Brazilian Games Festival has surprise topic change to anti-NFT speech four slides into future of gaming

A developer surprised the crowd at a recent games festival by turning his Future of Game Design talk into a take-down of blockchains and crypto.

Mark Venturelli had his Future of Game Design talk accepted to the Brazilian International Games Festival, which also featured talks along the lines of “Web3 and the New Generation of Games” – only that wasn’t his talk.

His actual presentation, revealed four slides in, was called “Why NFTs are a nightmare” and was a half-hour, 80+ slide take-down of blockchains and crypto in gaming.

He received a standing ovation when the change in topic was revealed.

Mark Venturelli switches his talk at BIG.

In the talk, Venturelli (known for Chroma Squad) covers everything from explaining the blockchain to pointing out why it doesn’t solve the gaming issues it’s being used for.

He talks about trust, the environmental impact, right-wing political philosophies and how they interact with the blockchain, dystopia, economic impact of NFTs and rampant speculation, the impact of ‘play to earn’ on artistic merit, and in the third act, even game design.

The slides, translated into English, are available here. You can also watch the original presentation on YouTube:

He concludes that the no-trust system and rules-less capitalism of blockchain gaming and play-to-earn models are terrible for everyone involved, and makes comparison to illegal activities in a number of games. It’s pretty brutal.

Speaking to PCGamer, Venturelli went on to say that the reason blockchain-related sponsors were there is because they must “buy their relevance, because they‘re not relevant.“

Those sponsors apparently “got really mad.

They tried to break into the talk while I was talking, but the organisation would not let them.”

Venturelli had already cleared his change of topic with those running the festival and they had given their blessing for him to go ahead.

While the moment of the reveal was great for the audience, he’d done the work beforehand to make sure it wasn’t going to get him taken down.

Both the full slides and the follow-up interview are worth a read, no matter what you may think of crypto-adjacent technologies.

— written by GLHF