17 ms·

Richard Bartle explains Web3's flaws at a Web3 conference. It doesn't go well

155 points by SLHamlet 4y ago

ggm 4y ago
The meta-lesson for anyone reading this, is that changing people's minds when they are grounded in self-interest belief, is next to impossible. Bartle knew he was on a fools errand, and went into it with low expectations. It's interesting to see exemplifiers of the kind of 'this contradicts my interior logic so I shall ignore it' behaviour from the participants. They look very plausible. I think AGW denialism and pre-AGW fury, the people trying to deal with religious objections to evolution had this in spades: no amount of good logic and reasoning can overcome somebody who is determined to recast what "time" means to make the fossil record align with God's work over 6 days. (nobody ever asks what contract gave him a day off on the 7th) The "we don't want to pay tax" movement, loves in-game NFT type value transfer precisely because they believe there cannot, will not be any intrusion of tax levying bodies into the space. Contrariwise, the people I know in the forensic accounting space say they really like the naievity of people who forget "the cloud" is shorthand for "somebody else's computer" which naturally, is subject to MLAP requirements these days. Sharing your goods in runescape is not invisible transfer of wealth, and speaking to each other in runescape is not secret communication. 12 year olds know this. Maybe grown-ups need to remind themselves of it from time to time? Maybe people need a reminder REAMDE is fiction? Plot devices don't always translate into real-world well. I am also reminded of Varoufakis' work on in-game economics and inflation.
- akira2501 4y ago
  > is that changing people's minds when they are grounded in self-interest belief, is next to impossible. If all you take are short-term measurements, then this would seem to be true. In my experience, the longer-term results are more achievable then popular thinking might suggest.
  - ggm 4y ago
    Death-bed conversions argue to your side of the deal, for sure. Richard Francis Burton was a disbeliever right up until he died in trieste, when his wife miraculously declared he'd changed his mind. hence, buried in hallowed ground. Less facetiously, I do think de-radicalisation works, and so a long term commitment to listening, being accepting of difference but encouraging wider thinking might work to bring committed anti-vaxx and AGW denialists back into the fold, but it demands a patience I probably lack. A geologist friend said its a life burden to commit to trying to change people's minds in his field (paleo) few can endure. He'd rather talk to people he doesn't have to argue with. I don't know Web 3.0/NFT proponents have the time free to engage in a long-term de-programming exercise. They'd be very busy actualising their net worth, one tik-tok at a time.
- hanniabu 4y ago
  > changing people's minds when they are grounded in self-interest belief, is next to impossible This applies to all the web2 naysayers as well
  - msla 4y ago
    From what I can tell, Web 2.0 came to pass, whereas Web 3.0 has not, which rather changes the discussion around each of them. Or am I wrong about what Web 3.0 is?
    - TaylorAlexander 4y ago
      Well after "Web 2.0", there was a lot of talk about "Web 3.0", some fifteen years ago [1]. And then now the crypto people have created a term "Web3", ostensibly completely unaware of the use of the term "Web 3.0" from the past which meant something completely different. I assume these people were too young 15 years ago to remember. But "Web3" means stuff with blockchain and similar. [1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%22web%203.0%22 https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...
      - klyrs 4y ago
        Wait until you learn about an even older term, 5th gen computing. With all the hullabaloo about ML, I've been waiting for that one to make a comeback...
        msla 4y ago
        I'm still waiting for someone to give us the next generation beyond VLSI. SDSI, for Super-Duper Scale Integration, maybe. Anyway: Fourth-Generation languages were "Steal ideas from Lisp", Fifth-Generation languages were "Steal ideas from Prolog", so Sixth-Generation languages will be "Steal ideas from everyone the ML model was trained on". Github/Microsoft is ahead of the curve on this sort of thing, as usual.
  - Ensorceled 4y ago
- junofan 4y ago
  I dunno, the model is compelling from a business perspective because you don’t have to pay to make content up front. Instead, charge royalties on user-generated content revenue. Roblox already does this well. I wouldn’t dismiss the whole thing out of hand.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - tmpz22 4y ago
    > the model is compelling from a business perspective So is alchemy
    - reidjs 4y ago
      Are you talking about the web3 platform, alchemy? https://www.alchemy.com/ https://www.alchemy.com/
  - josephg 4y ago
    It works for Roblox because the game is the content. Likewise for Mario Maker, or WC3 custom maps. It works because players evaluate the content based on how fun it is. But if I'm building something like Diablo I'll have a carefully crafted progression system for my game. If the "content" is in-game items then the best items will be the most powerful - that is, the ones which let players skip to the end of the game. And if my game's progression system can be completely ignored because someone owns a space laser they bought in another game for money, it ruins the game for everyone. - The art becomes a non-cohesive mess. - The players who don't have a space laser feel like their in-game progression has suddenly become meaningless. Clearly the real progression is being able to afford items with real money out of the game - and they don't play diablo to feel poor. - And the player who has the cool space laser has all the struggle and progress taken away from them. A sense of fulfillment is created by struggling at something then eventually succeeding. You can't feel fulfilled if you don't first struggle. (Thats what the middle of a game is for.) If you skip