This space is hosted by ForgotPlayland
Space Summary
The Twitter Space delved into the intersection of Web 2 and Web 3 gaming, highlighting the transitional dynamics and the value propositions of decentralized assets. It underscored the tension between traditional gaming ownership illusions and the genuine ownership offered by NFTs. There were rich discussions about the long-term benefits of adopting blockchain technology for gamers and developers, and the session wrapped up with a note of optimism and enthusiasm for future innovations.
Questions
Q: What distinguishes Web 3 gaming from Web 2 gaming?
A: Web 3 gaming offers true ownership through NFTs, unlike the rental feeling of Web 2 assets.
Q: How essential is mainstream adoption for blockchain gaming?
A: Mainstream adoption is crucial as it aligns values for both Web 2 and Web 3 communities.
Q: Should gaming prioritize enjoyment over monetary gains?
A: Yes, fun should be the primary focus, with financial incentives as secondary motivators.
Q: Are there hurdles in the early stages of Web 3 technology?
A: Certainly, but active development can smooth out these initial challenges.
Q: What does community feedback suggest about token utilities in gaming?
A: It reflects positive intrigue and acceptance, reaching even non-gamers.
Q: What should developers concentrate on for future innovations?
A: Staying abreast of global trends and understanding community needs are key priorities.
Q: How often are updates provided to the gaming community?
A: Monthly updates help to keep the community engaged, informed, and involved.
Q: What was an unexpected reaction during the session?
A: A hairdresser showed interest in token discussions, showcasing broader appeal.
Q: Why is stakeholder feedback crucial?
A: It ensures that gaming projects evolve in alignment with the community's changing preferences.
Q: How do you envisage the integration of Web 2 and Web 3 gaming in the future?
A: Future gaming trends are likely to seamlessly merge Web 2 and Web 3 experiences for players' benefit.
Highlights
Time: 00:00:00
Introduction: Web 2 vs. Web 3 Gaming
Time: 00:05:12
Ownership in Web 2 and Web 3
Time: 00:10:20
Gaming Appeal and Prioritizing Enjoyment
Time: 00:20:45
Community Feedback and Non-Gamer Interest
Time: 00:30:15
Importance of Mainstream Adoption
Time: 00:40:35
Developer Insights and Global Trends
Time: 00:50:18
Challenges in Early Web 3 Stages
Time: 00:55:50
Monthly Updates and Community Engagement
Time: 01:00:30
Unexpected Hairdresser Interest
Time: 01:01:44
Positive Community Interactions and Acceptance
Key Takeaways
- Web 3 gaming offers genuine ownership through NFTs
- contrasting with Web 2's rental-like assets.
- Mainstream adoption of blockchain in gaming is vital for tangible benefits.
- Emphasis on gaming enjoyment over financial incentives
- with community feedback crucial for development.
- Web 3 technology faces infancy challenges but proactive development can yield broad benefits.
- Token utilities in gaming show positive community acceptance and appeal beyond gamers.
- Developers need to stay informed about global trends for effective innovation.
- Frequent updates and community engagements foster belonging and active participation.
- Unexpected interest from non-gamers like a hairdresser indicates broader appeal.
- Stakeholder feedback is pivotal for nuanced gaming project development.
- Future gaming trends are likely to merge Web 2 and Web 3 experiences for players' benefit.
