The game that gives itself away

Bitcoin is still teaching us: games should distribute ownership creatively and algorithmically.

The main purpose of the open-economy metaversal age of gaming should be to create owners who benefit from their continued investment of time and effort into a community. Games are better with more players, more options, more ways to express oneself.

However, these first iterations of open-economy games are not making owners — they’re printing commodity (fungible) tokens or non-fungible tokens. There’s no practical economic difference between the two. Both are emitted on some schedule — either probabilistically or deterministically — by the game. Both can be exchanged for other assets on marketplaces. Both have in-game utility. Neither confers ownership of the game itself.

Enter Bitcoin theory. Behavioral incentives to participate (perform consensus) in the network! Participants are rewarded with a provably-scarce asset.

Game designers could take a page from that old tome. Behavioral incentives to participate in the game! Players are rewarded with ownership of the game itself.

Maths (sorry, not picking on Axie Infinity):

Random day — September/29/2021: SLP is $0.062USD and AXS is $69.49. The cost to become an owner is 1,120 SLP. Assuming 150 SLP/day that is 7.46 days of playing for 1 AXS token.

Random day — October/01/2021: SLP is $0.0759USD and AXS is $110.55. The cost to become an owner is 1,458 SLP. Assuming 150 SLP/day that is 9.72 days of playing for 1 AXS token.

The commodity token used to reward play went up in value but the value accrual of the overall game went disproportionally to owners’ stakes. And now staking is live — with capital you can compound into more capital. We can practically see the value flow moving from SLP into AXS as returns on participation are diminished in favor of returns on ownership.

Capitalism is just that — all about the -ism. All about the capital. Don’t get mad; it is designed around favorable conditions to capital. Games should light the way not towards a new labor market but towards a new model of equitable ownership.

A simple query: why does emission of game-ownership come through any way except participation? Returns on ownership should equal returns on participation.