“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by the madness of trying to understand Axie Infinity.”
Allen Ginsberg might have written that had he been alive in October 2021.
Or as John Maynard Keynes could have put it;
“Blockchain gaming will remain irrational longer than you can be bothered to try and understand it.”
It’s a state of affairs I’m increasingly seeing (maybe even encouraging in various Discord threads) as some very smart and successful people in the games industry have been awakened to a new technology that threatens to turn the past 35 years of conventional thinking on its head.
A new way to be wrong
In many ways, it’s a laudable position in which to find yourself: they are trying really hard to understand a new thing.
Problem is blockchain games aren’t coherent in the way that the past was, certainly not now, maybe never.
There’s the blockchain infrastructure piece, the tokenomics - flow design, minting distribution and schedule - the feature roadmap, the gradual decentralisation, maybe a cheeky DAO thrown in for good measure, not to forget the uncontrollable urge of billions of dollars of crypto liquidity just waiting to take a huge bite out your carefully laid plans.
Now maybe I’m so far down the rabbithole, I’ve actually given up worrying about whether Axie Infinity’s economy is rational and sustainable. Probably I’ve already failed the Maynard Keynes test.
On the other hand, I do think the longer you spend in the blockchain sector, the more you realise this is an environment with its own rules.
Maybe like Wile E. Coyote in the Road Runner cartoon, we’re already over the cliff-edge, gravity will eventually kick in and we’ll all end up in a mangled heap at the bottom of the canyon.
Mostly though I think when you’re building out an entirely new way of making games, communities and all the stuff inbetween, no-one has the mental maps to tie everything into neat knots and sign off on the due diligence.
Of course, this isn’t to say that thinking deeply about how things could or should work is a waste of time. If nothing else, it will filter out the 99% of over-exuberance or plain scams that have no chance of success.
If I read another whitepaper from a team of ex-management consultants who are making the next MMORPG on the blockchain, I might end up full degen.
Yet, in my experience, it’s those with the strongest opinions on their own analytical abilities who lack the flexibility to accept almost any aspect of blockchain.
In the parlance of Silicon Valley, they’re not comfortable feeling uncomfortable, and that’s fine. This wild west isn’t for everyone.
Or as Ginsberg memorably puts it in Howl; “O victory forget your underwear we’re free”