Behind the Mic
Hey guys, thank you so much for joining Friday Open Forum with us. Um Bram thanks for joining in as a co-host. Ori thank you so much for joining in as a guest. How's everybody doing this Friday? Bram why don't you kick us off? Ah, thanks so much for having me as a co-host today. And I see some familiar faces in the audience, so welcome to you all as well. Hope everybody's doing well this Friday. Hey guys. Hi everybody. It's a pleasure for me to join you this Friday and uh, thank you so much for having me tonight guys. Yeah, absolutely. We were in a Twitter space a few weeks ago together with you and Olivier Pons and we just thought, wow, there's so much knowledge that you have to share and so many inside insights. Absolutely had to have you bring your perspective here. For those that maybe missed that space we had a couple weeks ago that don't know who you are or what you do or what you're up to, give us a quick little background. Sure. So, so um, I'm almost 40 years old, started my career in Web2 companies, uh, back in the early 2000s. I quickly worked my way in social media marketing at that time with MSN and Microsoft, and got my skills developing with C++. And, um, quickly after that I entertained a career, uh, along different brands, so Adidas, Dropbox, and I sort of brought my bagages with me to Microsoft again a few years later and started in 2016 when, uh, during the pandemic, um, I've sort of heard about Hypersign and NFTs, which I was kind of, uh, uncertain about what was going on there. And, um, as soon as I landed and I understood what NFTs represent and metaverse in general, uh, I was totally, totally hooked up to this space. And last year I decided, so in 2021 I decided to leave my job at Microsoft to devote to, uh, my company right now called Overlord World, which is building, uh, the first, uh, ever 8-bit, uh, top-down metaverse focusing on interaction rather than necessarily gameplay, uh, in itself. I love that top-down. Um, I think we've talked in other spaces about it. It's such an interesting way to interact with your community and like, for the community to interact with the gameplay throughout. Um, what kind of top-down views have inspired you in, in building this? Oh yeah, this is a question I get frequently. Um, I worked on Sandbox a few years ago. Actually might have been two years ago now. And, um, during the time I worked for Sandbox, we, we iterated on a lot of the concepts that brought the turn-based battle aspect but also the macro aspect of building yourself, your own house, and everything was in 16-bit. And I found that the UI was the most easy for, first off, anyone to get a hang on, but also allowed the most flexibility in terms of concept art. Now, with the beauty of top-downs, it leaves a lot of place to the imagination, right? So in game design, this is something we often talked about, the more low-fi a game is, the more the player will have, uh, a room to actually embody the character they're playing. So there’s almost a schizophrenia aspect in game design. Now today, cuboids are what kids want, right? So this is why my game, and I'm going to reveal it today and not anybody actually knows already, it's based on cuboids, right? So we go from cubes to cuboids and we found out it was the most efficient way. So cuboids, then onboarding. Do you see the same challenge with onboarding when it comes to things like cuboids? Is the onboarding from Web2 to Web3 a challenge that you're taking on? Oh yeah, this is very interesting. First to answer with onboarding, I think the technique here is not to scare people away, right? When you enter Web3, you sort of open a door that lands you in a deep, deep hole, and the further you go, the further down you go, the more you have to learn. And this scares a lot of people because subject matters are very, very wide. So when we onboard people, we don't give too much details. We work with the story to be very inclusive in the verbiage we use. We really decide to work on the simplicity of the gamification rather than necessarily NFTs. And NFTs come second. Right? So this is all about the usability. Um, and this is why Web3 is still a challenge even in 2023. Yeah, that leads to a lot more usage. With a more mainstream audience, they don't know about decentralization right away. They've heard of NFTs, they've heard of crypto. How do you get them onboarded into the concept of decentralization? And we don’t use this term, first off. It is meant for us that decentralization means independence and therefore more possibilities in terms of creativity for the player, but we don't use decentralization as a term in-game because remember, our game is an experience, and it's the fun aspect that we need to bring forward. Right? So, um, talking about education, if I talk to Web3 or Web2 gamers and companies such as Ubisoft, they have no clue. They don't care about decentralizing the data or these sorts of things. They want to play a good game, a fun game, and if they realize oh, I can make money with that or I can buy these premium cards with those tokens that are earned, they're going to get hooked similar to how you get hooked to skins or how I personally got hooked to nfts because I just love getting nfts and collecting them. I think that is the best approach to first of all, mainstream adoption and also bringing value to both the Web3 community as well as the Web2 community and please, both of their needs and yeah, preferences. I love that Web2 is such the illusion of ownership. It's, you're really renting these things, right? They can do whatever. When we talk to ourselves in spaces, it's so clear, like the value proposition of Web3. And I just, I can't wait for the moment for like all of Web2 to realize that, you know, like, yeah, there's some things wrong with crypto. We're in our