take away the money-grubbing, eliminate the environmental concerns and at least try to explain the tech without being condescending or patronising and I might shift over a little more in my acceptance. Alas, rarely have I seen or heard anyone make the case for the blockchain to take a greater role in our lives, at least not by someone who doesn’t have a vested interest in some early stage business venture reliant on pushing decentralised tech. Which is why I sought out Hilmar Veigar
Pétursson, the CEO of CCP Games, who I know has been taking an interest in web3 and all its associated technologies and buzzwords for many years. While he recently ruled them all out in terms of any immediate or medium- term adoption into CCP’s venerable MMO EVE Online, he wrote in a recent blog post that blockchain tech had ‘a lot of untapped potential’ and that he remained ‘intrigued by the technology’, which though hardly a ringing endorsement, is perhaps the closest you’ll find to such a thing from a games company CEO who doesn’t want to be hounded out of the job by a baying pitchfork-wielding mob.
V/DEVELOP | 19
Let’s start with the so-called metaverse. Is it just a repackaging of what we read about all those years ago in Snow Crash? I don’t really think it’s repackaging. I think the metaverse has existed for 20 years. When I was doing VRML back in the late 90s, we were talking about the metaverse in cyberspace while doing it. So I don’t think it’s repackaged, I think it’s just completely the same thing. When I see what Mark Zuckerberg is all about, I have PowerPoint presentations which are word for word the same thing from the late 90s.
What do you think of Facebook rebranding itself as Meta and pushing it as some kind of corporate utopia? It’s very familiar. And you don’t really have to dig into it. Sometimes it’s good to listen to people talk about the same thing, as I have been working on for decades, and just listen if there’s nuances that open up new doors of understanding. Right now I’m not hearing much. It’s just a lot of the same thing presented as discoveries by people that are now making a big deal out of it. But it isn’t necessarily adding a lot to the understanding so far. Maybe it will.
What about the VR/AR angle? I think what is important are the emotions you have on the inside, not the peripheral you have on the outside. So whether you’re using a screen or a VR device, or a mobile device, doesn’t really matter. The technology’s not very important.
No one seems able to get across what the big deal is about the blockchain. Can you? Blockchain tech is a very small implementation of cryptography. That’s ultimately what it is. It’s a fairly innovative wrapper - which is the consensus mechanism - around the core concept, which is fundamentally deeply useful - which is cryptography. You could debate whether blockchains are
a useful application of cryptography the way they exist right now. And you will have good arguments to say no. Some of those arguments are due to the fact that our understanding and commercialisation of cryptography is fairly basic. That is because it’s hideously complicated. But coming out of the push that blockchains are providing, we are getting things like ‘zero knowledge proofs’, ‘secure multi party computing’, and the holy grail of everything, which is called ‘indistinguishability obfuscation’. These are extremely powerful computing concepts to build meaningful virtual worlds that can aspire to have a degree of autonomy beyond their creators.
Proponents of the blockchain in gaming forever focus on ownership. Are you suggesting that it’s about agency before ownership? It’s about agency and autonomy of the creation. Distributing the ownership is a way of creating a multi party incentive framework for the economy to arise.
What about the counter argument that everything the blockchain can do - in relation to games - can already be achieved without resorting to the technology? That is true and not true. Let’s take Bitcoin. It’s a very simple concept, but then it’s the most evolved and proven. You could argue about its elegance, but you can’t argue about its autonomy. Bitcoin is autonomous from its pseudo-named creator Satoshi Nakamoto. You can’t even pin it on anyone. It is an elegance in and of itself. But it autonomously exists through a network
July 2022 MCV/DEVELOP | 55
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