Edge Xmas 2021

For a good while, ‘NFT’ has been just another entry in a long list of threeletter initialisms that was easy to ignore. Like so many technological fads before it, the thinking went, it would surely simply fizzle out. But with millions of dollars of investment in the space, an explosion of players in blockchainpowered games, and now the highprofile involvement of Will Wright, it’s clear that it’s not going away. And that’s despite Valve going so far as to amend Steam’s publishing rules to outright ban any applications that trade in cryptocurrencies or NFTs. The question today is becoming inevitable: what legitimacy, if any, do these technologies have within videogames? For the uninitiated, NFT stands for non-fungible token – meaning one that is unique and not interchangeable with a similar equivalent,…

Miners hoard processing power because of the ‘proof of work’ model, which – because only the first to solve a problem gets the reward – incentivises them to compete with other miners for each transaction. It’s an incredibly inefficient process, by design, but there are other options, most notably ‘proof of stake’, which randomly offers validation opportunities to a limited number of validators at once, reducing some of the need for competition and thus the amount of processing power being expended on each transaction. Ethereum, one of the biggest blockchains (with, according to Digiconomist’s energy consumption index, an annual power consumption equivalent to the entire nation of Chile), was founded on proof of work, but is in the process of transitioning to proof of stake.…

For a good while, ‘NFT’ has been just another entry in a long list of threeletter initialisms that was easy to ignore. Like so many technological fads before it, the thinking went, it would surely simply fizzle out. But with millions of dollars of investment in the space, an explosion of players in blockchainpowered games, and now the highprofile involvement of Will Wright, it’s clear that it’s not going away. And that’s despite Valve going so far as to amend Steam’s publishing rules to outright ban any applications that trade in cryptocurrencies or NFTs. The question today is becoming inevitable: what legitimacy, if any, do these technologies have within videogames? For the uninitiated, NFT stands for non-fungible token – meaning one that is unique and not interchangeable with a similar…

Looking outside of the actual in-game experience, another potential use case for NFTs could be creating a resale market for digital editions. At a time when digital-only consoles are becoming increasingly common, it is at least an interesting notion. And at the forefront of this, unexpectedly, is Intellivision Amico. Though the console itself is still to be released, ‘boxed editions’ of its games have recently gone on sale for $/€80 per set of four. The boxes don’t actually contain any physical media but do come complete with an NFT, allowing buyers to transfer ownership of each downloadable game through the blockchain.…

Miners hoard processing power because of the ‘proof of work’ model, which – because only the first to solve a problem gets the reward – incentivises them to compete with other miners for each transaction. It’s an incredibly inefficient process, by design, but there are other options, most notably ‘proof of stake’, which randomly offers validation opportunities to a limited number of validators at once, reducing some of the need for competition and thus the amount of processing power being expended on each transaction. Ethereum, one of the biggest blockchains (with, according to Digiconomist’s energy consumption index, an annual power consumption equivalent to the entire nation of Chile), was founded on proof of work, but is in the process of transitioning to proof of stake.…

Looking outside of the actual in-game experience, another potential use case for NFTs could be creating a resale market for digital editions. At a time when digital-only consoles are becoming increasingly common, it is at least an interesting notion. And at the forefront of this, unexpectedly, is Intellivision Amico. Though the console itself is still to be released, ‘boxed editions’ of its games have recently gone on sale for $/€80 per set of four. The boxes don’t actually contain any physical media but do come complete with an NFT, allowing buyers to transfer ownership of each downloadable game through the blockchain.…