What P2E Games Get Wrong | Brooks Brown

Transcript

This episode is brought to you by ParaSwap, the leading aggregator to find best prices across various DEXs. You'll hear more about them later in the show. Welcome back to another episode of Empire. We got Santi and myself. Uh, we have a very special guest today. We got Brooks Brown on the show. Uh, the description I have in front of me is more than 18 years of creative and strategic development in interactive content for Universal Pictures, LucasArts, Lightstorm, and James Cameron's Avatar. Tar. I think that's a really boring introduction because I listened to Brooks on a couple of shows.

a guy on Fiverr to make to write that for me. I think I suck at bios so bad. So Brooks, I think I I've listened to you on a couple of podcasts. Here's my introduction is that you have an absolutely encyclopedic knowledge of games. You are one of the deepest thinkers I've ever listened to when it comes to games, gaming ecosystems, just art as a concept and what this even means. So, I'm super excited about this. Welcome to Empire. Well, thank you for the flattering intro. And I'm really excited to be here because I I'm a listener. So, it's kind of one of those fun things. I don't There's very few crypto podcasts I listen to.

It's basically you guys and Tom at Delphi. And so, it's kind of weird that those are the two I also get to go on. But, this is this is a blast. I'm I'm really excited. Um, well, Brooks, it's a I've known you for a while. And full disclosure, I'm an investor in your project. I am curious, if you could just walk us through what makes a good game? Um, well, that's See, that's very deep That's a very deep question. Um We like to go deep on Empire. So, so what makes Let's just start with what makes a game important because a a good game is is a relative thing. Let's talk about art and pull back. Uh, Um when when someone looks at a piece of modern art, you'll hear people go

that this doesn't mean anything. This is empty. There's nothing there for me, like a Jackson Pollock. And the response I have and the response other people who love art say is um well, then what are you trying to say? Like what are like you as a person? Because art is a two-way thing. You get out of art what you put into it in that moment of vulnerability or if you have an interesting story, art brings and pulls something out from you. This is the nature of how properly done good art works in in any form. And this works from red, you know, paintings to cinema to plays to books and to be video games.

Uh video games make it explicit. It requires a player to control a thing and to act within a space to give that space meaning. The best games are the ones that let a player do the things that they sort of want to play with and experiment with. Uh play as a thing I consider to be almost sacrosanct. There's a big breadth of what that means in the world of games and I don't make some judgments that other people do. I Last of Us is not a a walking movie. It's a it's a game. There's there's moments of agency. There's storytelling.

It's done differently. All the way though to things that I consider to be not games that that take advantage of it. Slot machines uh for example inside of Vegas, they utilize a lot of the same things. Oh, you can choose your adventure and you hit the button and you put a dollar in or other games that literally are only that and maybe available on the iPhone or the Android and fill the store up with garbage. Uh these things don't have agency. Everyone's playing and doing literally the exact few things, but they have a reward mechanism that makes you feel like you're playing. They make you feel like you're learning, like you're doing something. And this trick is something that we learned a long time ago, uh sort of how to do to people. And that has become to me almost venomous, pervasive,

toxic to the underlying reality of what we're able to really build in the space, which is deep, interesting, systemic worlds that allow experimentation. And if we want to go down that road, which I do, you end up in a space where something like Minecraft probably is one of the best games ever made. The Sims, they also happen to be the largest grossing games, and that's I don't think a surprise. People are able to experiment and explore and do things inside of them that they can't do inside of other games. There's They're canvases that I'm able to play within within a very strict set of rules versus something that is very very particular.

Um the The greatest game of all time is one no one's heard of. It's Dwarf Fortress. I consider it the greatest game, and I think there's other games that are sort of playing in that direction of this hyper-realized what do I do in this space and what happens? And as you do that, the world means more. Uh in Minecraft, a mud hut has meant far more to me in the course of like the weeks playing as I slowly built up and I turned that mud hut into something more than, you know, the month or two collectively I've probably spent playing Candy Crush or games like that that just mean [ __ ] nothing.

