Thread by @FEhrsam

An abundance of high quality and cheap digital entertainment = a lot less young men working. Excellent piece by Andrew Cortina.
kortina.nyc/essays/kinky-l…

The optimistic view: this is a rapidly growing new frontier offering lots of opportunity, it just happens to be digital rather than physical (ex: space).

I suspect blockchain-based digital assets will make virtual economies very real. People will be able to earn their entire living in virtual worlds in the next 10-15 years, changing the definition of “work” itself.

In 2006 I sold my high end World of Warcraft account for $2,500. I spent 3,000 hours playing. That's $0.87 an hour 😅.

Yet we've also come quite far. In 2005 the largest prize pool in a year for a game was $500k (Painkiller). In 2019 it will be $100 million (Fortnite), with the winning team of a single tournament in 2018 taking home $11 million (DOTA 2's The International).

The trajectory is clear: more people are playing games, their economies are getting bigger, the closed economies of these games hurt both trust and extensibility (see boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/general-d…), and crypto will make these economies open.

The extensibility point is key. Games are built on modding culture. Counter Strike and Team Fortress were mods (aka forks) of Half Life. League of Legends copied DOTA which was a mod of Warcraft 3. Fortnite copied PUBG, a mod of DayZ: Battle Royale, which was a mod of ARMA2.

Crypto supercharges gaming modding culture: the lifeblood of the gaming industry since 1998.

Why? The building blocks are more likely to be open and thus stackable. Want to create the biggest game out there? Create the most attractive one to extend! Perhaps the best future business model for future video games is creating a platform.

These games can start by looking deceptively simple. In some cases they may not explicitly even be a "game" (see reddit.com/r/place). But simple building blocks quickly give way to complicated emergent behavior. Said another way: fun and deep gameplay!

Modding is a beautiful thing. It's an incredible outlet for hands on learning and creativity in a world where traditional education is becoming less relevant and young people are increasingly struggling to find purpose.

Video games taught me what is required for excellence. I worked incredibly hard to eventually lead the best team in the world at a small game (America's Army) in 2005 and that experience has helped set my internal bar ever since.

I learned as much about logic, spatial reasoning, and physics from virtual worlds (especially CAD software) as I did from school. Portal 2 has been used in multiple studies to show dramatic boosts in cognitive abilities; perhaps even more than traditional schooling.

Debate will continue to rage on whether or not the gaming trend is good for society. But a few things are clear to me:
- It's growing fast with no sign of reversal
- I've experienced life-changing benefits
- Crypto will take it to a whole new level by making these economies real

.@VitalikButerin @jcp @tomerafek @jaekwon @dominic_w @karl_dot_tech @evanashapiro @elaineshi @dawnsongtweets @EliBenSasson @ArthurB when scalable forms of blockchains please 😀