that by spending real money, its not fun. Even pay-to-win games have loot box mechanics and a money based progression system for the people who pay. You can make the art be cosmetic only, but that has its own set of problems. Fashion is valuable in part because of scarcity. Fortnite, Team Fortress and Dota2 create that scarcity by controlling what assets are included in the game. Scarcity is ruined if anyone can mint another NFT of the same jpeg with a single pixel changed. And you have the obvious problems of people drawing "adult content", and so on. It works for VRChat, but most of VRChat's content is off limits to most players (on devices like the Quest) because of how non-child friendly it can be. An in-house art team could easily be cheaper than the moderation team you'd need. Virtual worlds with cryptocurrency derived items seems to be a lot of smoke and not a lot of fire. Given how many people are excited by the idea, and how much money there is to be made if someone gets it right, I find it telling that there still aren't any compelling games built on these concepts.
- fswd 4y ago
  what does the acronym AGW stand for? Can't figure out if you mean global warming or the story of Genesis.
  - codetrotter 4y ago
    I figured it means Anti Global Warming
  - toomuchtodo 4y ago
    Anthropogenic Global Warming. Refers to the increased warming of the Earth's atmosphere due to human activity.
- UIUC_06 4y ago
  I'm not a denier of AGW. However, I think you're wrong to lump all those people in with anti-Darwinists. AGW comes freighted with Green baggage, and some of the people who reject it are largely rejecting the Green baggage. They suspect, not without good reason, that the "cures" for AGW are measures that Greens wanted anyway. And calling them "denialists" just insures that they'll never listen to you. Some of them are, of course, religious objectors who think the world was created in 6 days. The task is to separate those people from the rest.
  - Aloha 4y ago
    Some of the solutions are things the greens have largely rejected, like nuclear energy. The largest rejectors of nuclear energy are the environmentalists, some of which are very anti-climate change.
  - BlueTemplar 4y ago
    I just want to point out that there are many shades of "Green" (though today, unlike in the 70s(?), perhaps none of them are critical of the AGW concept) : https://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-10-09/what-shade-of-green-are-you/ https://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-10-09/what-shade-of-...
  - ggm 4y ago
    Yes. I would agree my pejorative language doesn't help. But if I can draw an analogy, this is also a function of polarised debate in the wider sense: it's impossible for anyone now to express views positive of Palestinian self-determination because the 'overton window' of tolerance for the idea, is consumed by the meme of 'you must be a self hating jew' for anyone who is jewish, and 'you must hate jews' for anyone else. So, 'because you are green I oppose all the things you believe in because I hate the green/left agenda' is a form of denialism of the legitemacy of the underlying concern. Finding the bridge to "I agree it exists, I just disagree about solutions, like I want nuclear and you don't but we agree the problem exists' is now almost unsayable for some people. An observation I've made to others is that old school feminism is really tainted now for a younger cohort. They reject all the achievements of their aunts, mothers, grandmothers, because of a disagreement over the non-binary status in gender/sex. The language used here is (to me at least) comparable to the language used in the 'hate the greens' thing.
- btilly 4y ago
  There is a variant on the halo effect which explains a lot of this. We have a tendency to choose sides. Once we do, we easily remember the good things about our side, and have a hard time believing the bad things. This is exactly reversed for the other side. It takes active work to remain balanced. So if you're on the side of technology, it is easy to talk about all the ways it improves our lives. And easy to discount the environmental impacts. Conversely if you're opposed to technology, you can easily quantify the harms. But will have an unduly rosy image of the benefits of natural things. Likewise it is hard for those who have lined up with web3, crypto, and so on to even hear well-informed and reasoned skepticism.
mysterydip 4y ago
Almost missed the footnote at the bottom, but his "Designing Virtual Worlds" book is available as a free PDF in the link there. I read it cover to cover previously and it had a profound effect on my designs going forward.
- microtherion 4y ago
  I agree with that recommendation; it's an amazing book. I wonder why there doesn't seem to be nearly as much comparable writing from authors of other MUDs, at least not to my knowledge.
  - mysterydip 4y ago
    Before I read it, I had so many ideas that were going to solve the woes of multiplayer games. Pretty much all of them were described in the book as already tried, and here's why they didn't work. Gave me a whole new appreciation for the work the pioneers of those worlds did.
trynewideas 4y ago
> I had already pointed out that we've long had a way of converting an object in one game into one of equal value in another: money. Sell your bow and arrow for cash or crypto-tokens, then use those to buy what you want in the other game. There's no need to decide how to translate it into a space game world where ranged weapons are far more commonplace; you will always get a replacement of the exact same value in the second world as what your bow and arrow gave you in the first world.
- deleted 4y ago
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- moron4hire 4y ago
  That's another great point for why NFT game items are never going to be a thing: game companies don't want users to be able to trade items. If they did, it'd already be possible the easy way with cash. But it's not and they try to crack down pretty hard on anyone they catch engaging in outside market making.
  - reidjs 4y ago