How do you strike a balance between this You talk about these canvases. And now the the word in vogue now is a metaverse, right? This open canvas is that has like endless possibilities. And I think of a game like Zelda, the latest one. It felt to me like it was just very expansive and it was sometimes frustrating to play a game where you don't have much direction. As a creator, how do you strike a balance between walking the user through this kind of open canvas and allowing them to experiment like but there needs to be some hand-holding to some extent. I don't know if you To a point and and every game is going to do it differently. Um Matthias Worch,

uh if you Google him, so lovely game designer has given a lot of really amazing talks on sort of how level design tells stories. And uh to your point about Zelda and I would say conversely something like uh and he was on it a Dead Space or Doom that have a little bit more of a corridor feeling and a very directed sort of do X I need the blue key find blue key kind of mentality versus a what are you going to do next uh kind of mentality that some of these open open games do. It is very much about giving you that emotion of exploring the space and what you want to do with it. Um a Dead Space which is a very linear. Uh there's there's no options. You don't like choose to go

down another pathway. How you go about those pathways is kind of the big deal but that pathway is set. It's not about exploration. In fact, it's the opposite. It's about a a sort of closed-in emotion that it's trying to drive you towards a goal and have you experience that feeling and that continual terror of I have no choices. I must continue. How will I survive versus something that like Zelda for example or Minecraft that is massively open and there's a billion things you could do is about you kind of just playing within that. Um my favorite stories of Zelda are actually where people broke it where you went the wrong direction or you decided not to go where they wanted you to and in those moments

where you feel like you're being naughty. Like it it you feel it. You know you're not Oh, I'm not supposed to be here yet but it feels cool and as you start doing stuff in those spaces you start actually enjoying it I think in a really profoundly odd way. So it's it's not easy to do. Open world games are some of the hardest. Um you know, our our projects on No Or are a little bit more directed. It's PvP focused, Uh little bit of a different setup, but it's not easy. Like there's a reason that just like great films, there's not a thousand of them every year. We don't know what literally does it, but we do know, and it's pretty consistent that the more space a player has to explore,

not only the more successful financially and the more players that want it, but the more profound the response is almost every single time. Before we go to Noor and kind of your assessment of the current landscape of Web3 games, I want to talk about your experience working with James Cameron in Avatar and what that sort of taught you about and how you relate it back to these kind of open worlds. Um Yeah, the the the team on Avatar, which I'm I'm me saying this is more tautological than anything, the best in the world. Anyone in the space who was working there, it's not that Pandora isn't real.

You needed to treat it as if Pandora was a real place. And it was a really strange thing at first because I came from Star Wars. Star Wars is not treated like that at all. Star Wars is a Well, what else do we need? All right, well, the line could be Oh, I need a water planet. Uh It's all water. Yeah, but how does that work? I don't care. Like it's it's kind of that setup, whereas with with Jim in Pandora, there's this great story where they're showing this piece of art that Dylan had done. I think it was Dylan. And it was a Na'vi's schoolhouse, and there was like a a bird's nest in one corner. It's this big piece.

And Jim What's that? What's that? Oh, that's a that's a bird's nest. Now you got to invent a bird. Uh because for everything that you did, it had knock-on effects. It's like a realized real systemic world. And as you start thinking about world creation that way, this is the kind of games I've always liked. Once you start thinking about creating your worlds that way, these things sort of sync up and you start building, to me, a more cohesive, interesting space that I believe people are more apt to be invested in or makes more sense on its face. Um there's kind of two ways world building works. And it's it's Star Wars or Avatar. And Avatar has a few other There's other films that do this, another worlds, too.

