Thread by @larsiusprime

One thing about NFT's that some people from my side (the skeptic side) don't always get is that a huge amount of these "art" NFT's values is tied up with speculative value in the promise that these things are going to be embodied in interactive apps/games described in whitepapers

That is in itself not a reason to be any less skeptical, of course (in many cases it's a reason to be *more* skeptical) but if you were wondering why people put so much money into a digital receipt for a jpeg of a digital monkey, that's part of it

And there's the ongoing hope, that I feel is fairly undercooked, that somehow, magically, MULTIPLE 3rd party developers are going to be incentivized to embody popular NFT collections in their app.

To some degree this is happening! It feels undercooked to me, but still watching.

So it's not just, somebody owns a digital receipt on a magic cryptographic database in the sky to a jpeg of a monkey, but also the promise that somebody's going to make this monkey sing and dance and play the guitar and shoot space lasers (oversimplifying a bit)

Personally I think people have not really thought out the infrastructure and the incentives here and that we have plenty of partial precedent for this sort of thing already:
- Kickstarters
- Kongpanions
- Amiibo
- Every 3rd party game platform API that failed to gain traction

Ultimately, if you want third parties to embody a player's pre-existing digital wealth from an outside ecosystem, you need to give them a reason (typically a *financial* reason) to do that. This is why Kongpanions and Amiibo didn't get much uptake.

As for interoperability, the technical considerations are way more complicated than most people are prepared to grasp, especially given how crypto gaming lacks a lot of deep gamedev talent.

Yes, it's @raphkoster citation time again:

raphkoster.com/2021/09/23/how…

As always, I like to present this as a challenge. I'm calling your bluff but if you come up with a straight flush I'll gladly eat my words! Make your stuff live up to its promises.

Going back to Kongpanions as maybe people don't know what they were -- they were little virtual pets that the wildly successful flash portal Kongregate.com let players buy, hoping that 3rd parties would embody them in their apps through an API. Got very little uptake.

On the other hand, the REST of Kongregate's API -- achievements and stats, were SUPER successful and had really high uptake, because there was a direct financial incentive for developers to do so -- it unlocked access to promotion for the game and badges, which players loved.

The app that EVERYBODY cites here is the loot project:

lootproject.com

Which started off kinda interesting but seems to have stalled without yet creating anything that "wows" me. Basically someone minted a few thousand JSON files with randomized D&D/Diablo-style loot

Shortly after the loot was minted, a bunch of people started making little apps that embodied the loot and visualized it in various ways. But after initial excitement wore off we have yet to see anything super cool, and I don't see the incentive structure to bring it about

There's a lot of "if you build it they will come" flying around this space. I swear I'm not here just to yell at people making crypto games and poo poo everybody.

What I *AM* here to do is ask hard questions and kick these tires and subject everything to rigorous analysis.

And so far there's been a significant dearth of serious analysis. The FOMO is hitting everybody super hard. It may yet be the case that you can use something, somewhere, in this big pile of tech usefully and responsibly but it's also true that most of what's out there is not that