    Just because that’s true for most games, doesn’t mean it’s true for every game. I could imagine building a game where p2p trading is one of the core mechanics and I’m sure it’s already been done. Not my type of game, but maybe someone’s
    - Lazare 4y ago
      Er...trading items between players is a core part of basically all MMOs, many ARPGs, some TCGs, etc. It's a huge thing in many games, including some of the most popular games on the planet. ...none of them use or need NFTs or a blockchain, and in every instance I know of, the existence of such would be actively harmful. For a blockchain to make sense, you need a number of factors, probably chief among them that there is no single trusted entity that can run the DB. For bitcoin, that makes (some) sense. There is no Bitcoin Inc that could plausibly track the balance of every BTC wallet, after all! For World of Warcraft gold it makes no sense; Activision Blizzard is already running a centralised database of how much gold every player has, and every player WoW has obviously trusts Activision to run the DB, just like they they trust them to run every other aspect of the game (eg, content creation, balance tweaks, competitive content, etc.). WoW (like any MMO) is an extremely tightly curated experience.
deleted 4y ago
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gizmo 4y ago
A common conceit in tech circles is that you could easily make the world a better place, just put technical people in charge and the rest will take care of itself. As this post so clearly illustrates, techies can be just as delusional and blinkered as everybody else.
- scaredginger 4y ago
  There are far more social problems in the world than technological ones
  - LastTrain 4y ago
    How would a comparison like that even be possible.
    - scaredginger 4y ago
      I didn't intend to be taken literally, I was more commenting on the habit of trying to find technical solutions to social problems while ignoring the underlying causes
- eswat 4y ago
  Do we know that most of the people at this Crypto Circle conference are techies though? From the brief description it just sounds like your run-of-the-mill cryptocurrency enthusiast conference and mostly for “investors”. It’s not a builder conference where it's mostly hackers or technical leaders, and those do exist. I’ve been to both types of conferences and I’m not surprised Bartle got the cold shoulder by most of the audience if the conference is of the former. People are usually there to seek alpha or cut deals, not talk about how to improve the tech or processes. Could be argued that having tech people a the helm could make things better in this case.
mxwsn 4y ago
> overjustification effect Fair enough but not a flaw. > There is no reason why a game would accept any non-worthless NFT object minted by a different publisher No reason? Surely you can be more creative than that. > The longer the blockchain, the more time it takes to check if someone owns an NFT Not true on Ethereum. > Dupe bugs are ruinous The general point of bug damage and lack of central control is valid and dangerous yes. Duping though is not a practical concern. NFT contracts have stood the test of public interest and time. > Tax implications Finally, an actual flaw.
- Lazare 4y ago
  > > overjustification effect > Fair enough but not a flaw. ...a lot of game developers want people to enjoy their games, either out of a sense of artistry, or just because enjoyable games attract players and make money. If you're considered implementing a piece of tech and it reduces the enjoyment players get from the games, that's a huge drawback that needs to be balanced out by a major advantage. If there is no such counterweight, then yes, it's a flaw. > > There is no reason why a game would accept any non-worthless NFT object minted by a different publisher > No reason? Surely you can be more creative than that. I mean, we've been talking about the idea for years now, and no one has articulated a single plausible reason so far, but... > Duping though is not a practical concern. NFT contracts have stood the test of public interest and time. The concern isn't duplicating an NFT, eg, when it is transferred, it's about incorrectly minting too many NFTs if they're being minted by in-game actions. Imagine if you, say, kill a boss that drops rare loot and it mints an NFT for each drop. A replay attack against a poorly coded game server might mint multiple NFTs as if you had actually killed the boss multiple times. A traditional game architecture makes this easy to rollback. More broadly, if you've ever played a large MMO, you might have noticed that there's a fair amount of support requests to resolve things like: "I killed the boss, but a bug meant I didn't get loot" or "I accidentally sold a piece of loot and I want it back" or "I picked up a piece of loot that cannot be traded, but I meant to let my friend pick it up instead, can you transfer the item to them" or "I finished a quest that gave me a choice between two items, but now I've changed my mind" or "my account was compromised and all my gold and items are gone". Popular games have good customer service, which routinely resolve all those issues, hundreds or even thousands of times a day. If loot is represented by NFTs on a blockchain, and the blockchain is the actual source of truth, then none of that can be done, certainly not easily, and in most cases at all.
tukantje 4y ago
I sincerely believe in the value of these technologies. I think, similar to dotcom, there are shining stars and there are scams. However the sheer starry eyed ignorance in this sector is worrisome. Whilst optimism helps in keeping going in a startup, refusing realism in general, in an almost religious fashion, is overall not good. How widespread that is, is a systemic risk, in my opinion.
darcys22 4y ago
The counter point is everything he said is well known and discussed within the web3 circles, nothing he mentioned was ground breaking. In general speakers who are talk about their solutions to problems are interesting, while speakers who take a defeatist attitude of course are going to get ignored.
- marcell 4y ago
