Who knew Aggro Crab was so influential?
The hitherto unknown US indie game dev was the first Team 17-published outfit to come out all guns blazing.
“We believe NFTs cannot be environmentally friendly, or useful, and really are just an overall fucking grift,” it stated, obviously oblivious to the MetaWorms’ press release that goes on ad infinitum about its environmental credentials.
Not only would the project have donated to Refeed Farms’ vertical worm beds but the energy required was compared to the annual kettle usage of 11 households.
Presumably this is a small amount of energy but that’s hard for me to tell as I do drink a lot of tea.
The size of a cow
Now, I can understand why many blockchain projects are championing their green status but my view has always been as we don’t go around telling Argentina it shouldn’t be using “as much electricity as Argentina” — (or whatever country is compared to Bitcoin’s energy usage) — so the question shouldn’t be whether Bitcoin should be using the energy consumption of Argentina or not.
The question is whether the (environmental) cost of Bitcoin (and other proof-of-work chains as Ethereum is currently) is commensurate with the value provided.
For me, an entirely new type of internet-sovereign money is pretty damn valuable. I’d take it over Argentina any day (joke)!
But back to Aggro Crab.
Of course, the two-man team wasn’t influential, merely quickest to throw up its hands in horror at the very thought of NFTs. How very dare you.
It was a queue including Overcooked dev Ghost Town Games, which is one of the more popular titles published by Team 17 — a publicly-owned company on the London Stock Exchange.
The fear of share price impact is always a dangerous pressure point in these situations.
Then it was time for the shock news that some teams within Team 17 “had no knowledge of its controversial plans”, as if it’s standard practice to run all commercial decisions through a quorate session of the workers’ council.
Hilariously Team 17 refers to its staff as “Teamsters”; at least it did in its U-turn tweet cancelling the MetaWorms project. It has a rather different meaning in a US context.
Tell me no lies
By this stage, it’s clear to me that the entire ‘NFTs in games’ outrage has very little to do with NFTs and games.
It’s best considered part of the progressive movement that is post-religiously prescriptive about the moral behavior of companies and governments in North America and parts of western Europe.
“Fuck NFTs” is about as coherent a policy as “Defund the Police” but its incoherence doesn’t dent its power. Actually it enhances it through deliberate whataboutism.
That stated, it’s been interesting to see that the level of debate around these tweets is sometimes less overwhelmingly negative than you might imagine. Certainly that’s the case when it comes to Team 17’s U-turn tweet.
Let’s take one dialogue in that tweetstream as an example.
@ruesch_brandon writes:
“It blows my mind, I’ve been a gamer my whole life and crypto and nfts is all about bringing money back to the gamers with p2e,every blockchain game I’ve went into has paid me more money than I’ve ever received in 20+ years of traditional gaming but let’s keep fighting it, smart.”
Whereas @cauboidoespasso replies
“it blows my mind that some people are so detached from reality and brainwashed by neoliberalism that everything has to be some sort of financial investment. most people just want to experience art for its own sake, not turn it into a fucking job.”
So there.
The elephant on the blockchain
And this is really where the debate is now centered: environmental concerns are merely a neat framing mechanic.
Like MetaWorms, pretty much every blockchain game is bending over backwards to ameliorate and explain its electricity use. But Bitcoin (and pre-proof-of-stake Ethereum etc) isn’t hated primarily because of environmental concerns. Even if all blockchains used 100% green energy, people would still complain.
With NFTs too, energy usage isn’t the issue. Instead it’s become an existential issue for a certain vocalized group which defines itself on ideological purity, albeit it for ill-defined ‘neoliberalistic’ reasons.
As a related aside, the same dynamic has also be seen in the decision of Germany and some US states to shut down their nuclear power stations. This isn’t to say that real-world decisions aren’t complex, offering many shades of grey. I guess you can make a case for shutting down nuclear power as part of the green energy revolution. It’s just not a very good argument.
Instead, irrespective of nuclear power stations’ carbon footprint or their views that reducing carbon emissions is a global priority, some people want to shut down nuclear power stations formally as a large ‘p’ political act.
Similarly people want to shut down blockchain and NFTs as a small ‘p’ political act, not because they understand anything about them; because they can.
And that’s the real kicker about MetaWorms.
It wasn’t a particularly thoughtful, thought-though or explained project. Clearly Team 17 didn’t have any idea how it was going to bring value to the Worms community.
But, following the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 debacle and a lack of follow-through from Sega, it is another cancellation. EA is also back-tracking. It’s no longer “driving hard” for NFTs, whatever that means.
I guess we see if Ubisoft and a Take-Two controlled-Zynga deliver on their plans. At least, Jam City’s Champions Ascension appears to be still alive — for now.
Yet ever the optimist, I think there are positives arising from the situation. The current environment forces companies who are using blockchains and NFTs to be fully committed to the cause: nailed to the mast so to speak.
It does make it very difficult for existing game companies to get into the sector, however, especially at the experimental level and that’s a shame.
To-date, the sector has been driven by crypto-first founders and teams, who are enthusiastic and innovative but lacking experience in terms of managing production and product quality.
2022 was going to be the year in which professional game developers joined the party with better games, albeit at the cost of being blockchain-lite. Likely that transition has been delayed at least six months, maybe pushed back to 2023.
But what’s not in doubt is that change is coming. Fundamentally NFTs and blockchains allow game developers to build better products that are better aligned with their communities.
The worm will turn. Again.