infancy stages and we have a lot of kinks to work out, but you know, we're building for your benefit right now. You know, we're putting in the effort for you. So I just want to point out, and not to brag about myself, but I've been getting my hair dyed the whole time I've been on this space and just a second coat on my new red hair. And my hairdresser overheard you guys talking about the token utility and she said, God, I'm not even a gamer but that sounds like a great loyalty program. And I just I love when people from the real world hear the wisdom of Web3 and go, oh, I get it. Yeah, yeah. I love what you just said because instinctively what you just delivered was an experience of first impact. You're not even a gamer, right? And the instinct here was not to what does it stand for? What is this coin going to do? How can I inflate it or deflate it? That is more technical aspect, the entry level for most people is gamification. That's what we do. Interesting because my niece is like she’s been developing loyalty programs for last two years for big companies and I was talking to her about what we do and she said oh my God, that makes so much sense. Why aren't big companies adopting this already? And gives me faith. In your opinion, because you have this loyalty and approach, do you feel like games are the Trojan horse for the masses out there? Returning to our Web2/Web3 discussion for a moment, for me Web3 and Metaverse was always going to expand from 2016 when crypto started rising and people bought crypto and never used it. It was meant for transactions initially and speculation later on and today with Web2 we're meant to bring experience in which they don't need to own or speculate on any coins. This means that they will dive directly into what gaming has most to give. We're confident to bring value in this as well as what loyalty program can bring in traditional sense. Everybody has got needs and preferences as per their own likings, but what is important is having experience and playing the game. Period. And spending time playing the game and learning. I love that answer and I'm sorry for digging a little deeper on mainstream, uh, gamers of these games. Um, for you, in your opinion now, how do you make the game more fun? So fun is a function of investment. The more time you invest, the more time it's fun. Think about Pokemon. Pokemon relies on scarcity. A game doesn't need to be fun right away. Onboarding and layering the fun, top of the funnel. They build on top of each other, creating this feeling of whoa, look what I’ve made. So yes, we build the storyline first, sprinkle a bit of sugar on top, but most importantly, we are focusing on delivering fun aspects through soft economy first. Hard economy comes second. Yeah, I wish everybody had your clarity on this. And I know, we know you're not just all talk. You've got Rufflor in action. Yeah, we're definitely working at it. To be honest with you, it's been two years since we planned this, and the biggest issue I encountered while I was setting up my dev team and what really got me stuck at creating the first game, was actually creating the views necessary for the game, not the engine, but the creative engine to populate the sprites. Like, what is visible? What isn’t? That's why I leaned into top-down view, which is what makes it so important for those that are building new functionality. And boy, this has been a challenge, trust me. And so far we've delivered the official launch of the soft version of Rufflor starting last week with the community. Oh nice, congrats on that. And I can't tell you how much people love interacting with what you've already built. Thank you so much. And I think my community needs to be thanked more than I do because you need to see the content they are delivering. I actually pushed to YouTube my first gameplay session and had guys send me audios and videos of their experience and those were like, wow amazing reactions. Uh, so to wrap things up, what’s the next steps for Roughlor and Overlord these next couple months? Yeah, good question. So first, we're going to go for another update round where I will show you what’s been evolved to make the game even a better experience focusing on narrative and storytelling. This is added on top of the already existing game whereas we are going to extend this soft version of the game to probably mid-January until we are happy with the results and then we will go for a bigger update, which is migrating to Overlord World so this means more alpha-testing, more deliveries of programs and NPCs and all the features we talked about today. It's definitely an exciting time. And let me just pivot for a moment, because I had a related question. Once you migrate to Overlord, how different is that experience for someone that's maybe interacted with Rufflor? Oh very good question. So gameplay definitely is a nice example going to bring here. When you started, you have what's called a head-up display and for us, transitioning happens within 10 seconds and now it's your account vs. the Metaverse. So this is why it's important for us to not only have a render of what people are doing but also move this out without closing the game. Creating a seamless navigation for people to get people totally hooked on the game. So that's for us that is quite crucial because Web2-based games, when you have to shut down or open a new tab, this sometimes creates issues with API and definitely causes troubles with navigation for the player. Whereas with Overlord, it's very linear. Everything is created within the same single frame. It's pretty cool to see, shifting towards no clicks experience, right? And now we are trying to create this inception phase. That’s something we've talked about here a lot, right?. You're essentially removing friction. Reminder for everyone, whenever