"What will determine the [online virtual worlds] that we want to invest our time in?" asks SF writer Damien Walter. "That we want to be immersed in? That we want to live lives within? Story. Story is what's going to determine which unreal worlds we choose. That's why I think it's very likely, despite the disappointing track record of Lord of the Rings games, that because Tolkien's storytelling has been so important to us, that we will choose to participate in the digital Middle Earth."
What Mr Walter has to say in this podcast is interesting, and I urge you to listen to the whole thing. [ADDENDUM 27/01/24: If you can find it online; the video has been deleted.] But I'm not convinced about Middle Earth being such a shoo-in as a leading virtual world. It may well have a cracking story, but it's not the story you'll be getting in the online virtual version. It's the scenery. The world-building. And the problem with Middle Earth, through no fault of Tolkien's, is that it looks pretty much like every medieval-ish European-ish fantasy world created since: The Witcher, D&D, Skyrim, Game of Thrones, whatever.
Middle Earth is not (these days) brandably distinct. It is just a primogenitor of the medieval imaginary. Anything with elves and dwarves probably swiped its act from Tolkien, but they've overploughed that ground so much by now that the original uniqueness is lost.
I think the design of virtual worlds will no more be driven by story than cinema as an art form was driven by literature and theatre. Which is to say, maybe a little bit, but most of it will be something else. We're going to want the virtual equivalent of exciting tourist destinations.
"The author can only say that he enjoys societies which are not simply reruns of the usual Graeco-Roman or Mediaeval fantasy mythos, but which present something really different; something akin to stepping off an airplane in Bhutan or Medina, rather than in familiar old London or Paris."
That's Professor M A R Barker justifying his exotic world of Tekumel. Nobody could mistake Tekumel for any other world. It has multiple influences, but it's impossible to say "it's the Maya" or "it's ancient Egypt" or "it's India" the way you can pin most fantasy down to Europe in the Middle Ages. That might not make for stories that the average punter can relate to the way they lap up cowboys-in-space or intrigues in Westeros, but virtual worlds aren't about the stories. What matters is the originality and quality of the world-building. And there Tekumel is in a class of its own.
At 19m 05s Damien Walter says: "An NFT is a way to hold a share in an item that has been created. A share in its value."
ReplyDeleteIt certainly could be used in that way (you can attach any conditions you like to the blockchain) but I'm dubious about the example Damien Walter goes on to give. A writer releases 100 NFTs of their first story. Are these supposed to be the only versions of the story? That is, you can only read the story if you buy it as an NFT? That wouldn't work because the text is digital and can be easily stripped and endlessly recopied (as Mr Walter has already pointed out earlier in the podcast).
So why would I buy the $50 NFT version of the story when I could get the free just-the-text version? It is not an investment unless I can make money from the author's future success. Nobody is going to buy the NFT off me for $150 if all it amounts to is a token, and if you think such a token is of any use I can sell you a docket that says you have a share in ownership of the Brooklyn Bridge. Even George C Parker's infamous con promised his victims a share of tolls from those using the bridge.
For the NFTs of a story to appreciate in value, they need to have potential yield attached. This would be possible. The NFT might give the owner a 1% share in revenue from any movie or TV adaptation of the story, for instance. Now it could make money, and any sale of the NFT will be based on whether speculators think the author's star is rising or falling. You'd need to include something like that, otherwise all the NFT amounts to is a virtual pat on the head for having spotted an emerging talent early in their career.
More on this on The Creative Penn podcast: https://www.thecreativepenn.com/2022/02/04/the-creative-potential-of-nfts-for-authors-with-j-thorn-and-joanna-penn/
(Incidentally, Mr Walter doesn't agree about the value of world building:
https://youtu.be/Lgn_teogiiI?t=859
And on most days of the week I'd agree with him, but when it comes to online worlds we must put aside our writer's hat and think like a game designer.)
I would disagree with you here, for two reasons.
Delete(1) Ebooks can easily be copied: the current ebook system has exactly the same problem. It's trivial to find a pirate copy of almost anything; paying for an ebook is voluntary. 'Buying' an ebook from Amazon just puts a note in their off-chain ledger that you should have access to it. And they do all they can to discourage you from actually downloading the file to your computer!
An NFT-based system would have exactly the same issues as the current one, from the perspective of the distributor. I suspect it would result in the same, sub-optimal solution as current ebook-lending platforms use: require the reader to use a proprietary platform that lets the distributor take it away from you.
(2) I'm not sure why you're of the opinion that buying an NFT needs to be an investment. The point is that they can represent ownership of anything, not just yield-bearing financial assets. I don't normally expect to financially gain anything from buying a book other than the ability to sell it on to a used book shop later. I certainly wouldn't buy an ebook NFT for $50, but why wouldn't the author just let you mint them for a normal ebook price?
You could certainly argue for some sort of decentralised publishing system, where there's a market mechanism for investing in an author's work for a share of their future profits. I don't see a good reason to link that to actually buying a copy of their book, though. Something like that would be better off fungible, anyway.
I would personally very much like it if ebooks were sold as NFTs rather than licences to temporarily view text at Amazon's discretion. Being able to buy/sell used books would be nice, and the author being able to collect royalties on them would certainly be a step forward. It also opens up options like 'Own 10 of Dave Morris' books and get access to the Jewelspider RPG'.
I agree that buying an NFT does not have to be an investment. (An NFT could be a property deed, for example.) And an NFT ebook could just give you the book itself, with no extras -- but in that case Mr Walters' idea that you might buy a book by an unknown author, and profit by reselling it for a much higher price when he or she is famous, doesn't really work. I'd just expect to get the standard price, though as you say being able to resell it at all is a bonus. But with options like being able to get Jewelspider once you own ten other books -- that makes a lot of sense.