  Every once in a while a crypto conference invites a skeptic to speak, I guess to show they are open to criticism. It doesn’t benefit anyone. Crypto holders have already heard everyone “con” argument, and whether you agree or not just depends on your priors.
- moron4hire 4y ago
  So you are saying there are solutions to these problems? Because, if there are, this is the first I'm hearing anything about it. I've had a lot of "NFT game items are never going to be a thing" kind of arguments and not once have heard a compelling argument for them. Are you just keeping the answers a secret, or something?
  - em-bee 4y ago
    rather, if there is no solution to a problem, or at least an attempt to solve the problem, then it's not worth the discussion. maybe proving that a problem is unsolvable is useful, but failing that there is nothing new being added
    - timeon 4y ago
      If something has no solution it is dead end. You need to start from scratch.
      - em-bee 4y ago
        of course, but telling those that don't want start from scratch that isn't going to achieve much
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jsemrau 4y ago
One of the lessons learned is that people will try to maximize their gains if a financial incentive is given. And who can blame them.
quickthrower2 4y ago
Web3 conference is gonna be a cult. It is not like, say, a JS conference and someone is talking about the drawbacks of JS and while people may frown they will probably accept it. This is more like talking about celestial orbits at a flat earth meetup.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Or picking out factual errors in the bible at a church meetup.
  - em-bee 4y ago
    like young sheldon
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    Depending on which denomination I guess?
- eswat 4y ago
  You're unlikely to get healthy debate about JS at a conference where's predominantly investors that care more about ROI than the tech itself. Same thing with the web3 conference described in the OP where it seems it was predominantly for cryptocurrency investors, not hackers. Most of the hacker-focused web3 conferences I've been to have had a healthy amount of debating and criticism over things that are not working in the space. I can't deny them looking very much like a cult though…
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    Depends on the conference. I remember back in the day early 2000s Microsoft conferences they were not allowed to even mention or use Google.
sekao 4y ago
Richard is a great contrarian thinker. I remember him from GET LAMP, a documentary about text adventures, and his take on the power of text in games was really memorable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zctp972y_Eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zctp972y_Eg
outside1234 4y ago
"It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it." -Upton Sinclair
dannyobrien 4y ago
I feel like this brings some sort of (hopefully slightly premature) closure to my life in tech. When I was a young teenager in 1983, I was lucky enough to get an account on Essex MUD[1], which was (one of) the first multi-user games ever, created by Richard and Roy Trubshaw. The richness of that environment -- its lessons, ambitions, and the day-to-day experience of collaborating in a virtual game space -- had a huge influence on me. Not least were the mistakes: I remember one time, in an attempt to make it easier to manage multiple characters, the MUD developers listed any other accounts that shared the same password as your main login. Turns out that having the same password is not the same as being the owner of another account; especially with users who rotated their passwords through multiple commonly-used ones, and harvested the user accounts that popped up. By virtual of being a privileged first-adopter in Richard's MUDspace, I got to see a glimpse of a future that was, in my mind, overdetermined. I didn't know what future "MUDs" would be like, but I was absolutely sure that multi-user games would be a thing; it was just a matter of either waiting for them to appear, or working to make them arrive myself. In the meantime, the glimpse gave time to sketch out some invariants, based on experience: a rough shape of things to come. I had the same experience with the web: by engineering things so that I could access the Internet and the Web early on, I got a sense that it would be inevitable, and some insight into what that inevitability might look like. Not much, but enough to ride that wave too. Now I'm in the (waves air-quotes) crypto/web3/dweb world. I just did a demo to some non-profits of some of the tools being used in this area -- mostly IPFS, a bit of Filecoin (I work at the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web now). Unlike perhaps many in this space, I caveat the hell out of this tech, because I recognize it as being far far closer to that MUD (or 1993's Web) than, I don't know, Fortnite or Gmail. But I genuinely see this space full of technology that gives the glimpse of a direction; a thing that's not going away; and a thing that it's hard to describe and easy to miss unless you're staring straight at it. I feel like people caught in these moments often ignore the past, and overvalorize the future: I realise in retrospect I should have listened more to the people who loved amateur radio, television production, state-run communication systems, centralized publishing. But you really do have to keep listening out for the future, even when you have so much past experience to convey. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD1
- pjsg 4y ago
calibas 4y ago
Can we stop calling this stuff "Web3"?
- kibwen 4y ago
  These bags aren't gonna hold themselves.
  - kreetx 4y ago
    Unlike pyramid schemes though, the intrinsic value of bitcoin is that it can't be printed at will.
- layer8 4y ago
  It’s a bit too late for that. At least you know you can safely ignore anything with that label.
- wlonkly 4y ago
  Perhaps later Web3 will be like IPV5. "Ah, yes, that one. We skipped that one."
somsak2 4y ago
This article title is bordering on clickbait, this is a complete non-story.