But it's uh with Avatar, it's systemic. Things fit or they don't. So, people don't really have the ability to make up. There's like not a lot of fan fiction for Avatar because it either fits or it doesn't. There's no surprise twist. Oh, over here gravity doesn't matter anymore is not really how it works. Whereas with Star Wars, it's literally anything can be around any corner. There's a magic box sort of nature to it. And so, there people love having puzzles or can I invent something that fits into this world and it's a weird twist. Oh, Luke's a dark side now or whatever that like doesn't really make sense, but is fun. And so, you kind of have these two competing things. I lean heavily in the this side where it's systemic, where things make sense, where you're constantly teaching people about

the world and you're able to play with it much like our world, which is a weird, terrifying nightmare in its own way. Um but at the same time deeply rewarding to learn about. And I think there's a lot of um a lot of fun to be had there. And really, it was like a college career, uh a doctorate in world building just sitting alongside these people and being able to see how they when they were working on Disney, how they talked about it with the Imagineers. How they were working on the upcoming Avatar films and how they were thinking through it. The writers, who are extraordinary writers, um who have for the next few movies. The the art team is uh second to none in how they thought and how their brains worked. Um being able to absorb that was

just an extraordinary treat. I'm just really fortunate for me. Would you say that the systems building approach versus the Star Wars model is more relatable to humans? And and you talk about humans being invested and we talk about a game. Is that Is that more interesting? Conversely, I think the investment is deep in a different way when it comes to something like a systemic world like an Avatar or a world that's built that's thinking through those. How does it fit into our space?

How does it work? All of these and if you don't answer them shittily, where you kind of end up is people take it to heart in a deep way. Uh Harry Potter's not not a bad version of this for a lot of children all the way through to Avatar. The The fandom for Avatar is like nothing I saw with Star Wars. Um like nothing. Uh they're they were they were Na'vi. They were in this space. They they spoke the language. They talked about it. Their investment was emotional in a way where they can they cared about it because they cared about the world. They were all deeply environmental. They were all deeply eco-friendly. They had a weird way of looking at that isn't just fun dressing up in outfits once in a while and going

to a convention. It was like this is their life because again, the systemic nature of it makes it feel a lot deeper. And there's a lot of games again when we talk about games as a thing and systemic world building is still a thing that I think overall is new. When we talk about games or we talk about how these things sort of fit in us, the way that games play systemically means I can get invested in any single part of it and that time spent isn't wasted later because the systems are always interlocking. The systems are always growing. I'm always growing.

Whereas if you put out a game where all I do is press quick time events in order to do things, then the system I'm getting good at is just pressing buttons. I'm not in I not better at the game or invested in any deep way. Uh Asura's Wrath is one of my favorite Xbox 360 games. It's pure It's pure quick time events. It's hilarious and stupid. I don't care about that world at all. Conversely, a game like Dota, a game like Rust where I can put thousands of hours into just minute things. I've I've played a total of like seven to 10 heroes in Dota 2 out of the 100 150 billion it feels like at this point. But I like I only do so many heroes. And even that, I'm 4,000 hours in and I'm moderate. And kind of crap.

I'll I'll be honest, I'm crap. But like that's it's it's a really strange thing to be able to invest that and have that and know kind of where you sit. But again though, if we go back, the great systemic storytellers, the people who really thought through all of this stuff, books and film. Like games is a different beast. But books and film, they've been doing this for years. They've just been using our world to do it. But it's the the way people are building and writing these stories has never been non-systemic except for like kind of crap one-off stuff. That's where the greats come from. And I I I aspire to be towards that or at least encouraging people to get in that direction.

So in that model, would you say that a game like Nora that is based on on sort of a systemic approach to world building is more of a journey of introspection for the player versus the other approaches that's more like click-baity, um more kind of reward-based. Whereas the the systems-based is much more deep and if you're able to strike it it it it creates a much more powerful uh experience for the for the player. Well, this is where you start getting into one of my favorite debates, which is where do games sit on sort of the triangle of reality. And some people like sports games and sports as a thing or e-sports. Like there's been that

debate oh are they really sports? Other people art in this whole thing. Games are such a unique odd thing to me. I I try to talk about them much more aligned with the way soccer works of football depending where you're at in the world. Most of the world I guess. I'm an American. I Anglicize everything until it works. Um but or American sports in general they're games but they're games that you can't buy yourself better. You can't do anything that just jumps you to that next point. There are no as much as Nike would love you to say otherwise. There's no shoe that makes you better at basketball.

