00:00.000 --> 00:22.800 Hello, hi everyone, 00:22.800 --> 00:32.880 welcome to the seventh week of the University of Nicosia's free MOOC on NFTs and the Metaverse, 00:32.880 --> 00:40.720 this is George Giaglis and today our topic of discussion is going to be gaming NFTs, 00:40.720 --> 00:44.600 so we're going to be discussing gaming today. 00:44.600 --> 00:51.640 So today's session, I would dare say is sort of a bridging session because as you know, 00:51.640 --> 00:56.720 this is a 12-week course we've done, we've covered the first six weeks which were about 00:56.720 --> 00:57.720 NFTs, 00:57.720 --> 01:03.560 so we did an introduction and we saw the various use cases and application areas of non-fungible 01:03.560 --> 01:06.560 tokens. 01:06.560 --> 01:11.000 As of next week, we're going to move to the second part of the course which is more about 01:11.000 --> 01:12.960 Web3 and the Metaverse. 01:12.960 --> 01:20.400 And today's session is sort of transit or sort of trying to bridge these two areas in 01:20.400 --> 01:32.760 the sense that it is my personal feeling that many people will first experience the metaverse 01:32.760 --> 01:36.200 through some sort of a game, 01:36.200 --> 01:41.200 so I'd like to spend some time today discussing the various types of games, the history of 01:41.200 --> 01:51.760 gaming, how do NFTs fit with a future of gaming and how these could facilitate the transition 01:51.760 --> 02:00.200 to a more immersive, more persistent digital experience for everyone, what we usually define 02:00.200 --> 02:03.200 as the metaverse. 02:03.200 --> 02:09.120 So we will start by going through a short history of video games, and how it all started, 02:09.120 --> 02:14.800 and I'm not going to, it's totally impossible to cover everything of course, but I'll try 02:14.800 --> 02:26.760 to go through the major milestones trying to give you a perspective in the sense that 02:26.760 --> 02:33.400 where we are today and where we're probably heading tomorrow in terms of our gaming experiences 02:33.400 --> 02:40.240 is something that is very compatible with what has happened so far and although we might 02:40.240 --> 02:46.920 sometimes tend to think of blockchains and NFTs as a hugely disruptive experiences, I think 02:46.920 --> 02:51.760 it's somehow the natural next step in the evolution of gaming. 02:51.760 --> 02:58.480 We'll discuss a little bit the process of creating games, not because I'm going to turn 02:58.480 --> 03:04.880 any of you into gaming designer production experts, again, we cannot do this in the short 03:04.880 --> 03:10.520 time of one session, but because I think it is important to understand the various dimensions 03:10.520 --> 03:19.280 so that we can see why existing blockchain-based games and why existing gaming NFTs have still 03:19.280 --> 03:22.640 not managed to live up to their expectations, 03:22.640 --> 03:30.000 so the complexities and intricacies of the process of creating games make it quite difficult. 03:30.000 --> 03:39.000 We will discuss the main types of benefits that blockchains bring into gaming, namely 03:39.000 --> 03:45.440 the ability to facilitate real ownership of game assets for the players, the ability 03:45.440 --> 03:54.600 to transfer assets between games and to create an interoperable in-game or across-game economy. 03:54.600 --> 04:03.960 We'll discuss it a little bit later again, not trying to do an exhaustive review. 04:03.960 --> 04:10.400 This is everything that we're discussing are still phenomenal that is under development, 04:10.400 --> 04:19.160 so we're just going to see where we are today and what the potential next steps might be 04:19.160 --> 04:24.600 and maybe talk a little bit about the size of the market in-game. 04:24.600 --> 04:30.600 As usual, our disclaimer, this is educational material only, so although I will be referencing 04:30.600 --> 04:38.200 a number of projects in this presentation, none of them is included for anything else 04:38.200 --> 04:43.400 apart from as an indicative example for educational purposes. 04:43.400 --> 04:50.640 So please do your own research if you decide to delve more in-depth into any of the projects 04:50.640 --> 04:53.200 that are mentioned in this course. 04:53.200 --> 04:59.400 So, let's start with the first argument that I'd like to make. 04:59.400 --> 05:06.760 The argument, as I've said, is that games can be thought of as very early examples of 05:06.760 --> 05:07.760 Metaverses, 05:07.760 --> 05:12.280 so those of you in the audience that are already gamers know what I'm talking about 05:12.280 --> 05:21.960 because you know that many of the MMORPGs that exist out there look and feel like what 05:21.960 --> 05:25.160 most of us think about as the Metaverse. 05:25.160 --> 05:32.680 Obviously, with a very specific setting of the virtual world and a very specific objective 05:32.680 --> 05:38.800 and gameplay and the types of things that are happening are not like a virtual world 05:38.800 --> 05:44.400 as a whole is a very specific, narrow virtual world, but a virtual world nevertheless, 05:44.400 --> 05:49.600 so I think as I've said that games can be thought of as proton Metaverse, so very 05:49.600 --> 05:56.640 early examples of a Metaverse and I think many of us are going to experience the Metaverse 05:56.640 --> 06:00.440 through games. 06:00.440 --> 06:03.040 I like this definition of what a game is, 06:03.040 --> 06:08.440 I'm not really sure that we need the definition, but nevertheless, it's always good to start 06:08.440 --> 06:09.440 with a common perspective. 06:09.440 --> 06:15.320 A game is an interactive experience, so it's something that is between players or between 06:15.320 --> 06:21.760 a player and a computer and is an experience that provides a player with an increasingly 06:21.760 --> 06:26.680 the challenging sequence of patterns which the player learns and eventually masters, 06:26.680 --> 06:37.480 so most of the games will make the player go through a series of steps, tasks, challenges 06:37.480 --> 06:47.240 or whatever that are of increasing difficulty until either the player loses or the game 06:47.240 --> 06:54.960 concludes with some successful and some games have an objective, others you still continue 06:54.960 --> 07:02.040 playing for as long as you can and there's never a natural finish and successful finish 07:02.040 --> 07:04.760 to the game. 07:04.760 --> 07:14.560 So according to this definition, you can think of video games as having three main components. 07:14.560 --> 07:19.280 One is a user interface, so the player needs to somehow interact with the game, and usually 07:19.280 --> 07:25.760 this would happen through a console, a joystick, a controller, or some sort of motion sensing 07:25.760 --> 07:29.120 device or what have you. 07:29.120 --> 07:36.360 There needs to be a video display device early on, it might be our TV, now a computer monitor, 07:36.360 --> 07:41.560 tomorrow maybe a virtual reality headset, but there needs to be something that shows 07:41.560 --> 07:50.000 us the virtual world through which we traverse while we're playing the game and there needs 07:50.000 --> 07:54.320 to be a storyline, there needs to be a setting, there needs to be a context, there needs to 07:54.320 --> 08:00.520 be a virtual world in which the action of the game takes place and if you think about 08:00.520 --> 08:06.680 it, the combination of these three things, so having a virtual world out there, a virtual 08:06.680 --> 08:13.440 the world that is displayed in some sort of output device which could be immersive, it could be 08:13.440 --> 08:15.360 a virtual reality headset. 