155 points by SLHamlet 4y ago

ggm 4y ago

The meta-lesson for anyone reading this, is that changing people's minds when they are grounded in self-interest belief, is next to impossible. Bartle knew he was on a fools errand, and went into it with low expectations. It's interesting to see exemplifiers of the kind of 'this contradicts my interior logic so I shall ignore it' behaviour from the participants. They look very plausible. I think AGW denialism and pre-AGW fury, the people trying to deal with religious objections to evolution had this in spades: no amount of good logic and reasoning can overcome somebody who is determined to recast what "time" means to make the fossil record align with God's work over 6 days. (nobody ever asks what contract gave him a day off on the 7th) The "we don't want to pay tax" movement, loves in-game NFT type value transfer precisely because they believe there cannot, will not be any intrusion of tax levying bodies into the space. Contrariwise, the people I know in the forensic accounting space say they really like the naievity of people who forget "the cloud" is shorthand for "somebody else's computer" which naturally, is subject to MLAP requirements these days. Sharing your goods in runescape is not invisible transfer of wealth, and speaking to each other in runescape is not secret communication. 12 year olds know this. Maybe grown-ups need to remind themselves of it from time to time? Maybe people need a reminder REAMDE is fiction? Plot devices don't always translate into real-world well. I am also reminded of Varoufakis' work on in-game economics and inflation.