Like that's not really how it works. Time and mastery and skill and I use I did throughout high school and junior high I did drills for basketball. I did drills for sports. They take a lot of time to be able to do things regularly to have the muscle memory to be able to refine yourself to that you know you're you start and you hit 50% of shots and then slowly the curve sort of goes until you're you know you practice a billion years like someone like Michael Jordan. It's less that he has natural talent literally that he just did it only this. This is all he did. He played and played and played and that mastery those systems he was able to enter and play and get very good at and that kind of mentality is I

think where the best games offer where it's the reason to me the Dark Souls games or Elden Ring strike such a deep chord because it is a it's a systems-based game. I don't necessarily find my the game infuriates me. The camera is I think the worst enemy in the game. I don't care what anyone says. It's awful. But I play it because the addiction comes from you feel yourself and you can visibly see yourself getting better. And as you play you get better and you can watch other people who are better and see how they're doing it and then take tips and then make yourself like this becomes a over time life improving I can progress thing. Versus something where I spend a few bucks and I I jump ahead

of a World of Tanks or an Axie or whatever it is that I throw myself in and I spend money on that has muddied the waters of skill. It It doesn't mean anything anymore because I just did it. I I didn't have to sort of go through it. I didn't actually do a thing. It's not my effort. It's not my memory. It's not my thing. It's just me passing through other people's uh just because I happen to have capital or I happen to be closer to someone or I happen to whatever it be is. This is not the human condition, at least as far as I'm concerned. I have a very I'm a hyper idealogue when it comes to this, but it's people are meant to have experiences and grow. It's a weird idea,

um but I think it's an important one. The best games, and if you're free to I'd love to hear what you're like your top five games are, they're going to be where the mechanics are systemic, where you can improve over time. Even if the world is it Kirby. I watch my son play Kirby or Yoshi. The world's not necessarily that systemic. It's a kids game, for sure. But the controls are, the way he learns how to do stuff, the way he can combine stuff, and the way he can think about doing stuff that's around the corner, that stuff is where it's like, oh, actually no, there's interesting things that he can discover how to do and you can master and you can get better personally. This setup is not far from chess. Chess doesn't have a systemic world. It's a king, a queen, it's there's no growth. The The world of

chess is never changes, but the game is deeply systemic to the point where someone who's very good at it can see and sort of push you into making a move five moves from now, which is kind of wild. Like that kind of thinking, these are deeply systemic games. So, it's understanding how that operates and it plays within mechanics, being able to marry that properly with a story world that I think plays in that space, and then seeing kind of where we can end up between the two. I I know Santiago's going to want to take us into into crypto and Nora in a second, but I really want to get your framework for how you're just viewing almost the evolution of games. Like you got Pong in the early '70s, you've got Donkey Kong in the early '80s, and then you get this we move from the the you

pay 50 bucks for a game to the free uh free to play games, and now every talk about play to earn. Like what have the last 50 to 60 years of video games? What does that progression look like? And like how did we get here? Well, I it's the most interesting part about video games like when you go through and you do like a a real history and proper Marxist roots as I have, the to me with the connections with larger society I've always found fascinating. The The first video game came from a guy who was incredibly disillusioned by his work on the Manhattan Project. Uh he made the atomic bombs and was just beyond depressed. He actually made uh kind of Pong. He made a tennis for two, which was a tennis game with a wave meter. It's beautiful. It's kind of

amazing as as he was able to program it. And his view was this was a game people could play electronically, which meant anyone could do it as long as you had the electronics. You It was like this accessible everyone could do thing. And uh there's kind of a beauty in that. Over time this went away, came back a bit as Atari, came back as arcades, came back as a few things. But the interesting part for me is how we financialized it because that's really what has really driven It's not just games, it's everything. Uh kind of shapes We don't think about it, but how we financialize things shapes how they work. Film becoming blockbusters was inevitable because of the nature of how

