Future of NFTs in games involves labour abuse

A consultant at an NFT game company believes that by abusing “cheap labour” from a “developing country”, NFTs can make a comeback in gaming.

NFTs in gaming are on the decline, as evidenced by their market crash. Still, early adopters of the controversial technology believe that a path forward exists — at the expense of cheap labour from countries like the Philippines, that is

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NFTs, or “non-fungible tokens” are digital receipts that prove ownership of a digital item, and in games they typically refer to a specific costume for a character or weapon. The value of NFTs, and cryptocurrency in general, relies on heavy investing from a wide range of people — but as a currency it is useless. You can swap it for fiat currency, but rarely can you spend it by itself.

Due to its unregulated design, cryptocurrencies are often the target of “rug-pulls” as well, where the currency is either stolen or deflated intentionally in value after a small subset of users withdraws their funds or cash out for regular money.

However, some NFT projects simply have runs of bad luck. First reported by Rest of World, this was the case with Critterz, a Minecraft-based mod that employed NFT integration. Mojang, the company behind Minecraft, banned blockchain and NFTs from integrating with the core game — effectively dealing a deathblow to Critterz, which relied on NFTs to stay afloat.

Minecraft private servers are nothing new, and often run on donations in order to offset server costs and pay development costs. Picture: Mojang

While the bulk of the story goes into the history behind Critterz, the key takeaway is the thought-process behind the early adopters of cryptocurrency in gaming. Speaking to Mikhai Kossar, who is part of a consulting group that specialises in NFT gaming projects, gave readers insight into how he believes NFTs can find a foothold in the future.

“With the cheap labour of a developing country, you could use people in the Philippines as NPCs (“non-playable characters”), real-life NPCs in your game,” said Kossar. These people could “just populate the world, maybe do a random job or just walk back and forth, fishing, telling stories, a shopkeeper, anything is really possible.”

If reducing actual human beings to role-playing as forgettable NPCs in a video game for wages seems dystopian, well, it kind of is. It’s yet another example of how NFTs and cryptocurrency clash with real people and their needs.

NFTs have a rough future ahead in gaming as well, as it’s not just customers who are unhappy with the controversial technology. A speaker went rogue with a crypto take-down during a seminar regarding the “Future of Game Design,” explaining the many issues blockchain technology has.

Written by Junior Miyai on behalf of GLHF.