Why discs instead of cartridges, which are currently the superior physical option? I personally try to buy physical whenever possible, because I don’t trust companies to not ban my account and flush hundreds of dollars of games down the toilet, and it generally feels better to have just that little extra bit more ownership over my own property.
Social and conversational engines (think Stardew Valley or Animal Crossing) tend to make me feel a lot lonelier than straight NPC dialogue. I think it’s because NPCs are shallow enough that I don’t see them as people, just people-shaped quest dispensers, but when you add social systems on top they’re inevitably going to fall short and that friend-shape turns into an NPC and my brain realizes I was playing alone the whole time. I’m really looking forward to the integration of language models into games so I can actually socialize with these characters, even when they’re more shallow than real people.
Weapon durability becomes a lot more bearable when you streamline the decision-making process to “do I want this stick” and “which stick do I want the least to make room for this new stick” and/or treat it as an exercise in zen. Leave your burdens at the shore of the dao, dear Bandicoot.
I had a surprising amount of fun with the Dragon Quest games, DQ Builder I/II and Treasure Hunters. Squeaky clean polish and very focused, nearly arcade-like gameplay. Don’t forget the various Marios and Kirby Forgotten Land.
Cadence of Hyrule is a bit of a weird departure but very fun and replayable with a kickass track. You can get the Binding of Isaac physically, as well as the Ori collection which is incredible and Stardew Valley. Moonligher is a bit repetitive but that can be good comfort. Celeste, if you’ve never played it, is potentially life changing if you struggle with perfectionism and/or anxiety.
For a very obscure digital game, Chasm was an amazing randomized full-length metroidvania.
I most associate web3 with decentralization. That includes the Fediverse, IPFS, and (begrudgingly) crypto. Of these, crypto seems the most like a solution in search of a problem - Bitcoin had a problem, centralized currency, but fintech got ahold of it and treated it like a stock asset instead of a currency.
It seems a bit like the toxic hype is paralleled with true hype in a weird way, as if astroturfing was trying to draw attention towards their perversions. For instance, edge computing (true decentralization) is hyped as cloud computing (centralized services which are somewhere else). Language models (which can act as general-purpose inference engines) are hyped as chatbots which replace humans (very, very poorly). Or heck, crypto as a means to make money rather than a way to coordinate trustless actors - best use-case I’ve seen is FileCoin, which incentivizes people to host IPFS chunks, a measurable good to society which gets compensation.
This is a very good point - it isn’t (and can’t be) a feature, it will only ever be an implementation detail unless you’re selling snake oil.
Capitalism wins again!
Could you detail what negatives come with blockchains in games? I’d like to better understand your perspective and position. I don’t know of any games that use blockchains and aren’t some kind of scam, but then again it’s not a hammer’s fault if it’s used to bludgeon someone to death. If a hypothetical good dev somehow put a blockchain in, what negatives are there due to that specific inclusion which aren’t the result of malicious intent?
Or better yet, games where you get monopoly money for pretending to do a job in the game
What do you think about arguments for using it in cross-game “metaverse” type trading? It’s another buzzword but it would make centralization of the data hard to impossible.
My intuition is we’re seeing the first wave of snake oil salesmen adopting Animal Magnetism Quantum Whatsits to Manifest your Holograms who poisoned the well and drove everyone away, then in 10-20 years someone will have a good idea using it at which point the scammers are no longer around to ruin it for everyone. What do you think of that idea?
Can you unpack this? Not saying you’re wrong, I’d just a clearer idea of what it demonstrates.
The article is more correct than what I’ve been seeing in this thread - their inclusion doesn’t make games fun, which is correct. People are essentializing the use-cases of an algorithm, some saying NFTs make a game fun (somehow?) and others pointing out that they’re trash cash grabs that seem to actively make the experience worse.
My mistake, I should’ve read the article. I didn’t think OP editorialized the title.
Efficiency and performance are valuable, not entertaining. My point is that “boring” is a category error for these things, they aren’t game mechanics and they have no entertainment value.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say there’s no viable use-case, but every example I’ve seen has been a terrible misappropriation. This is largely because they make the mistake of inclusion of an algorithm to somehow be featureful or entertaining. As I see it, this discussion is a bit like ransomware becoming very prolific and people are saying there are no viable use-cases for encryption because it’s been used to scam so many people.
To be clear, literally all NFTs are is a key: value mapping on a blockchain. That has nothing to do with finance, art, games, or anything else associated with them at present - the value of a tool is in how it’s used. They’ve been used extensively by shitty people, so now people only know of the shitty ways to use them.
Calling blockchains in video games “boring” is like calling backface culling “boring”. It’s an algorithm, not a game mechanic. Companies make it boring by treating it like one.
They aren’t saying crypto is a ponzi scheme, they’re saying play to earn is a ponzi scheme. Saying pay to earn isn’t a ponzi scheme because more money is minted is like saying a ponzi scheme isn’t a ponzi scheme because the fed prints more money. Ponzi schemes are a business model where the majority of revenue comes from sign-up fees and investments, the economy they exist within is irrelevant.
That being said a lot of cryptobros seem to want to use crypto as a ponzi scheme so it’s easy to see where people get that impression. Pump and dump can be framed as one - the initial investment is people buying the crypto or dedicating resources to mining it giving the illusion of increasing value, then the people with the most crypto (top of the pyramid) “dump”, causing the model to collapse and extracting surplus value from people’s investment. This isn’t inherent to crypto more than any financial system though, it’s a side effect of the economy being small enough that individual actors can cause a total market collapse and people treating it as an investment rather than a currency (possibly promoted by crypto being deflationary?)
TCGs use fungible resources, though. Except for very rare cases like misprints or limited releases, two cards are completely interchangeable so long as they’re the same card. I could maybe see Pokemon using NFTs because they’re supposed to be your special semi-sentient animal friend, so making them non-fungible is a natural progression. They’ve approximated this with IV and PV, but ultimately you can still clone your shiny pikachu with hacks. An NFT pokemon could have a personal history on the blockchain (battles/contests won/lost, grooming/play sessions, parental/trainer involvement, regions they’ve seen, battle partners they’ve had, etc etc etc) which affects its behavior in subtle ways that simple numbers can’t achieve. You could do this without NFTs using a centralized service, but I given the radical backwards and forwards compatibility of the games decentralization might make it a lot simpler to implement.
Note too that this is a strictly non-financial application of NFT. You could potentially exchange money out-of-band like you would in selling a card, but it doesn’t require the pokemon cost anything. If I were to implement it, I’d probably avoid calling it “NFT” like the plague because it’d pull in cryptobros like a swarm of locusts and ruin the fun for normal people who don’t want to pay $3000 for a Zigzagoon.
Can’t be a billionaire if you pass a certain threshold of self-awareness, it’s the rules.