akira2501 4y ago
> is that changing people's minds when they are grounded in self-interest belief, is next to impossible. If all you take are short-term measurements, then this would seem to be true. In my experience, the longer-term results are more achievable then popular thinking might suggest.
- ggm 4y ago
  Death-bed conversions argue to your side of the deal, for sure. Richard Francis Burton was a disbeliever right up until he died in trieste, when his wife miraculously declared he'd changed his mind. hence, buried in hallowed ground. Less facetiously, I do think de-radicalisation works, and so a long term commitment to listening, being accepting of difference but encouraging wider thinking might work to bring committed anti-vaxx and AGW denialists back into the fold, but it demands a patience I probably lack. A geologist friend said its a life burden to commit to trying to change people's minds in his field (paleo) few can endure. He'd rather talk to people he doesn't have to argue with. I don't know Web 3.0/NFT proponents have the time free to engage in a long-term de-programming exercise. They'd be very busy actualising their net worth, one tik-tok at a time.
hanniabu 4y ago
> changing people's minds when they are grounded in self-interest belief, is next to impossible This applies to all the web2 naysayers as well
- msla 4y ago
  From what I can tell, Web 2.0 came to pass, whereas Web 3.0 has not, which rather changes the discussion around each of them. Or am I wrong about what Web 3.0 is?
  - TaylorAlexander 4y ago
    Well after "Web 2.0", there was a lot of talk about "Web 3.0", some fifteen years ago [1]. And then now the crypto people have created a term "Web3", ostensibly completely unaware of the use of the term "Web 3.0" from the past which meant something completely different. I assume these people were too young 15 years ago to remember. But "Web3" means stuff with blockchain and similar. [1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%22web%203.0%22 https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...
    - klyrs 4y ago
      Wait until you learn about an even older term, 5th gen computing. With all the hullabaloo about ML, I've been waiting for that one to make a comeback...
      - msla 4y ago
        I'm still waiting for someone to give us the next generation beyond VLSI. SDSI, for Super-Duper Scale Integration, maybe. Anyway: Fourth-Generation languages were "Steal ideas from Lisp", Fifth-Generation languages were "Steal ideas from Prolog", so Sixth-Generation languages will be "Steal ideas from everyone the ML model was trained on". Github/Microsoft is ahead of the curve on this sort of thing, as usual.
- Ensorceled 4y ago
junofan 4y ago
I dunno, the model is compelling from a business perspective because you don’t have to pay to make content up front. Instead, charge royalties on user-generated content revenue. Roblox already does this well. I wouldn’t dismiss the whole thing out of hand.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- tmpz22 4y ago
  > the model is compelling from a business perspective So is alchemy
  - reidjs 4y ago
    Are you talking about the web3 platform, alchemy? https://www.alchemy.com/ https://www.alchemy.com/
- josephg 4y ago
  It works for Roblox because the game is the content. Likewise for Mario Maker, or WC3 custom maps. It works because players evaluate the content based on how fun it is. But if I'm building something like Diablo I'll have a carefully crafted progression system for my game. If the "content" is in-game items then the best items will be the most powerful - that is, the ones which let players skip to the end of the game. And if my game's progression system can be completely ignored because someone owns a space laser they bought in another game for money, it ruins the game for everyone. - The art becomes a non-cohesive mess. - The players who don't have a space laser feel like their in-game progression has suddenly become meaningless. Clearly the real progression is being able to afford items with real money out of the game - and they don't play diablo to feel poor. - And the player who has the cool space laser has all the struggle and progress taken away from them. A sense of fulfillment is created by struggling at something then eventually succeeding. You can't feel fulfilled if you don't first struggle. (Thats what the middle of a game is for.) If you skip that by spending real money, its not fun. Even pay-to-win games have loot box mechanics and a money based progression system for the people who pay. You can make the art be cosmetic only, but that has its own set of problems. Fashion is valuable in part because of scarcity. Fortnite, Team Fortress and Dota2 create that scarcity by controlling what assets are included in the game. Scarcity is ruined if anyone can mint another NFT of the same jpeg with a single pixel changed. And you have the obvious problems of people drawing "adult content", and so on. It works for VRChat, but most of VRChat's content is off limits to most players (on devices like the Quest) because of how non-child friendly it can be. An in-house art team could easily be cheaper than the moderation team you'd need. Virtual worlds with cryptocurrency derived items seems to be a lot of smoke and not a lot of fire. Given how many people are excited by the idea, and how much money there is to be made if someone gets it right, I find it telling that there still aren't any compelling games built on these concepts.
fswd 4y ago
what does the acronym AGW stand for? Can't figure out if you mean global warming or the story of Genesis.
- codetrotter 4y ago
  I figured it means Anti Global Warming
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  Anthropogenic Global Warming. Refers to the increased warming of the Earth's atmosphere due to human activity.
UIUC_06 4y ago
I'm not a denier of AGW. However, I think you're wrong to lump all those people in with anti-Darwinists. AGW comes freighted with Green baggage, and some of the people who reject it are largely rejecting the Green baggage. They suspect, not without good reason, that the "cures" for AGW are measures that Greens wanted anyway. And calling them "denialists" just insures that they'll never listen to you. Some of them are, of course, religious objectors who think the world was created in 6 days. The task is to separate those people from the rest.
- Aloha 4y ago
  Some of the solutions are things the greens have largely rejected, like nuclear energy. The largest rejectors of nuclear energy are the environmentalists, some of which are very anti-climate change.
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  I just want to point out that there are many shades of "Green" (though today, unlike in the 70s(?), perhaps none of them are critical of the AGW concept) : https://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-10-09/what-shade-of-green-are-you/ https://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-10-09/what-shade-of-...
- ggm 4y ago
  Yes. I would agree my pejorative language doesn't help. But if I can draw an analogy, this is also a function of polarised debate in the wider sense: it's impossible for anyone now to express views positive of Palestinian self-determination because the 'overton window' of tolerance for the idea, is consumed by the meme of 'you must be a self hating jew' for anyone who is jewish, and 'you must hate jews' for anyone else. So, 'because you are green I oppose all the things you believe in because I hate the green/left agenda' is a form of denialism of the legitemacy of the underlying concern. Finding the bridge to "I agree it exists, I just disagree about solutions, like I want nuclear and you don't but we agree the problem exists' is now almost unsayable for some people. An observation I've made to others is that old school feminism is really tainted now for a younger cohort. They reject all the achievements of their aunts, mothers, grandmothers, because of a disagreement over the non-binary status in gender/sex. The language used here is (to me at least) comparable to the language used in the 'hate the greens' thing.
btilly 4y ago
There is a variant on the halo effect which explains a lot of this. We have a tendency to choose sides. Once we do, we easily remember the good things about our side, and have a hard time believing the bad things. This is exactly reversed for the other side. It takes active work to remain balanced. So if you're on the side of technology, it is easy to talk about all the ways it improves our lives. And easy to discount the environmental impacts. Conversely if you're opposed to technology, you can easily quantify the harms. But will have an unduly rosy image of the benefits of natural things. Likewise it is hard for those who have lined up with web3, crypto, and so on to even hear well-informed and reasoned skepticism.

mysterydip 4y ago

Almost missed the footnote at the bottom, but his "Designing Virtual Worlds" book is available as a free PDF in the link there. I read it cover to cover previously and it had a profound effect on my designs going forward.

microtherion 4y ago
I agree with that recommendation; it's an amazing book. I wonder why there doesn't seem to be nearly as much comparable writing from authors of other MUDs, at least not to my knowledge.
- mysterydip 4y ago
  Before I read it, I had so many ideas that were going to solve the woes of multiplayer games. Pretty much all of them were described in the book as already tried, and here's why they didn't work. Gave me a whole new appreciation for the work the pioneers of those worlds did.

trynewideas 4y ago

> I had already pointed out that we've long had a way of converting an object in one game into one of equal value in another: money. Sell your bow and arrow for cash or crypto-tokens, then use those to buy what you want in the other game. There's no need to decide how to translate it into a space game world where ranged weapons are far more commonplace; you will always get a replacement of the exact same value in the second world as what your bow and arrow gave you in the first world.

