SPECIAL BONUS EPISODE OF THE NEAR FUTURE LABORATORY PODCAST FEATURING HIGHLIGHTS FROM GENERAL SEMINAR N°10!

This guy has had success in both precious metals AND crypto! Coolest Experts in FOREVER! (And was once a WALL STREET EXEC!)

Yeah. CRYPTO GAMING. That’s like..games and blockchains, right? Or pay-to-play-to-earn, as I’ve heard it referred to? Or is it, like..being able to take your broadsword from Fortnite into Call of Duty or something?

VEGAS BABY! VEGAS!

I feel like that fish-like cracked-egg guy up there who’s probably worth a shitton of ETH and is wondering how they got in a crypto game and basically — WTF is going on??

I feel like that fish-like cracked-egg guy up there who’s probably worth a shitton of ETH and is wondering how they got in a crypto game and basically — WTF is going on??

GENERAL SEMINAR N°10 — CRYPTO GAMING

Join me, Julian Bleecker, my co-hosts Katie Dreke and Nicolas Nova — along with extra special guest participant, my pal Ian Bogost, [game designer and professor so, like..there’s an adult in the room thankfully..] to discuss with us CRYPTO GAMING so we can all collectively make some meaning to all this barely sensical stuff and get to somewhere near the bottom of this mishegoss.

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I heard that that game Axie Infinity — which I’ve never played and I’m not even sure exactly how one plays it if one wanted to — is earning some people in the Philipines 10x what they could earn otherwise in the local economy..if they were able to find a job to earn. And it might be that there are now the blockchain’s equivalent of pay-day loan entities who will loan you the required game token so you can get in on the action. Maybe their not extractive like the extractive pay-day loan folks, I can’t say. But loaning someone an asset so they can work to hopefully make some filthy lucre has one of those B.O. smells where you’re not sure if that’s bad B.O. or the good B.O.

Really — I have no idea. But I want to have more of an idea because something at the vanguard of consciousness is changing because the other day my nephew seemed to have it all figured out and that’s just..amazing and-also I want to know.

But anyway — CRYPTO GAMING — I been hearing about this one. Games with some kind of blockchain mechanics attached to them. I don’t know. Not sure I entirely get it. What’s there to “get” anyway?

Oh. Right. Filthy Lucre is to be got — or maybe just a reasonable income.

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And anyway – I wonder what that’s doing to the local economy there in these Philippines communities that are cryptoized..like, if you have a bunch of people earning 10x what their neighbors are earning? Can that be good? Does that start to look like my Los Angeles where there are dire homeless encampments down the street from the $6MM mansions of game show hosts?

Crypto’s Cool! Gaming’s Cool!

Seriously. It’s cool, which doesn’t necessarily mean good or fair. The other day I tried to get in on Sarah Friend’s latest gamified “drop” to purchase an NFT for about the price of a mass-market hardcover book so, like..not extractive and-plus this was someone’s creative work that I could identify with so that seemed like a no-brainer price-wise. Anyway, I missed out because the network got clogged up like a grease-filled kitchen sink so my earnest efforts failed. Nevertheless — it’s a game. In the cryptochain where the owners (let’s just call them that..) of the NFTs have to work together to unlock a trap door (effectively..) that leads to something else. Beautiful. Working together. Community formed through blockchain mechanics. Is it a game? Sorta..because it’s ludic and curious and spontaneous in a way.

Let’s figure this out. I don’t mean to sound doom-y — I’m just really confused in a beautiful way knowing that something is changing or at least “going on” in the space where blockchain meets the business of games.

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