08:15.360 --> 08:22.600 The last ability to interact, live and do things within this world sounds a bit like what the 08:22.600 --> 08:27.520 metaverse would be about, I mean we'll formally define the metaverse next week, but I think 08:27.520 --> 08:35.680 most of us would agree that a virtual world in which we exist as a character and do things 08:35.680 --> 08:41.880 and receive feedback and interact with other players or with the virtual world is what 08:41.880 --> 08:46.040 a metaverse is all about, that's why I'm saying that video games can be thought 08:46.040 --> 08:51.440 of as sort of metaverse type of experiences. 08:51.440 --> 08:59.240 The history of video games is quite old, I mean beginning of the 70s with things like 08:59.240 --> 09:07.640 Zolk, for those of you that are into text-based, a bunch of games or with arcades like punk 09:07.640 --> 09:16.240 which was the first ping pong-themed arcade game and you see here on the right the type 09:16.240 --> 09:22.880 of the game that I'm talking about, but remember this is 1972, we're 10 years before the introduction 09:22.880 --> 09:33.520 of the personal computer, so this is a very, very proto type of experience in an arcade 09:33.520 --> 09:43.920 type of interface where you have very simple two-dimensional graphics effectively, two 09:43.920 --> 09:50.760 players or one player and the computer, is controlling a dash that moves up and down 09:50.760 --> 09:56.760 the screen and there's a ball moving in between if you might not cut the ball and throw 09:56.760 --> 10:03.640 it to your opponent, then the game continues, if you don't then you lose a point and this 10:03.640 --> 10:07.600 is how it all goes. 10:07.600 --> 10:16.920 Pong was developed by Atari, one of the very famous gaming computer developers of the 70s 10:16.920 --> 10:25.560 and the 80s, Atari has a very special place in my heart along with the Commodore and the 10:25.560 --> 10:29.720 ZX Spectrum and all these computers because these were the first types of computers that 10:29.720 --> 10:39.440 I interacted with, so Atari is a legend in the early computer gaming era, Pong was a 10:39.440 --> 10:44.760 very interesting game, it was created by a guy called Allan Alcorn and it was not created 10:44.760 --> 10:50.320 to be a commercial game, it was created as a training exercise given to Allan by his boss, 10:50.320 --> 10:59.000 one of the Atari's co-founder Nolan Bushnell, so Allan did such a great job that Atari thought, 10:59.000 --> 11:06.280 wow, we gave this as an exercise but there's probably an opportunity here to commercialize 11:06.280 --> 11:12.320 this, so they did and they commercialized it like this, when we're talking about games 11:12.320 --> 11:18.760 in the 70s, this is the setting that we're talking about, stand-alone, special made, 11:18.760 --> 11:26.480 you know, whole 'cupboards' that included a screen and they, and some controls as you can see 11:26.480 --> 11:31.120 here on the left there are two controls for the two players that are playing Pong and 11:31.120 --> 11:40.080 there's a coin-inserting machine, so you would go to a mall, to a supermarket, to a shop that 11:40.080 --> 11:45.480 had arcade games and you would play this game for money, there were no computers, there were 11:45.480 --> 11:55.640 no, there was no way in which you could do this at home, the big revolution and the big 11:55.640 --> 12:03.600 advancement in gaming was when we made the transition from arcade consoles, so when computer 12:03.600 --> 12:09.920 games started the kind of home entertainment again from the 1970s, you can see on the right 12:09.920 --> 12:14.600 a picture of two kids playing the same game, this is Pong now, but now they're playing 12:14.600 --> 12:24.880 it at home in a console that is connected to the home computer. 12:24.880 --> 12:33.240 This, the fact that games entered our homes created an explosion in the types of games, 12:33.240 --> 12:41.960 so there are, I mean, nearly countless genres of the game today, games would most typically 12:41.960 --> 12:48.120 be categorized according to the interaction and the game place will have adventure games 12:48.120 --> 12:54.360 or fighting games or puzzle games or shooter games or sports and so on. 12:54.360 --> 12:58.800 And another big distinction is whether we're talking about first-person or third person 12:58.800 --> 13:10.680 games, so like the picture that you see there on your left, you are the character holding 13:10.680 --> 13:18.280 the machine gun but you never see your actual avatar, you never see your character, the 13:18.280 --> 13:22.920 the whole world revolves around your own point of view. 13:22.920 --> 13:28.600 In the third person games like the example we see on the right, you control a character 13:28.600 --> 13:36.000 that you can see in front of you and you see how he or she might interact with their environment. 13:36.000 --> 13:40.760 Another way of classifying games could be according to their dimensionality, so we'll 13:40.760 --> 13:48.920 have 2D games, the early examples of games where we like have very crude graphics both 13:48.920 --> 13:55.240 for the avatars and for the surrounding world, so Super Mario as you can see there on the 13:55.240 --> 14:01.160 left is an example of such a game and I'm not trying here to make an argument that says 14:01.160 --> 14:07.720 that two-dimensional games are worse than 3D games, they are just older and there's 14:07.720 --> 14:14.920 a different type of modality of interacting with a virtual world and I'm saying this 14:14.920 --> 14:27.880 because I might be proven wrong here but contrary to what most people expect or predict, I think 14:27.880 --> 14:36.080 there's going to be a sizable market for metaverses in the beginning at least of the commercial 14:36.080 --> 14:44.000 era of the metaverse where the world around us would be deliberately simple, so everything 14:44.000 --> 14:52.640 in a computer is a model of reality and we can decide what type of abstraction we want 14:52.640 --> 14:59.360 to have against that reality, so many designers and producers and providers and then users 14:59.360 --> 15:09.560 I think would choose to go to simpler models where they can focus more on the social interaction 15:09.560 --> 15:18.760 rather than be consumed by the elaborate details of the worlds around them but that's one possible 15:18.760 --> 15:27.880 direction and some people will take that path, others might choose to go to a more realistic, 15:27.880 --> 15:34.480 photorealistic I mean games, so we have 3D games now like the most you see on your right 15:34.480 --> 15:40.840 where your view of the world is essentially a 3D camera perspective, either first person 15:40.840 --> 15:49.600 or third person as we discussed and there are some games in between these two like the 15:49.600 --> 15:57.120 payments from the middle from Wolfenstein which was the first game that popularized the shooting 15:57.120 --> 16:09.400 games, a genre where there was a sort of a pseudo 3D environment in the sense that everything 16:09.400 --> 16:19.520 was in reality 2D, there were no 3D models there but the use of two-dimensional sprites 16:19.520 --> 16:28.400 creating the impression to users that they were seeing a 3-dimensional world. Now the 16:28.400 --> 16:35.320 most important distinction of games and most important for the purposes of this lecture 16:35.320 --> 16:44.800 because again trying to make a point that would lead us to NFTs and Web3 is that most 16:44.800 --> 16:53.480 video games would be classified as what we call RPGs like Role Playing Games in the sense 16:53.480 --> 16:59.760 that when you play the game you assume the role of a character and you take control of 16:59.760 --> 17:08.080 the actions of that character, so most of video games are RPGs. One sub-gender of 17:08.080 --> 17:14.720 RPGs that became popular especially in the 80s