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moron4hire 4y ago
That's another great point for why NFT game items are never going to be a thing: game companies don't want users to be able to trade items. If they did, it'd already be possible the easy way with cash. But it's not and they try to crack down pretty hard on anyone they catch engaging in outside market making.
- reidjs 4y ago
  Just because that’s true for most games, doesn’t mean it’s true for every game. I could imagine building a game where p2p trading is one of the core mechanics and I’m sure it’s already been done. Not my type of game, but maybe someone’s
  - Lazare 4y ago
    Er...trading items between players is a core part of basically all MMOs, many ARPGs, some TCGs, etc. It's a huge thing in many games, including some of the most popular games on the planet. ...none of them use or need NFTs or a blockchain, and in every instance I know of, the existence of such would be actively harmful. For a blockchain to make sense, you need a number of factors, probably chief among them that there is no single trusted entity that can run the DB. For bitcoin, that makes (some) sense. There is no Bitcoin Inc that could plausibly track the balance of every BTC wallet, after all! For World of Warcraft gold it makes no sense; Activision Blizzard is already running a centralised database of how much gold every player has, and every player WoW has obviously trusts Activision to run the DB, just like they they trust them to run every other aspect of the game (eg, content creation, balance tweaks, competitive content, etc.). WoW (like any MMO) is an extremely tightly curated experience.

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gizmo 4y ago

A common conceit in tech circles is that you could easily make the world a better place, just put technical people in charge and the rest will take care of itself. As this post so clearly illustrates, techies can be just as delusional and blinkered as everybody else.

scaredginger 4y ago
There are far more social problems in the world than technological ones
- LastTrain 4y ago
  How would a comparison like that even be possible.
  - scaredginger 4y ago
    I didn't intend to be taken literally, I was more commenting on the habit of trying to find technical solutions to social problems while ignoring the underlying causes
eswat 4y ago
Do we know that most of the people at this Crypto Circle conference are techies though? From the brief description it just sounds like your run-of-the-mill cryptocurrency enthusiast conference and mostly for “investors”. It’s not a builder conference where it's mostly hackers or technical leaders, and those do exist. I’ve been to both types of conferences and I’m not surprised Bartle got the cold shoulder by most of the audience if the conference is of the former. People are usually there to seek alpha or cut deals, not talk about how to improve the tech or processes. Could be argued that having tech people a the helm could make things better in this case.

mxwsn 4y ago

> overjustification effect Fair enough but not a flaw. > There is no reason why a game would accept any non-worthless NFT object minted by a different publisher No reason? Surely you can be more creative than that. > The longer the blockchain, the more time it takes to check if someone owns an NFT Not true on Ethereum. > Dupe bugs are ruinous The general point of bug damage and lack of central control is valid and dangerous yes. Duping though is not a practical concern. NFT contracts have stood the test of public interest and time. > Tax implications Finally, an actual flaw.

Lazare 4y ago
> > overjustification effect > Fair enough but not a flaw. ...a lot of game developers want people to enjoy their games, either out of a sense of artistry, or just because enjoyable games attract players and make money. If you're considered implementing a piece of tech and it reduces the enjoyment players get from the games, that's a huge drawback that needs to be balanced out by a major advantage. If there is no such counterweight, then yes, it's a flaw. > > There is no reason why a game would accept any non-worthless NFT object minted by a different publisher > No reason? Surely you can be more creative than that. I mean, we've been talking about the idea for years now, and no one has articulated a single plausible reason so far, but... > Duping though is not a practical concern. NFT contracts have stood the test of public interest and time. The concern isn't duplicating an NFT, eg, when it is transferred, it's about incorrectly minting too many NFTs if they're being minted by in-game actions. Imagine if you, say, kill a boss that drops rare loot and it mints an NFT for each drop. A replay attack against a poorly coded game server might mint multiple NFTs as if you had actually killed the boss multiple times. A traditional game architecture makes this easy to rollback. More broadly, if you've ever played a large MMO, you might have noticed that there's a fair amount of support requests to resolve things like: "I killed the boss, but a bug meant I didn't get loot" or "I accidentally sold a piece of loot and I want it back" or "I picked up a piece of loot that cannot be traded, but I meant to let my friend pick it up instead, can you transfer the item to them" or "I finished a quest that gave me a choice between two items, but now I've changed my mind" or "my account was compromised and all my gold and items are gone". Popular games have good customer service, which routinely resolve all those issues, hundreds or even thousands of times a day. If loot is represented by NFTs on a blockchain, and the blockchain is the actual source of truth, then none of that can be done, certainly not easily, and in most cases at all.

tukantje 4y ago

I sincerely believe in the value of these technologies. I think, similar to dotcom, there are shining stars and there are scams. However the sheer starry eyed ignorance in this sector is worrisome. Whilst optimism helps in keeping going in a startup, refusing realism in general, in an almost religious fashion, is overall not good. How widespread that is, is a systemic risk, in my opinion.

darcys22 4y ago

The counter point is everything he said is well known and discussed within the web3 circles, nothing he mentioned was ground breaking. In general speakers who are talk about their solutions to problems are interesting, while speakers who take a defeatist attitude of course are going to get ignored.