you publish a blockchain-enabled game or like /NFTs or DeFi, there are actually costs. Bearing these costs sometimes scares small producers and dev teams, but we are there to reassure that. Everybody needs that reassurance in Web3 nowadays. Right, exactly. And we don't want to scare people who are still not getting enough funding and visibility, so it's crucial here to actually create a true community. Because without community and without having any empathy for our players… Right, and I have nothing else to say. That is quite impressive. Thank you. You mentioned Inception a few moments ago. Since we’ve already dove deep into the philosophy of developing, tell us about what inspired you to target Inception and how you plan to bring it to interaction-based metaverses? Yeah, so I've read a lot of sci-fi books and I watched the movie Inception when it came out, and basically for me, Inception means bringing back the consciousness again about what we are playing as a game. Realizing the boundaries. Usually a game now right takes 3D linear structure. You have your basic frame and you evolve around the same environment. So what I plan to do with Inception is similar to what a turret is doing for sci-fi games. Creating feelings again but also relying on new topics and the player doesn't realize a sort of out of body experience that game instills and that’s my plan to totally immerse them. Wow, it's like a sci-fi novel being brought to life in an experiential way. Exactly, yes. I'm a sci-fi nutter and definitely what I try to do is just drive into the players’ own consciousness and go even further than that so to keep the fun and immersion quite thrilling and continuous. This is definitely an interesting way of putting narrative and usually I'meager to see where you guys bring this. We’ll be keeping a close eye on Inception for sure. Absolutely. And it's so true that the way we blur the boundaries of game is so vital nowadays. And we absolutely need to surprise people. I mean that's the beauty of it. Speaking of sci-fi, are there any other games out there that are doing this now? Interesting question. And yeah, if Cyberpunk was meant from the start to stay a fun experience, they will go out on full on open world and just hook on new stories. Cyberpunk delivered this last year with their latest expansion pack. Right? You had a base game, you get absolute fun as you progress. But they brought up old maps, they brought new stories that kept you going longer, like completely driving you in. The main critique I have about Cyberpunk though, is the interaction, because they are doing it with genuine narrative rather than player input. It's more like they delivered the stories and what I think we need more is being part of the story. I prefer rather than delivering it, I try to include the player literally. So it means driving them having personal perspective, driving them emotional and definitely positive friction. So my view stands somewhere in the middle of what Cyberpunk did strictly narrating the story and including more into Inception for me works. Yeah, when you think of emotional friction it really draws parallels to things we see in real life like loyalty. Yep, exactly, hope that answers your questions. Absolutely. I always love deep diving. Excellent. So any last minute questions here because we’ve still got a few minutes. Sure. I can chime in for a moment perhaps. Just curious about interplay and interoperability of various Web3 related metaverses. And how stories can interplay as we evolve through multiple genre types. Oh yeah, this is very interesting. Actually interoperability for Web3 Metaverse for me is in fact the ultimate goal. Because in the end right, cyberspace can be secured, can be insured. The NPCs can be transferred regardless of platform changes. This is prime stuff for me. In this sector now everybody happens to own their own station. In NPCS or other AI services, so far Ori and Blockchain have been delivering it. Now if you apply this to our end users, ensuring metaverses that you want to interact between can bring more meaningful and consistent experience to the user based on metadata. So right now, we've delivered cross-metaverse functionality, also cross-chain functionality. And it’s happening now due to smart contracts. So my answer here would be ultimate goal of interoperability leading to seamless user experience continuity. That’s a great answer, thank you. Thanks so much for your patience Ori, and the insights. If anyone's looking for more of Ori, follow him on Twitter or get involved through his project. Absolutely, thanks. Bram any closing thoughts? Yes, just that it has been an incredible discussion and I’m so glad we could have Ori join us today. A huge thanks. Thank you so much for your wisdom and insight. If you are a game or anybody looking for insight into the space, they have such a breadth of knowledge. It's just nice to have somebody that's out there, like in the center of everything with the feelers, out working with so many different games, having your back because when your head's down building a game, you don't see all these changes. You don't see the things going on in other countries. You don't see, you know, you don't see the next trend when it's coming because you are busy marketing your game or developing your game. So it makes me sleep a whole lot better at night knowing that they're kind of watching our backs in that regard. And Bram, thank you for spilling a little alpha. I'm surprised we actually got something out of you. I can't wait to play hot potato in the social hub again. It's just been a really great space. Thank you to all the guests for coming out. We saw a lot of good friends in the audience. Love you guys, and we will see you next month after the next monthly update. Have a good day, everyone.