and beginning of 90s, was what we would 17:14.720 --> 17:24.080 call multi-user dimension, originally it was called multi-user dungeon or multi-user domain 17:24.080 --> 17:29.920 games, it became popular with the art from the MUD anyway. Dungeon because it started 17:29.920 --> 17:35.960 from adventure games that used to take place in the worlds characterised by dungeons 17:35.960 --> 17:44.640 and the distinguishing characteristic of these games was that they were typically text-based 17:44.640 --> 17:50.440 or storyboarded. So there were no elaborate graphics, and sometimes there were no graphics 17:50.440 --> 17:57.480 at all, a player would enter a world that was usually fantasy or science fiction inspired 17:57.480 --> 18:04.720 world and they would receive text-based descriptions. So you are now in the forest you see you know 18:04.720 --> 18:11.040 housing front of you, this was typical like the introduction to Zork, one of the first text 18:11.040 --> 18:16.600 based adventure games but the distinguishing characteristic of MUDs was that they were 18:16.600 --> 18:23.800 multi-player, there were many players that could play the game at the same time and they could 18:23.800 --> 18:30.160 have either an adversarial or a collaborative relationship between them depending on the 18:30.160 --> 18:37.520 game and how it works, so sometimes you would know be there to kill other players or 18:37.520 --> 18:45.840 to cooperate with them in order to achieve some objective and this sounds sort of like, 18:45.840 --> 18:52.680 you know, trivial today but it was far from trivial back then, the ability to create worlds 18:52.680 --> 19:01.320 that would accommodate many users. So MUD types of games were the first games 19:01.320 --> 19:08.320 that created an internet type of experience for the users back then in the early 90s, many 19:08.320 --> 19:15.000 people back then discovered what we call today the internet so a worldwide connected network 19:15.000 --> 19:20.720 of computers through playing such kinds of games but because of you know bandwidth or 19:20.720 --> 19:28.120 technology limitations these games were usually very limited in terms of their graphical interfaces. 19:28.120 --> 19:37.920 Now, RPGs and MUDs came together and evolved into what today we would call MMORPGs or massively 19:37.920 --> 19:43.360 multiplayer online the wrong playing games which are video games here we're talking now 19:43.360 --> 19:51.240 about virtual worlds that have you know a very significant graphical interface sometimes 19:51.240 --> 19:59.120 with a very high degree of photorealism and allow a massive number of players I mean I'm 19:59.120 --> 20:10.680 talking in the range of even millions of players to play the game at the same time. Another 20:10.680 --> 20:16.600 distinguishing characteristic of these games and this characteristic that is very important 20:16.600 --> 20:24.360 for us is that these games feature what we would call persistent worlds, in other words 20:24.360 --> 20:32.040 we're talking about games where if you as a player stop playing the game the game still 20:32.040 --> 20:37.680 continues to exist, other players are there, the world evolves, things happen, so next time 20:37.680 --> 20:42.880 you go back online you might find a very different environment because things have happened while 20:42.880 --> 20:48.280 you were away and this is something that, okay for the younger people here that you know the 20:48.280 --> 20:56.080 first types of games that they got used to were MMORPGs might sound like a natural thing but 20:56.080 --> 21:03.440 for us it's a total revolution it was a total revolution because previous types of games 21:03.440 --> 21:10.800 existed only as far as long as I was playing them the moment that I stopped playing the 21:10.800 --> 21:17.400 game when you know I got offline or when I got the game over sign the game didn't exist 21:17.400 --> 21:23.600 there the world stopped existing it came into existence and it stopped being there when 21:23.600 --> 21:29.840 I entered and when I stopped playing the game. MMORPGs are the first example of persistent 21:29.840 --> 21:37.560 worlds and as we will be discussing next week because persistence is a very important defining 21:37.560 --> 21:44.280 characteristic of the metaverse, I would say that you know most early metaverses 21:44.280 --> 21:50.400 is that we will say enjoying some type of real commercial success in the sense of having 21:50.400 --> 21:58.600 many users in them will feature some sort of game-like persistence in the experience of 21:58.600 --> 22:09.560 the users. Now these games have become hugely popular those of you that play such games 22:09.560 --> 22:15.280 know that already for those of you that you know all these are new there are games like 22:15.280 --> 22:22.600 World of Warcraft where the total player count of people that have accounts play that game are, 22:22.600 --> 22:28.840 like you know, in the in the hundreds of millions and there might be more than a million people 22:28.840 --> 22:35.520 playing the game at the same time around the world so we're talking about really really 22:35.520 --> 22:43.200 popular really successful and mass-adopted games in the respective communities 22:43.200 --> 22:50.280 and this has resulted naturally in gaming being a huge industry, I mean I come 22:50.280 --> 23:01.960 from a blockchain and crypto type of background into this course so for me, the fact 23:01.960 --> 23:09.800 that the whole crypto industry is worth around a trillion is, mind-blowingly 23:09.800 --> 23:16.360 hugely successful but we're talking here about an industry in which the 23:16.360 --> 23:23.320 number of cryptocurrency users are measured in the hundreds of thousands of millions 23:23.320 --> 23:29.520 around the world, here we're talking about an industry in which almost half the world more 23:29.520 --> 23:35.400 than 3.2 billion people worldwide play some sort of computer game, many of these people 23:35.400 --> 23:46.880 play MMORPGs but not only that and there's a very aggressively growing e-sport industry 23:46.880 --> 23:56.040 where the audiences have grown to more than half a billion people in 2022 so you think 23:56.040 --> 24:04.040 about it, almost one in every two persons in the whole world are playing games and around one 24:04.040 --> 24:12.120 in sixteen people are watching video games being played competitively by other players so this is 24:12.120 --> 24:20.040 a huge industry and if it somehow makes the transition to Web3 it's going to be 24:20.040 --> 24:28.440 a killer app for blockchains, for Web3 and for NFTs in general. The global gaming 24:28.440 --> 24:34.920 market is projected to be worth more than 250 billion dollars by 2025 so we're talking about a huge 24:35.560 --> 24:44.200 industry, there's console based marketplaces where you can get games like Nintendo, 24:44.200 --> 24:52.280 PlayStation or Microsoft Xbox and stuff like that, a whole industry of course in mobile games, iOS, 24:52.280 --> 25:00.520 Google Play for Andriod and so on, a huge number of websites and a huge number of platforms 25:00.520 --> 25:10.920 that provide access to gaming to desktop computers of which I think Steam is the largest, they support 25:10.920 --> 25:21.240 around 70,000 gaming titles. The industry is huge and being dominated by players that come from all 25:21.240 --> 25:28.360 backgrounds so you see technology companies like Microsoft, you see consumer electronics 25:28.360 --> 25:38.840 companies like Sony, you see game studios like electronic cards and games like Rob 25:38.840 --> 25:47.000 Blocks being in the top 10 of the gaming industry and you see the top 10 companies have 25:47.000 --> 25:55.000 market caps that range from tens of