A game developer who wanted to speak about the “future of game design” at Brazil’s International Games Festival instead surprised attendees with a talk on “Why NFTs are a nightmare.”
Festival sponsors 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 participants and sponsors alike with his statement against crypto gaming.
“These people are outsiders here, they don’t matter,” Venturelli told PCGamer after the event. “They’re just trying to buy their relevance because they have no real impact on the future of our industry. If you just give them that space unquestioningly, you’re just giving them exactly what they want and buying their narrative that they’re relevant.”
The title change was a gimmick, as the developer began his talk on emerging gaming trends before dropping the title and changing the subject, to which the audience applauded.
And although the change of subject was controversial, it was clarified beforehand with the festival organizers and not censored – despite sponsorship.
“I heard that the sponsors got really angry,” says Venturelli. “They tried to break into the conversation while I was speaking but the organization wouldn’t let them. This doesn’t surprise me because the organization didn’t censor me on a single point, they prevented me from saying what I wanted to say on the slides. I gave them access to the slides before the presentation. There was never any intention on their part to shut me up or anything like that.”
Venturelli’s presentation was posted on YouTube and his slides were translated into English. It notes that “everything Play to Earn can do…has already existed (but more efficiently) in other games for over a decade”.
However, much of his reasoning boils down to trust.
“Computationally, like in real life, if you don’t trust the people you’re working with, you have to expend a lot more energy to achieve the same things,” Venturelli told PCGamer. “If I live with you in the same house and we don’t trust each other, I have to hide my valuables every time I leave my house. I need to take stock of the things I own and maybe put cameras or locks in things. When I get home I need to check everything and see if you’ve messed up any of my things and make sure you haven’t put them in my room come when i sleep and so on shit.
“It’s so much energy I have to expend just to exist in a room with you because I don’t trust you. I think that’s a very good metaphor for how computationally blockchain works and what the underlying philosophical idea behind it is: ‘We want a world without any kind of centralized authority because we can’t ever trust any of them.’ And I think that’s the opposite of what we want as a society.”
Elsewhere in the gaming industry, Ubisoft launched an NFT platform claiming gamers wouldn’t understand, while EA has backed off its initial enthusiasm for the topic and Square Enix is exploring the technology.