NFTs and gaming

No wonder he was missing from the episode of Play Watch Listen where they talk about how pointless and rubbish NFTs are in games

I bet Netflix still wanna adapt it though.

NFTs in gaming are like the world's dumbest version of Pass The Parcel. Whoever is left holding the NFT when the servers are shut off, loses.

This is a long read that I'm saving for later, but some of you might be interested in this interview with Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek finance minister who also worked for Valve at one point on their in-game digital economies.

After 20 years of the internet, this was written. Bitcoin has been around for 12. The technology has evolved a great deal since its inception and it will continue to evolve.

Hype alert: Why cyberspace isn’t, and will never be, nirvana. (Newsweek, 1995)

After two decades online, I’m perplexed. It’s not that I haven’t had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I’ve met great people and even caught a hacker or two.But today, I’m uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community – the internet.

Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.

Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

Consider today’s online world. The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers.

Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophony more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harassment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen.

How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it’s an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book.

And you can’t tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Internet. Uh, sure.

What the Internet hucksters won’t tell you is that the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don’t know what to ignore and what’s worth reading.

Logged onto the World Wide Web, I hunt for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar. Hundreds of files show up, and it takes 15 minutes to unravel them–one’s a biography written by an eighth grader, the second is a computer game that doesn’t work and the third is an image of a London monument.

None answers my question, and my search is periodically interrupted by messages like, “Too many connections, try again later.”

Won’t the Internet be useful in governing? Internet addicts clamor for government reports. But when Andy Spano ran for county executive in Westchester County, N.Y., he put every press release and position paper onto a bulletin board. In that affluent county, with plenty of computer companies, how many voters logged in? Fewer than 30. Not a good omen.

Then there are those pushing computers into schools. We’re told that multimedia will make schoolwork easy and fun. Students will happily learn from animated characters while taught by expertly tailored software.

Who needs teachers when you’ve got computer-aided education? Bah.

These expensive toys are difficult to use in classrooms and require extensive teacher training. Sure, kids love video games–but think of your own experience: can you recall even one educational filmstrip of decades past? I’ll bet you remember the two or three great teachers who made a difference in your life.

Then there’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog shopping–just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obsolete.

So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month?

Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet–which there isn’t–the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

What’s missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the fawning techno-burble about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate us from one another. A network chat line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee.

No interactive multimedia display comes close to the excitement of a live concert. And who’d prefer cybersex to the real thing?

While the Internet beckons brightly, seductively flashing an icon of knowledge-as-power, this nonplace lures us to surrender our time on earth. A poor substitute it is, this virtual reality where frustration is legion and where–in the holy names of Education and Progress–important aspects of human interactions are relentlessly devalued.

STOLL is the author of “Silicon Snake Oil–Second Thoughts on the Information Highway” to be published by Doubleday in April.

I mean Jesus.... If even EA are shying away from them....

The metaverse seems to be the latest trend in that regard-stories recently about how hundreds of millions have been spent to buy virtual space.

But again, all you’re actually buying an NFT tied to this ‘land’ so naturally you need crypto to buy it, and because it’s crypto it’s probably people selling land to themselves to hype up people into parting with their hard earned cash. It would be funny if it weren’t so depressing.

Besides, there’s only one metaverse dammit, and it’s used to steal peoples hearts!

A few months after Ubisoft introduced NFTs to Ghost Recon Breakpoint, they're now shutting down the game.

"You own a piece of the game and have left your mark in its history."

Translation: "Cheers for the money bud! We're making what you bought completely redundant, but you can buy another NFT in our next game and have absolutely zero effect on that game too!"

They aren't shutting down the game, they are stopping making new content. It came out in 2019 so three years of new content and updates is pretty decent. From now on, it is just keeping the game online the same as they do with Wildlands.