billions of dollars to, okay Microsoft has a huge market 25:55.000 --> 26:01.880 cap but it's not only gaming, so we're talking about a very very big industry that might make 26:01.880 --> 26:10.120 the transition towards Web3 in the coming years. Now this was a very quick introduction 26:10.120 --> 26:17.800 to the history of gaming and how we have arrived where we are today with NFT games but before 26:17.800 --> 26:24.920 discussing this I'd like to spend just a few minutes discussing game development. So 26:27.240 --> 26:35.560 the games that you saw a couple of static images from in the previous slides like 26:35.560 --> 26:42.360 world of Warcraft or Minecraft or similar types of games are very very complex competitive 26:42.360 --> 26:51.160 projects to develop, they need huge teams of engineers, of artists, of designers and of 26:51.160 --> 26:58.920 producers to be coordinated and to be able to create something that is not a one off thing, 26:58.920 --> 27:05.400 it's not like a Hollywood movie where you might also need a similar type of 27:05.400 --> 27:10.680 array of people coming together and coordinating themselves for a limited amount of time until 27:10.680 --> 27:19.320 the movie gets out to theaters and then that's it, here we're talking about an ongoing process 27:19.320 --> 27:27.000 of always improving, developing and evolving the game while the game is being played 27:27.000 --> 27:34.120 and especially in the case of MMORPGs you need to be able to deploy 27:34.120 --> 27:40.280 upgrades in real time while millions of people are using the product so we're talking about a very 27:40.280 --> 27:49.320 complex and there go and I'm saying this because I want you and I want people like me 27:49.320 --> 27:59.480 also to be a bit lenient when it comes to judging the gameplay, the design and the general 27:59.480 --> 28:06.280 complexity and sophistication of blockchain-based games that we see around us because we're 28:06.280 --> 28:14.520 trying to compare what huge companies with billions of dollars of market cap and thousands of employees 28:14.520 --> 28:24.920 are able to produce after 10 or 15 years in the industry, with what a team of five 28:24.920 --> 28:31.960 or ten start-upers might be doing in a whole new technology with whole new types of assets like 28:31.960 --> 28:37.240 fans of the lot non-fungible tokens and sometimes I see reports saying, yeah but none of 28:37.240 --> 28:46.440 these games are fun to play or sophisticated enough or whatever what do you expect did you 28:46.440 --> 28:55.000 expect that you know a team of people that have just released a game that there's no 28:56.520 --> 29:03.640 trodden path and there's no prior learning or whatever would be able to achieve anything close 29:03.640 --> 29:12.440 to what a very sophisticated professional public company making billions of dollars is 29:12.440 --> 29:24.040 producing, I mean, it's sort of expected that you would see the types of games that we see in the 29:24.040 --> 29:29.080 in the blockchain and the crypto world today. So anyway, coming back to the team you would need 29:29.080 --> 29:34.600 engineers obviously and not only people that would actually code and program the software but 29:34.600 --> 29:39.400 especially when we're talking about console-based games, also people that would design and 29:39.400 --> 29:49.000 manufacture and integrate the hardware on which the software will be running, you would need a huge 29:49.000 --> 29:54.280 array of artists because you would need people that would define the concept, what is the game 29:54.280 --> 29:58.920 vision of the storyline and everything, you would need people that would do the 3D modeling 29:58.920 --> 30:05.080 of everything within the virtual world, the environment, the characters, the assets you would 30:05.080 --> 30:13.960 need texture artists that would add textures and details to the 3D models created by the 30:13.960 --> 30:20.200 modulus, you would need people that would spend their time working on lighting and motion capture 30:20.200 --> 30:29.000 and sound and all these things. If you attended and watched the discussion of (Punk) 6529 30:29.000 --> 30:38.120 with Beeple the other day you might remember how much time and energy Beeple was 30:38.840 --> 30:44.520 telling us that he was he's spending when he's creating his digital art, not in actual 30:44.520 --> 30:53.400 modeling or customizing the models that he started working from but actually is sculpting or 30:53.400 --> 31:01.960 photographing or playing with the lighting around these objects that he creates. So you will 31:01.960 --> 31:07.800 need designers, you will need people to design the mechanics of the gameplay, to design the modalities 31:07.800 --> 31:12.440 of player interaction and so forth and you need a production team that would actually bring 31:12.440 --> 31:18.200 everything together would deal with this as a project with specific milestones and 31:18.200 --> 31:26.040 deadlines and phases and what have you, and they was they would liaise with the business units 31:26.040 --> 31:34.360 that would commercialize or market or sell the game, so we're talking about very big teams and 31:34.360 --> 31:42.120 that's why sometimes we make distinctions between what we call indie and AAA games so there are 31:42.120 --> 31:48.200 publishers that can afford having all these things and they are like they're the Hollywood type of 31:51.320 --> 31:58.120 of actors in the gaming industry and there are indies so an indie game would be produced by an 31:58.120 --> 32:05.080 independent studio or a small number of individuals and this is all the games in the blockchain 32:05.080 --> 32:13.320 world, I guess. I spoke about mechanics so the mechanics of the gameplay is a very very important 32:13.320 --> 32:20.760 thing because it defines all the rules and procedures that guide the player and they also dictate what 32:20.760 --> 32:28.360 the game responses to the player's moves or actions can be; an interesting thought here is that 32:28.360 --> 32:38.280 many/most of the games that we have today, in order to not confuse the player or not 32:40.120 --> 32:47.960 create a steep learning curve for a new player, try to adhere to the laws of physics so you 32:47.960 --> 32:54.360 know when you leave an object in the game it will fall down you know pulled by gravity as it would 32:54.360 --> 33:02.120 in the physical world however, you understand of course that there is no reason for this to happen 33:02.120 --> 33:11.480 in the digital world, we are free from all these constraints so in the metaverse sphere I would 33:11.480 --> 33:22.440 expect that we would see some very original or experimental modalities regarding game mechanics 33:22.440 --> 33:32.840 or world function mechanics where the world would not necessarily work as it does in the physical 33:32.840 --> 33:40.280 world, so we might you know free ourselves from the limitations of the physical world in these environments. 