Keep NFT out of FF14

[Kakure]

I get that people are concerned about the business practices that can be taken. I think people have every right to be skeptical however this has nothing do with the underlying technology of NFT's. If any company puts in practices that negatively impact gameplay or are unjust then defy them with your wallet. Nobody is making you buy anything and not buying sends a clear message.

As I've noted several times before, this is not about the underlying technology of NFTs. In any way. At all. It is about the social milieu of frenzied speculative investment that surrounds them. It beggars belief to think that these game executives are all tripping over themselves in an effort to figure out a way to use some anodyne data storage technology that by all accounts has little if any particularly obvious use in the gaming space.

From Matsuda's letter:

Another term that gained quick currency in 2021 was “NFT” or “non-fungible token.” The advent of NFTs using blockchain technology significantly increased the liquidity of digital goods, enabling the trading of a variety of such goods at high prices and sparking conversations the world over. I see 2021... as “NFTs: Year One” given that it was a year in which NFTs were met with a great deal of enthusiasm by a rapidly expanding user base... To address these changes in our business environment, the medium-term business strategy that we unveiled in May 2020 identified AI, the cloud, and blockchain games as new domains on which we should focus our investments, and we have subsequently been aggressive in our R&D efforts and investments in those areas.

This is very explicitly about SE trying to engineer some justification to tap into the burgeoning, speculative, overheated market for anything NFT so they can get in on "the trading of... such goods at high prices." That's the reason, right there. And everyone knows it. It has nothing to do with the actual technology.

I am not content to just sit back and not buy NFT items or not play some blockchain game because, besides being scuzzy behavior from people I give money to every month and expect better from, I view this shift in gaming as actively harmful and I am absolutely certain that if NFTs infest gaming it will negatively impact the things I enjoy and care about. Whether that takes the form of artificially scarce, numbered items a la Ghost Recon, companies using this as an excuse to take a cut out of player-to-player transactions, a shift in resources away from content that caters to "players who 'play to have fun'" (Matsuda's words), a greater environmental footprint for the hobby, or who knows what else, this is going to affect all of us and not in any good way. Gaming executives clearly see this as a potentially seismic inflection point in gaming and they need to be slapped down hard and fast and made to understand that players will not tolerate it.

As to your example between person A and person B with the tin cans: I see nothing wrong. If someone came up to me with a tin can and wanted me to buy it and I had no need for a tin can I would tell them to go away. If I for some reason wanted a tin can I would make them an offer. It's very curious that people think that just because you see no use in something that it's a scam. People really don't understand what the word scam means. If I wanted a tin can I as the buyer can set the price if there is no other demand. I can pay $1 for my tin can or $10 million. Either way, nobody got scammed. If I offered $1 for a tin can and got a cardboard cut out of a can then that would be a scam as I did not get what I wanted. Also, speculative investments are not a scam. I am again just purchasing a good with a fluctuating value. Most people try to make a profit on any item that they sell however sometimes you take a loss. This is life. Nobody got scammed because the value of something moved in the wrong direction.

That's probably because it wasn't an example of something wrong. It was an illustration of value assignation. It was a rebuttal of the claim that the value of something is whatever someone pays for it, that no one can say an NFT of a rock from a free clipart database isn't worth 1.3 million dollars if someone somewhere is willing to pay for it.

I'll go one further and happily defend the claim that this kind of grotesque nonsense is a scam though. I flatly reject the idea that just because someone knows what they are getting for their money it cannot be a scam. See: Pyramid Schemes; Televangelism.

One of the most critical purposes that NFT communities serve is to proselytize and legitimize the whole endeavor, to convince other people that forking over (often vast amounts of) money for things that have no value at all is normal and reasonable. Why would they do that? Because the more people who buy into this garbage and decide to become NFT speculators themselves, the more money existing NFT speculators can make. They might not say that in so many words. They might genuinely think of themselves as nothing more than a group of like-minded people who enjoy remortgaging their homes to purchase the honor of having their identifier on a little digital registry associated with a tweet or a meme JPEG, but the whole thing only works if they can keep drawing other people in. Else the bubble bursts and they all get left holding the bag of beanie babies.

I don't mean to suggest that every NFT enthusiast is explicitly and deliberately trying to mislead people. Some of them might just be caught up in this cool new techbro thing they genuinely think they understand better than all the haters. Some are probably just really, really dumb. And hyping stuff you like and trying to get more people involved is totally natural. We do the same thing in gaming communities. Everyone does.

But when the thing you're hyping is ridiculous and the thing you're trying to get people to be enthusiastic about is the sale of worthless junk (like an NFT of a tweet -- something that still exists as it always has as a public tweet on Twitter, with the sender's (not the NFT buyer, but the person who originally sent the tweet) name and profile pic and responses and likes and stuff -- something that anyone can view at any time or print out and put on their wall, for which the concept of transferrable "ownership" is all but meaningless) for vast amounts of money, that's pretty much a scam.

Someone buying a tin can for $10,000 is just an idiot. Someone claiming that used tin cans are worth thousands of dollars and working to normalize and prop up a system of overheated, speculative trade in tin cans knowing full well they have no underlying value is participating in a scam.