play to Earn can do … has already been around for over a decade in other games (but more effectively)”.

However, much of his argument is about trust.

“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,” Venturelli told PCGamer. “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. That, I feel, 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. ”

Elsewhere in the gaming industry, Ubisoft launched an NFT platform claiming that gamers “do not understand”, while EA has withdrawn from its initial enthusiasm on the subject and Square Enix is ​​researching the technology.