33:41.880 --> 33:49.000 Another important aspect is creating assets and here you would need to have access to 33:49.000 --> 33:57.480 quite sophisticated software for 3D modeling either to create characters as you see in the picture 33:58.360 --> 34:03.320 in the top of the screen which is I think from blender one of 34:06.520 --> 34:15.480 the open source types of software for 3D modeling all creating the details like the last 34:15.480 --> 34:21.880 and best practices in the machine gun that you see in the image below which is from 34:21.880 --> 34:31.480 a map software I think is from 3D Studio Mark so you would need to have all these things to create 34:31.480 --> 34:40.200 assets and here I'm still talking about design and creating the assets you would need to enrich the 34:40.200 --> 34:50.120 assets that come from your 3D modeling software and you usually start from some sort of mathematical 34:50.120 --> 34:56.760 polygonal type of structure to create and add texture and details and lightning and stuff like 34:56.760 --> 35:05.960 that on top of this and all this work is still to create the asset itself which could be part 35:05.960 --> 35:12.440 of the virtual world, could be a playing character, it could be a non-playing character within a game, 35:12.440 --> 35:23.880 it could be a weapon or a shield or a uniform or you name it, and has nothing to do with the actual 35:23.880 --> 35:30.760 gameplay and ownership and transferability and where you would be able to find and how you would 35:30.760 --> 35:38.200 be able to sell or swap or trade these types of assets, so the learning outcome here is that 35:38.200 --> 35:46.680 creating a sophisticated competitive game is a very very competitive process. There are there 35:46.680 --> 35:53.160 a number of game engines so there are a number of software environments that can be used to 35:53.160 --> 36:01.960 allow game designers to bring everything together so 3D modeling gameplay mechanics as a creation 36:02.600 --> 36:09.400 interaction between players and non-playing characters and so on, examples are the unreal engine 36:09.400 --> 36:19.160 or unity or cryogen that you see here in this slide and there is also a huge body of work in 36:19.160 --> 36:33.080 developing standardized libraries for APIs and software interfaces for either 3D graphics 36:33.080 --> 36:42.840 processing hardware like your GPUs in your computer, like OpenGL and WebGL or more proprietary types 36:42.840 --> 36:49.880 of APIs like DirectX by Microsoft for those that are programming games on Microsoft platforms. 36:51.800 --> 36:56.200 Now having said all this and I understand that this is a very very 36:56.840 --> 37:05.160 quick and shallow introduction to the technologies and processes around game creation 37:05.160 --> 37:10.680 I would like to focus the remainder of our time on what we're interested in today, like 37:10.680 --> 37:17.240 what happens when the technology of blockchain when cryptocurrency when fungible tokens and non-fungiable tokens (NFTs) 37:17.240 --> 37:25.640 meet gaming, how might we see the future of gaming through this 37:25.640 --> 37:33.640 this lens and as I've said in the beginning I think that there are three major 37:33.640 --> 37:49.320 types of implications that blockchain will have in gaming, blockchain being a technology that allows 37:50.040 --> 37:58.440 for value creation storage and transfer over computer networks, I think it will have a substantial 37:58.440 --> 38:06.520 effect on gaming because it will provide a much-needed layer for storing and transferring value 38:06.520 --> 38:14.600 in gaming and I think there are three things there, one is asset ownership so who owns the assets 38:15.320 --> 38:22.760 in a game, there's this famous story that Vitalik Butterin thought of a non-centralized Ethereum 38:22.760 --> 38:32.680 when I don't remember which game he was playing but they deprived him of one of the weapons 38:32.680 --> 38:42.600 or sheilds that he had managed to earn by playing the game and he realized that although 38:42.600 --> 38:49.800 he thought that because this was in his inventory it was his it was actually not there was not, there's 38:49.800 --> 38:55.320 no real ownership of your character, your avatar, your asset, your weaponry or whatever when you're 38:55.320 --> 39:00.920 playing a game, everything is being controlled centrally by the game provider so if they want 39:00.920 --> 39:06.360 they can throw you out of the game they can, 39:09.320 --> 39:11.240 block your account or they can 39:11.240 --> 39:21.160 deprive you of any asset that you might have had so blockchain will change all that 39:21.160 --> 39:28.280 because it would allow people to actually really own their assets that they use in the games and 39:28.280 --> 39:36.200 when I say really own I mean they would have the ability to not only trade them with other users 39:36.200 --> 39:45.240 but also do that and many other things outside of the game, so when you are when you have the asset 39:45.240 --> 39:53.240 in your wallet as an NFT, you might use it in this particular game but the asset becomes also interoperable, 39:53.240 --> 39:59.240 it can be used in other things so for example many of you have minted the course access token 39:59.240 --> 40:05.000 for UNIC, this is a token that give you access to some of the material for the course and certainly 40:05.000 --> 40:13.160 the exams so it's a token that helps utility within the ecosystem of this course but nothing 40:13.160 --> 40:20.120 stops someone from creating some other experience which could be educational, a game or what have 40:20.120 --> 40:29.240 you and have this experience token gated controlled and affected by the ownership of this token 40:29.240 --> 40:36.040 so have created something that is accessible only by people who happen to have this asset on their 40:36.600 --> 40:45.320 wallet so assets become more important than the games themselves, I don't know how many of you 40:45.880 --> 40:55.240 are familiar with projects like Loot (for Adventurers) or the N Project in the NFT 40:55.240 --> 41:03.480 space but both these projects and many others have flipped the idea of a game 41:04.680 --> 41:12.520 on its head and they said why should we create a game and have assets only within this game 41:12.520 --> 41:20.280 and not create the assets first, so create a set of weaponry and 41:20.280 --> 41:27.400 shields and shoes and helmets and so on with different powers and different degrees of rarity 41:28.040 --> 41:36.840 and aesthetics and so on and let everyone use the collection of these, this becomes an NFT 41:36.840 --> 41:44.520 collection of assets in the games or arts or experiences that they create, so we're talking 41:44.520 --> 41:54.440 about a wholly different perspective on how we view games if we have blockchain-enabled NFTs as 41:54.440 --> 42:04.840 assets in them. And the final the effect of blockchain into gaming is the ability to create 42:04.840 --> 42:11.800 in-game and sometimes (hopefully in the future) across game economies, so create whole economic 42:11.800 --> 42:21.640 structures with supply and demand dynamics in which value is distributed to users and controlled 42:21.640 --> 42:31.640 by the users within the game and not monopolized by the platform creating the game itself. So again 42:31.640 --> 42:39.880 NFTs allow for true digital ownership for game assets so if you hold your character or 42:39.880 --> 42:47.080 avatar as an NFT you are the real owner it cannot be taken away from you any asset that you buy 42:47.080 --> 42:53.720 or you collect while playing the game can also be an NFT and then you can swap or trade with other 42:53.720 --> 43:00.600 players without any intermediaries and without any possible censorship by the game owner and they 43:00.600 --> 43:06.360 can also exist as I've said outside the game as independent entities that might have other 43:06.360 --> 43:12.600 users or internal values so the collection of these four properties that you see in this slide 43:13.240 --> 43:23.160 create a revolutionary, I would dare say, environment on how assets in games can be thought of that 43:23.160 --> 43:29.640 was simply not possible in the pre-blockchain world even in the MMORPG era. 43:29.640 --> 43:38.360 This has created a number of experiments, one of them that I'd like to spend a few minutes 43:38.360 --> 43:46.600 discussing because it has received quite some attention by the community (at least the blockchain 43:46.600 --> 43:55.320 community) is the so-called