marcell 4y ago
Every once in a while a crypto conference invites a skeptic to speak, I guess to show they are open to criticism. It doesn’t benefit anyone. Crypto holders have already heard everyone “con” argument, and whether you agree or not just depends on your priors.
moron4hire 4y ago
So you are saying there are solutions to these problems? Because, if there are, this is the first I'm hearing anything about it. I've had a lot of "NFT game items are never going to be a thing" kind of arguments and not once have heard a compelling argument for them. Are you just keeping the answers a secret, or something?
- em-bee 4y ago
  rather, if there is no solution to a problem, or at least an attempt to solve the problem, then it's not worth the discussion. maybe proving that a problem is unsolvable is useful, but failing that there is nothing new being added
  - timeon 4y ago
    If something has no solution it is dead end. You need to start from scratch.
    - em-bee 4y ago
      of course, but telling those that don't want start from scratch that isn't going to achieve much

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jsemrau 4y ago

One of the lessons learned is that people will try to maximize their gains if a financial incentive is given. And who can blame them.

quickthrower2 4y ago

Web3 conference is gonna be a cult. It is not like, say, a JS conference and someone is talking about the drawbacks of JS and while people may frown they will probably accept it. This is more like talking about celestial orbits at a flat earth meetup.

Gigachad 4y ago
Or picking out factual errors in the bible at a church meetup.
- em-bee 4y ago
  like young sheldon
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  Depending on which denomination I guess?
eswat 4y ago
You're unlikely to get healthy debate about JS at a conference where's predominantly investors that care more about ROI than the tech itself. Same thing with the web3 conference described in the OP where it seems it was predominantly for cryptocurrency investors, not hackers. Most of the hacker-focused web3 conferences I've been to have had a healthy amount of debating and criticism over things that are not working in the space. I can't deny them looking very much like a cult though…
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  Depends on the conference. I remember back in the day early 2000s Microsoft conferences they were not allowed to even mention or use Google.

sekao 4y ago

Richard is a great contrarian thinker. I remember him from GET LAMP, a documentary about text adventures, and his take on the power of text in games was really memorable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zctp972y_Eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zctp972y_Eg

outside1234 4y ago

"It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it." -Upton Sinclair

dannyobrien 4y ago

I feel like this brings some sort of (hopefully slightly premature) closure to my life in tech. When I was a young teenager in 1983, I was lucky enough to get an account on Essex MUD[1], which was (one of) the first multi-user games ever, created by Richard and Roy Trubshaw. The richness of that environment -- its lessons, ambitions, and the day-to-day experience of collaborating in a virtual game space -- had a huge influence on me. Not least were the mistakes: I remember one time, in an attempt to make it easier to manage multiple characters, the MUD developers listed any other accounts that shared the same password as your main login. Turns out that having the same password is not the same as being the owner of another account; especially with users who rotated their passwords through multiple commonly-used ones, and harvested the user accounts that popped up. By virtual of being a privileged first-adopter in Richard's MUDspace, I got to see a glimpse of a future that was, in my mind, overdetermined. I didn't know what future "MUDs" would be like, but I was absolutely sure that multi-user games would be a thing; it was just a matter of either waiting for them to appear, or working to make them arrive myself. In the meantime, the glimpse gave time to sketch out some invariants, based on experience: a rough shape of things to come. I had the same experience with the web: by engineering things so that I could access the Internet and the Web early on, I got a sense that it would be inevitable, and some insight into what that inevitability might look like. Not much, but enough to ride that wave too. Now I'm in the (waves air-quotes) crypto/web3/dweb world. I just did a demo to some non-profits of some of the tools being used in this area -- mostly IPFS, a bit of Filecoin (I work at the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web now). Unlike perhaps many in this space, I caveat the hell out of this tech, because I recognize it as being far far closer to that MUD (or 1993's Web) than, I don't know, Fortnite or Gmail. But I genuinely see this space full of technology that gives the glimpse of a direction; a thing that's not going away; and a thing that it's hard to describe and easy to miss unless you're staring straight at it. I feel like people caught in these moments often ignore the past, and overvalorize the future: I realise in retrospect I should have listened more to the people who loved amateur radio, television production, state-run communication systems, centralized publishing. But you really do have to keep listening out for the future, even when you have so much past experience to convey. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD1

pjsg 4y ago

calibas 4y ago

Can we stop calling this stuff "Web3"?

kibwen 4y ago
These bags aren't gonna hold themselves.
- kreetx 4y ago
  Unlike pyramid schemes though, the intrinsic value of bitcoin is that it can't be printed at will.
layer8 4y ago
It’s a bit too late for that. At least you know you can safely ignore anything with that label.
wlonkly 4y ago
Perhaps later Web3 will be like IPV5. "Ah, yes, that one. We skipped that one."

somsak2 4y ago

This article title is bordering on clickbait, this is a complete non-story.