For the past few months, the higher-ups at game company after game company have announced that they’re going to be integrating NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) into their games. For those unfamiliar with the concept (probably not as many of you as would like to be), this is a method for storing a certificate on a shared public ledger by which people can claim ownership of something. The argument goes that this is a decentralized way of tracking ownership, untouched by any authority – and this is supposedly a general good because no one wants to trust authority.
There are a lot of problems with this idea, many of which have been argued more effectively and knowledgeably by others than I’m prepared to get into here. NFT-game proponents argue that you could claim unique resources, such as special weapons and characters, to gain an advantage over other players – something which anyone who plays games recognizes would be shitty for nearly everyone who plays the game – and/or that you could get a unique item that carries across games – something which anyone who makes games recognizes would either require tremendous amounts of work to implement in each particular game or would require that all of the affected games be so generic as to be effectively the same game. These problems share an underlying fundamental issue: The act of creating a game is the act of creating an experience, and to create an experience is to exert control over the person experiencing it. If we designate an area of the game to be constitutionally outside the designer’s control, it is effectively not part of the game any more – or, at least, not the game as it was designed. To put it another way, to create an experience with no authority is to create one with no authorship – which tends not to create very interesting experiences.
If you go to a gallery and look at a painting, you are experiencing what the artist intended, more or less. You do this because you trust the artist to create an experience that is rewarding for you. If you walk into the gallery with your own paintbrush and add a simple mustache to each figure in the painting, you are no longer enjoying the painting, you’re enjoying your own sense of power and mischief – and are ruining everyone else’s experience. Similarly, when you play a fantasy RPG you do so because you trust the developer to create an interesting world and compelling experience, something that feels wholly realized – but if you decide you want to bring in your unique customized AK-47 into that world, you’ve decided you no longer give a shit about any of that and want to blow guys away. This action, in isolation, is fine: You can do a lot of fun goofy things with modding and remixing other peoples’ finely crafted experiences. What is less fine is when, as with the painting, you choose to do so in a way which ruins everyone else’s experience – which is what would happen if every other player had to look at your stupid out of place gun easily murdering the armies of orcs they were struggling against.
Of course anyone whose played online games has essentially had this experience, and it’s called playing against hackers. What NFT-integration proposes to do is make this part of the core gameplay experience. For some reason, player reaction to this proposal is broadly less than enthusiastic, and the many companies mentioned at the start of this post which broached the idea have, more often than not, beaten hasty retreats after receiving huge volumes of negative feedback. Nevertheless, they persist.
All of this is fairly overtly and obviously stupid to anyone who cares to make any more than the most cursory examination. However, there is an interesting discussion to be had following from this: How much should the designer dictate the experience of the player? A lot of studios have made it extremely difficult to mod their games or play on unapproved servers, even after many of the foundational gameplay innovations that allowed those games to be made first appeared in mods and custom servers. At the same time, there’s a growing recognition that many games are unnecessarily hostile towards people who have certain inabilities or disabilities and prevent them from engaging with the designer’s specific, narrow vision. There’s a tension here: As a player I am trusting you to create for me a meaningful experience – but also to leave enough wiggle room in that experience for me to enjoy it in my own particular way. If you fail in this task, I may end up using a variety of external tools or hacks to tailor my experience – or, more often, to simply bypass it for a more hospitable game. The designer must figure out what parts of their envisioned experience ought to be set, immutable, foundational, and which ought to be open to reinterpretation and reconfiguration by the player.