played-win games so as the names suggest these are games in which 43:55.320 --> 44:05.080 the economics go to the next level because they allow their players to play the game for some sort 44:05.080 --> 44:16.280 of a financial gain. Not in the sense of gaining from other players so like betting and battling 44:16.280 --> 44:22.840 and whoever wins takes the money and wins the bet but in the sense of creating adding value, 44:22.840 --> 44:30.280 creating new value that is created by playing the game itself. There are typically two broad 44:30.280 --> 44:35.400 categories, those that are called "free-to-play" games, so you you can start playing the 44:35.400 --> 44:42.280 game for free although if you do that you most probably will be limited in your ability to 44:42.280 --> 44:49.800 to gain money from playing it, or, the so-called "pay-to-play" games in the sense that users will need to be 44:49.800 --> 44:56.920 equipped by some sort of NFT so you would need to get an avatar or weapons or your shoes or whatever 44:57.560 --> 45:02.120 so you need to buy NFTs you need to invest in the game in the beginning and once you've made 45:02.120 --> 45:09.720 that investment, depending on how good you are in the game and how powerful or rare the properties 45:09.720 --> 45:17.480 of your NFTs are, you might earn money usually in the form of some digital tokens which has fluctuating 45:17.480 --> 45:27.000 value so whether these games would be able to create sustaining economies is a different 45:27.000 --> 45:34.360 question that we're going to see in a while. Typically in such games players will be able to create 45:34.360 --> 45:40.360 or breed new characters so you would be able to you know literally breed your characters and create 45:40.360 --> 45:46.600 new ones that you can either use for playing or sell in the marketplace, you would be able to purchase 45:46.600 --> 45:53.000 items either within the game or in third-party marketplaces and you would typically be able to 45:53.000 --> 46:00.520 unlock or earn additional digital assets or tokens by playing the game depending on how long 46:00.520 --> 46:08.520 you played or how good you are at it and so on. The archetypal example here is actually infinity, 46:08.520 --> 46:15.720 I'm not going to spend so much time on it because I think it's old news now but I don't 46:15.720 --> 46:23.320 think any discussion about "play-to-earn" would be complete without discussing. Actually because it 46:23.320 --> 46:29.400 was the first game that became hugely successful I mean at some point a year or a year and a half 46:29.400 --> 46:36.840 ago there were lots of people, especially in countries like the Philippines where it was 46:36.840 --> 46:42.440 extremely popular but were actually doing it as their job, they were making money by 46:42.440 --> 46:50.680 playing the game. What is typical about Axie is that they pioneered this dual token structure so 46:50.680 --> 46:58.840 these games usually have more than one type of tokens so they have both fungible and non-fungible 46:58.840 --> 47:07.400 tokens and the fungible tokens usually are split between a governance token in the case of Axie 47:07.400 --> 47:15.400 Infinity it's the Axie Infinity Shard and the AXS token and a utility token in the case of Axie Gold Smooth 47:15.400 --> 47:23.080 (I thought the small anyway smooth or small) love potion the SLP token which is the 47:23.080 --> 47:32.200 reward token or the utility token that people would earn and there's also NFT tokens in the 47:32.200 --> 47:39.800 the case of Axie the playing characters are NFTs the Axie themselves as well as tokenized lots of 47:39.800 --> 47:47.480 land that act as forms or basis of operation for the activity. The game is about battling 47:47.480 --> 47:55.880 with with other opponents your Axie against them so it's mostly a card-based game in which 47:55.880 --> 48:04.680 players playing Terrence is not very interactive. There are a number of games that have been developed 48:04.680 --> 48:11.720 following on the same or similar ideas. I have just some indicators examples here so Alien 48:11.720 --> 48:20.120 Worlds or Galaxy Fight Club or Gods Unchained they are I would dare say and forgive me because it's a 48:20.120 --> 48:27.880 very simplistic type of description and maybe unfair to them they are advanced versions of Axie 48:27.880 --> 48:36.680 infinity in the sense that they follow a similar trajectory in terms of creating environments in 48:36.680 --> 48:44.280 which characters fight or battle each other and players might make money if they 48:44.280 --> 48:53.240 win against their opponents. A different Sam Zendre is the one in the bottom, 48:54.360 --> 48:59.800 projects like Stepping or Genopets which are what we would call "move-to-earn" 49:01.080 --> 49:10.040 games in the sense that they would reward users for their daily movements so the more that you 49:10.040 --> 49:15.400 walk or run or in the case of Genopets is much more complicated because you have 49:15.960 --> 49:22.360 this virtual pet so on top of banking steps you might do other things it's 49:22.920 --> 49:30.920 more move-to-earm and plat-to-earm type of game but all of them (or most of them) have the same 49:30.920 --> 49:37.880 basic underlying economic structure in the sense that there are a number of NFTs so in the Galaxy 49:37.880 --> 49:45.480 Fight Club you have your fighter and you have weapons that this fighter is equipped to 49:45.480 --> 49:51.960 and depending on you know what type of fighter or what type of weapon you might have different 49:51.960 --> 49:59.480 abilities in battle and so the outcome of the game would be a combination of your skills combined with 50:00.520 --> 50:06.840 the types of assets that you own. In the case of Stepping how much money you would make 50:06.840 --> 50:14.600 would depend on a combination of factors like you what type of shoe you have (so this is an 50:14.600 --> 50:24.920 NFT) what type of added properties you have equipped these shoe with and different shoes have different 50:24.920 --> 50:32.200 properties and these properties have different values so for different uses there are different 50:32.200 --> 50:42.120 optimal configurations of your shoes so quite complicated but at the same time this 50:42.920 --> 50:51.720 complication might increase the joy or the satisfaction that users get 50:52.600 --> 51:01.480 by playing the game. So these types of games exist today but I would like to emphasize that we are 51:01.480 --> 51:09.960 still extremely early in the NFT gaming phenomenon not only played one games but generally and 51:11.960 --> 51:18.760 I said earlier that we sometimes tend to be unfair to the people that are creating these games 51:18.760 --> 51:28.520 because we compare them with huge conglomerates that have been hugely successful 51:28.520 --> 51:35.080 in monetizing Web2 types of games but these people are startups that are trying to redefine an industry 51:36.280 --> 51:42.760 and it has proven to be very challenging to create a self-sustaining in-game economy. So as I've said 51:42.760 --> 51:47.560 most of the projects are using a dual layer structure so both fudgeable tokens and NFTs 51:48.200 --> 51:54.120 and a multi-tokens structure within its layer so you might have a governance and a utility token 51:54.120 --> 52:03.160 and multiple NFTs but I have yet to see a successful token economics mechanism so if you 52:04.440 --> 52:10.840 if you witness most of the projects they follow a trajectory in which at least if their utility 52:10.840 --> 52:19.400 token doesn't have enough utility it tends to fall in value because people would sell 52:19.400 --> 52:27.080 it if they have nothing to do with it within the game and this of course creates a selling