DeleteI work in financial regulation, and we have conversations about NFT's all the time. There is a strong line of argument that they are a flash in the pan sign of the times - both a side effect of the surplus quantitative easing cash sloshing around and a symptom of the end stages of the current economic boom/harbinger of a the coming crash. This school of thought holds that they will largely disappear as soon as the good times stop rolling (I appreciate that "good times" is a very relative term that most people wouldn't apply to their own circumstances right now).
ReplyDeleteI would take issue with the idea that something needs to produce a yield to have a value. For intrinsic value maybe, but not for a financial or "cash" value. Look at precious metals - perfect examples of stores of value that produce no yield (and that have little to no practical application). An NFT that gave a share of profits would really need to be seen as either a share or some form of debt instrument.
I think my own view is that NFT's are more akin to works of art, in that anyone can enjoy the visual aspects for next to nothing, but the value arises from being the person that owns the original, or one of a limited edition run.
The difficulty with drawing an analogy with art is that there is no meaning to "original" when it comes to digital files. If I own the Mona Lisa then it can be authenticated by an expert. I can put it in a vault or a gallery. I have control of a verifiably unique artifact. But if I have an NFT of the Mona Lisa -- or even an NFT of this blog post, say -- how can that be construed as having any intrinsic value? Without some way of that NFT's price reflecting changes in the popularity of the painting or blog in question, why then would anyone consider that owning it counts as an investment?
DeleteThese are questions I put to everyone with expertise in economics or finance, and quite a few share that view that they're a bubble. Actually I think NFTs as a technology could be genuinely useful. Things like contracts or real-world share certificates could be attached to NFTs -- though with the potential explosion of thousands of classes of share, since each NFT could have unique voting rights, yield, etc, attached to it.
But the notion of NFTs as indicating ownership in digital art or text, that's a bit of an enigma. What would ownership of the Mona Lisa be worth in a world of Star Trek replicators, where there could be an unlimited number of indistinguishably perfect copies? One copy might have "original" chalked on the back (it needn't be the actual original as these are identical in every way) and I suppose some people would pay more for that than for a perfect copy. But perhaps not $100 million more. A better analogy to what Damien Walter talks about in the podcast might be author's signatures. If I got Stephen King's autograph when he was starting out it wouldn't have been worth anything. Now it's worth a few hundred dollars, representing the fact that he's famous but there must be an awful lot of his signatures out there. The snag is, if his signature was digital then there could be an infinite number, so a little tick beside it saying "authentic original digital copy", apart from being an oxymoron, probably wouldn't confer any added value.
I'm always a bit baffled about NFTs in videogames, like the argument that "it'll mean I can sell my used digital downloads!". Surely that only works if there is a finite number of digital copies of the game made available for download in the first place?
DeleteI'll be interested to see how people would react if Grand Theft Auto 6 or whatever sold out on Steam... Or how I'd feel if I couldn't buy, say, the Lyonesse RPG on DriveThruRPG because it had sold out... (I realise that I'm straying beyond videogames, here).
I can see the benefit there to the producer, of course, since you could *possibly* charge hyped-up prices but that in turn relies on DRM to maintain scarcity. And when that DRM turns off, you have a problem.
Unless the NFT entitles you to something specific, it's just digital bragging rights. And will that be meaningful later on? Would owning an early-bird NFT for whatever becomes the next big Harry Potter or Star Wars mean anything? For the first owner, it might signify that they were ahead of the curve. After that?
There will be some market just for bragging rights, I guess. I wonder if people will eventually turn up on Antiques Roadshow in 2122 saying "This NFT once belonged to Elon Musk, you know!"?
Marvel used to do limited edition comics with special covers (and maybe still do) but everyone knows that's just a way to milk money out of the most committed fans, which kind of stinks as a strategy.
DeleteMind you, I say that, but I issued the hardcover of Blood Sword 5 as a limited edition. The justification there being that it was a reward for the Kickstarter backers -- they have something no one else can buy. It seems less venal than Marvel's approach, but maybe I'm just fooling myself.
In online games there's some argument for NFTs for unique items, like the One Ring example in the video. But I can't see the value of an NFT for a short story unless you get something else for your money. That could be a share of future revenue, or it could be a kind of membership access pass granting you interviews with the writer/musician/artist and first-look rights.
But, to the point of you post, I agree, if I did want a Medieval Europe themed virtual world to wander around I wouldn't choose Tolkien's - it's been done so much better so many times since. One of the first things I'd look for is a world that gave a more realistic and prominent role to female characters. Westerous does this quite well, but in book form I could never get passed George RR Martin's terrible writing. For me it's one of the few cases of a TV series being better (much better in this case) than the book. Might work very well as source material for a world though.
ReplyDeleteIf you want medieval Europe, then you probably have to choose between a realistic or a prominent role for female characters -- or at least a very different kind of prominent role from men's at the time. But does anybody want realism in a virtual world? As I said, they really want a theme park styled around the Medieval or Wild Western imaginary. A place that superficially looks like the original setting but that's populated by 21st century characters with modern sensibilities. These worlds aren't about roleplaying, after all, they're closer to cosplay -- or not even that, but just tourism. When a tourist goes to another country (I'd better not name any here) for a week or two they don't want to be confronted with its lack of equality for women, its record of persecuting gay and trans people, the dictatorial government or the prevalence of mob attacks for stating unpopular things. It's easy to see how a virtual version of such a country, which could replicate the look and feel while abandoning the unacceptable elements of culture or politics, would be much more palatable to gamers from liberal democracies.
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