pressure 52:27.080 --> 52:34.360 that combined with the infinite supply utility tokens that most projects would follow 52:35.000 --> 52:41.160 will result a in a death spiral for the price of the token. It is interesting because 52:41.160 --> 52:49.880 some analysts go as far as claiming that the play-to-earn movement itself is not sustainable 52:49.880 --> 52:56.760 because giving monetary rewards may prove to be bad for player retention because it weakens the 52:56.760 --> 53:02.680 the internal motivation that players would have at playing the game, I'm not sure I subscribe to this 53:02.680 --> 53:09.800 line of thought I think there's a very huge incentive for people to play games for some 53:09.800 --> 53:21.400 monitary gain and if we are true believers in our conviction that Web3 53:21.400 --> 53:29.240 is about taking value from the platforms and giving it to the users then all these 53:29.240 --> 53:35.720 billions that we discussed earlier, being made today by the gaming industry and being shared by a 53:35.720 --> 53:45.000 small group of companies that control it, we will flow through to the end 53:45.000 --> 53:54.760 users if and when we start finding self-sustainable economic models for that. A more 53:55.400 --> 54:00.440 fair criticism is that most games today seem to emphasize the tokenomics that I discussed 54:00.440 --> 54:07.640 earlier more than game design but we have to understand that for game design on blockchain we have 54:07.640 --> 54:15.320 huge technical challenges which at the moment prevent us from creating 100% decentralized 54:15.320 --> 54:22.120 games, remember the metaphor I used earlier, we are in the early days of the internet so as the first 54:23.080 --> 54:29.880 popular games in the internet era where months there were games that allowed many people to play 54:29.880 --> 54:36.920 together but they were text-based or storyboarded because you couldn't have sophisticated graphics 54:36.920 --> 54:43.640 in the primitive internet infrastructure we have the same thing here, we have blockchains that are 54:43.640 --> 54:51.160 very slow, transactions are public so you cannot have a real-time game, you cannot have game in 54:51.160 --> 54:56.680 which if I do something and this something creates a transaction on the blockchain and this 54:56.680 --> 55:04.360 is published you know 12 seconds later in Ethereum then my character will wait for 12 55:04.360 --> 55:11.080 seconds before it fires a bullet out of their weapon, this is a very bad user experience 55:11.080 --> 55:16.920 so we need to solve these technical problems but I'm not worried about technical problems like it 55:17.480 --> 55:24.360 happened in the early days of the internet and many people thought back then that this would be 55:24.360 --> 55:28.120 the lack of speed or security or whatever would be something that would 55:29.480 --> 55:35.880 condemn internet to oblivion and of course, it didn't happen, I am sure that the technical 55:35.880 --> 55:43.400 challenges will be solved. In the meantime we will be looking at games that are only partially 55:43.400 --> 55:50.520 decentralized and when I say partially I mean the characters, the avatars and the assets are 55:50.520 --> 55:56.840 decentralized they exist on public blockchains and they are truly owned by the players but the 55:56.840 --> 56:05.720 gameplay mechanics are still centralized and they happen on centralized servers. So concluding 56:07.480 --> 56:15.480 this session I would like to just emphasize four points: Number one is that gaming is huge 56:15.480 --> 56:23.560 and if gaming moves to blockchain and mass this will prove to be a killer application for 56:23.560 --> 56:31.800 NFTs I know that with (Punk) 6529 you've discussed a lot about art and generative art and PFPs and 56:31.800 --> 56:38.840 all these things and these are all fine applications but I think gaming is going to prove to be one 56:38.840 --> 56:44.600 of the killer application of NFTs and of course PFP collections and even generative and stuff like 56:44.600 --> 56:53.320 that has a huge role to play in gaming. The second takeaway is, I think that blockchain 56:54.040 --> 57:01.240 will act as the value layer in games providing three things, one is true ownership of assets by users, 57:03.000 --> 57:09.000 number two interoperability of assets so the ability to move assets across games and, number 57:09.000 --> 57:17.720 three, creating sustainable in-game and across-game economics. Take away number three, there are still 57:17.720 --> 57:24.200 significant challenges to be overcome many of them are technological and design oriented, we still 57:24.200 --> 57:33.480 haven't figured out ways in which we can move game mechanics to the blockchain and some challenges 57:33.480 --> 57:40.120 are economic we still haven't managed to find the perfect balance between governance, 57:40.120 --> 57:47.400 utility and non-fungible tokens to create a self-sustaining economy within a game. 57:48.360 --> 57:55.960 Finally, keep in mind and we'll discuss this next week with (Punk) 6529 in more detail that games 57:56.920 --> 58:00.760 can be thought of as early examples of metaverses and may 58:00.760 --> 58:06.760 yet prove to be the application type through which most people will have their first 58:07.640 --> 58:15.080 work-free exposure. As always we have some further reading for you and this concludes 58:15.640 --> 58:25.240 the slides for this week. If you have questions let me move to Discord. I mean as usual, you can 58:25.240 --> 58:33.080 see in the screen you can ask your questions in the OM Chat or on Twitter using the #NFTQnA 58:33.080 --> 58:42.680 hashtag my colleagues will have probably already started feeding questions on Discord for me so 58:42.680 --> 58:50.680 let me switch and see if I can find them there and I have my colleague Chris Christou from 58:50.680 --> 58:57.240 the UNIC Virtual Reality Lab with me in case there are questions that are more technical 58:57.240 --> 59:03.960 because as I said I don't come from a gaming background I might call him to join me in 59:03.960 --> 59:15.160 answering them so let me see. So there's one question that says "is it actually sustainable 59:15.160 --> 59:22.520 to release a token for a game that can be exchanged for fiat?" well that's a 59:22.520 --> 59:33.480 million dollar question. It's certainly this is the case we have it is proven by the gaming 59:33.480 --> 59:38.680 industry that people there's lots of people out there there's a big market for gaming so there's 59:38.680 --> 59:44.760 lots of people that would actually be able to open their wallet and pay money to play a game, 59:44.760 --> 59:53.560 they pay literally billions every year to play games. Whether this could translate into a sustainable 59:53.560 --> 00:03.720 mechanism through which money flows into an in-game economy in blockchain and allows that value 00:03.720 --> 00:10.360 to be multiplied between the users of that economy and somehow shared between those that 00:10.360 --> 00:18.520 create the game, those that play the game and those that provide the foundational infrastructure for 00:18.520 --> 00:28.760 security and scalability so the underlying blockchain is something we 00:28.760 --> 00:35.560 need to see how this could happen. I have to say that out of the examples that I showed you earlier 00:35.560 --> 00:42.920 and all the others that I've seen in the NFT gaming space this hasn't happened yet and I think it 00:42.920 --> 00:54.680 has happened for two reasons. One is that there hasn't been a game yet that would attract people 00:56.520 --> 01:03.080 for the intrinsic motivation, there have not been games like Minecraft or Roblox or 01:03.080 --> 01:09.160 the World of Warcraft or all the other games that have managed to create communities of millions of 01:09.160 --> 01:15.240 people that want to play the game for the shear pleasure of playing the game and even pay to play 01:15.240 --> 01:24.840 that game. Here we have mostly seen people that come in like "Kamikazes", getting into the game to 01:24.840 --> 01:33.400 make a quick gain out of it and this mentality does not help the community of a very particular game 01:34.120 --> 01:36.440 to create a lasting 01:40.360 --> 01:45.400 with real life with games 01:45.400 --> 01:51.400 games 01:51.400 --> 01:58.120 option that is more organic and less important people that play the game because they like it and 01:58.120 --> 02:04.760 they're not ready to leave it to go to the next game because they would make more money in the short term 02:04.760 --> 02:16.200 out of it. I'm not saying it's not 02:16.200 --> 02:19.400 I see myself 02:23.720 --> 02:26.920 some sort of internet 02:26.920 --> 02:27.560 let me know 02:27.560 --> 02:34.280 okay sweet okay I will continue saying that 02:38.920 --> 02:40.680 you know they will not do it 02:42.920 --> 02:50.040 maybe it's a process some of the games that we've seen become useful for a 02:50.040 --> 02:57.560 community or a longer amount of time like Axie Infinity or Stepping might make it 02:57.560 --> 03:04.280 but go through you know so what happened they went down now they will go up and find you know an 03:04.280 --> 03:12.200 equilibrium but I think to answer your question that we will see games and we will see games very soon 03:12.200 --> 03:23.560 that people would be willing to use their tokens inside the game and sell it outside the game for fiat 03:23.560 --> 03:29.080 and there will be a thriving demand 03:32.120 --> 03:36.760 and this is becoming the speed of blockchain transactions 03:36.760 --> 03:38.760 I mean 03:38.760 --> 03:40.760 yeah 03:40.760 --> 03:42.760 question 03:46.200 --> 03:52.280 blockchain scalability is a challenging thing I mean 03:53.800 --> 04:01.160 I've been in blockchain since the very beginning. Satoshi chose a 10-minute interval between 04:01.160 --> 04:13.240 blocks in the Bitcoin blockchain because it wasn't possible to propagate transactions in the network 04:13.240 --> 04:21.880 in a less amount of time so that all miners would know of the latest block 04:21.880 --> 04:26.360 and we'll be able to start working on the next one when the previous one was mineg so 04:26.360 --> 04:32.680 the Bitcoin blockchain had and still has a 10-minute interval between 04:36.440 --> 04:38.440 between blocks 04:40.920 --> 04:42.840 now moved to 04:45.560 --> 04:54.440 my 12 intervals between blocks so in 10 years time because Bitcoin started in 2009, we're not 04:54.440 --> 05:03.800 2022 so 13 years time we have gone from 10 minutes to 12 seconds and there are all sorts of solutions for 05:05.240 --> 05:14.280 scaling that further and new technologies are coming all the time either for Layer 2s like optimistic roll-ups or 05:14.280 --> 05:26.120 zero-knowledge snarks or other ways all for Layer 1s that have much much less demands in terms of 05:26.120 --> 05:39.720 space or computing power or synchronization of nodes and so on so I'm sure that in the future 05:39.720 --> 05:47.480 this problem will be solved but for the time being because games need near-instantaneous 05:49.000 --> 05:56.520 type of reactions, when I have a shooting game and you fire the weapon it's the bullet to go 05:56.520 --> 06:02.360 watch it its target of not hit it's targeting and do whatever it will do instantaneously I cannot 06:02.360 --> 06:11.480 wait 12 seconds I cannot even wait two seconds for the experience would be detrimental so 06:12.760 --> 06:22.680 my personal six times of game the first types of games will be becoming not going to be like 06:25.240 --> 06:30.680 huge requirements in terms of speed that's why we're seeing you know card-based games in which players 06:30.680 --> 06:36.920 play in terms so there's no real-time interaction we see the move to earn type of 06:37.480 --> 06:38.840 standard you get 06:40.040 --> 06:49.480 free for or stepping or whatever because these things do not have with and and real-time interaction 06:49.480 --> 07:01.640 requirements it will probably be a few years before we start seeing the migration of 07:01.640 --> 07:09.720 interactive games to the blockchain today. I have to wait until the holographic technology comes out and 07:09.720 --> 07:17.240 then games will be the ultimate experience, that's very interesting and I think I will answer 07:17.240 --> 07:26.600 this question then we can probably wrap this up. In the reader science world there have been two 07:26.600 --> 07:34.840 technologies that (how can I say) invited radical of researchers at 07:36.120 --> 07:41.800 indifferent points in time one was artificial intelligence that started in the late 60s with 07:41.800 --> 07:49.880 lots of unfair and expectations never managed to deliver much until the 07:53.240 --> 07:58.120 the discovery of Neural Networks and Deep Learning a few years ago and suddenly we have a 07:58.760 --> 08:04.760 solution. The other technology is virtually everything that has to do with the virtualization of the reality 08:04.760 --> 08:13.480 around us, either pure virtual reality or of managed reality has up to nowbeen more hype 08:13.480 --> 08:24.040 than reality so to address the students comment I will say yes, I agree, if and when we see a holographic 08:24.040 --> 08:37.400 technology come out or be too heavy and difficult to use and we'll not have 08:37.400 --> 08:41.960 a huge latency and I will not get dizzy after using them for 10 minutes or whatever, 08:42.520 --> 08:48.120 yes, there's huge potential for virtual long-term reality and also to be extremely 08:48.120 --> 08:55.560 uh and this happened we'll discuss all these in a couple of weeks because we have a dedicated 08:55.560 --> 09:03.000 session in transiting visualization technology, I think Chris would have a lot to say then but 09:03.880 --> 09:09.720 until the time that these technologies become really 09:09.720 --> 09:23.160 let's say, come to go to standard in which they can be commercially deployed for the mass market 09:25.480 --> 09:34.040 need some time so we'll see. Another question is "what incentive do current game designers have 09:34.600 --> 09:39.400 to explore or adopt blockchain in their games, don't they currently benefit from their centralized 09:39.400 --> 09:45.880 approach?" The answer is a clear yes but that has never stopped the world from progressing it's you know 09:46.920 --> 09:53.240 heard this argument time and again and says "what incentive does Kodak have to 09:53.240 --> 09:59.800 invest in digital photography, don't they profit from analog photography?" The answer is yes 09:59.800 --> 10:06.120 they did profit but some competitors will disrupt them and will if they do not adapt to the new 10:06.120 --> 10:13.480 technologies they will die so for the studios and the game designers and the big technology companies 10:14.600 --> 10:20.280 that decide now it should be more to have a centralized approach I'm not looking at 10:20.280 --> 10:25.880 blockchain as an alternative they might be lucky and blockchain never makes it but if it does 10:25.880 --> 10:34.280 you know in 10 years' time many of the household names that we know today will be in history like 10:34.280 --> 10:43.480 Kodak or Fuji in the analog for those businesses and they will be substituted by others. 10:44.760 --> 10:52.760 So, i think this concludes today's lecture, thank you very much for being with us, next week we'll 10:52.760 --> 11:08.680 have a (Punk)6529 discussing the Metaverse, thank you very much for being here and see you next week. Bye bye 11:22.760 --> 11:25.400 you