we finance them. We finance them through ticket sales, and that means asses in seats matters, which means you you to do it during summer time, which is when the kids are out, which means you need to make family-friendly stuff, but also action, so you get larger like the very particular nature of how things are financialized really drives a lot of that. Um with video games, it started with coins. Uh dropping coins in Donkey Kong, and so to make the most money, and they flatly said this, the maker of Pac-Man, I think my favorite quote was he wanted a game that women couldn't help but play over and over and over. And what do women like to do? They like to eat. So he made Pac-Man. I love that [ __ ] line. It's like the most insane line. But um so you you do, you have a compulsion, you get

your three lives, and you go on, and you die, and then you put in another quarter. And the games that were most successful were the ones who really took advantage of this uh to the point where it actually became sort of a self-fulfilling squeeze everyone out mentality. Well, as this was happening, lo and behold, and Nolan Bushnell, the Atari guys, came along and said, "Well, you know, you're just dropping a lot of money at the arcade, we can replace home." And they financialized it by selling cartridges and games to and and games to people, which is great. We got to play those games at home, not drop that money, but you'll notice all the old games, except for like two, still had lives. They still were coin-op games. Like this thing we had designed in order to make money now was there when we didn't need it. And this is

where we start getting screwed up uh kind of across the board, and this is not just games, but this is everything, when we don't realize why we do things and that it's an old outdated thing. I'll get to that because it's important for play to earn, especially. But you know, when you have three lives in a Nintendo game, you're not going to put another quarter in. That's literally like this archaic thing that got stuck in there, and we never dropped. It's still in video games on my PS5, which is insane to me. We don't need that. Why have that? Well, we can't help it. So as we sort of got going over time, these really expensive large-scale games were made. Um at some point uh StarCraft came out. And StarCraft's a big turning point for the industry.

Not just because it's great, and it was, but because it got really big in Korea. This is important because in Korea, people didn't have home computers, really. This was, you know, post, you know, Korean War. You know, they were still recovering. They had a big big recession right before. They were not the economy they were now in the late '70s, early '80s. And then into the '90s, they were slowly growing, and PC bangs became a thing. PC cafes where you'd go, you'd spend a dollar an hour, and you'd sit and play whatever games they had on that computer. Well, StarCraft was one of those games. And so, lo and behold, Blizzard, poor Blizzard, was selling very few games in in Korea, but millions of people were playing them because

everyone could go to a PC bang, buy one copy, and then how many hours in a day? That's 12. 12 people could play through StarCraft in a day. Great. That's good for the owner, but not for Blizzard. So, they came up with a great idea. Well, if that's the case, we need to add something to these games. We should just make them free because screw screw these PC bang owners, they're screwing us. Let's add in micro-trans. We'll charge for secondary items, vanity things, glow-in-the-dark stuff, avatars, whatever it is, and then we can make our money in these PC bangs.

And so, this got created, and it stuck. And when I say it stuck, free-to-play came to the west without knowing without anyone in the west questioning why is this a thing? Because the problem is this was great. And I was there around in the early days, and I remember sitting with friends being like, "Holy [ __ ] League of Legends is free. Dota's free." Like, free games means more people can play them, means huge audiences. And sure, we'll add some micro-trans, so be it. Like, didn't think through why we're doing it, or what it does. The shift, though, again, just like three lives is still in everything we do, micro-trans just moved over to even premium titles. At Gran Turismo, uh new Gran Turismo, if you haven't seen, uh it's $20 an extra car

on top of a $70 game for your PlayStation 5 that's $500. It's 20 bucks a car for a digital car that's like I I I hate that so much. And and and players do, too. It's It's brutal. And Ubisoft's doing a ton of this, EA's doing a bunch of this, premium titles with this baked in. And so, here we are now at this point where these things are just the way it's done. And here are all the pieces we're used to. And crypto comes along and it goes, "Hey, here I am. I have the ability to abstract all kinds of really cool things. I can do all kinds of fun stuff.

What should I do?" And we sit down and the first people in the space, inevitably, are going to be marketing or business people who happen to be on the most successful mobile games, which were free-to-play titles with heavy microtransactions. Well, so, play-to-earn sees this and goes, uh oh, we can just put that in crypto. And I just am stunned. But it it's what they did. They went, "Hey, these microtransactions, you know what we should do? Let's take the one thing that makes digital beautiful, which is no scarcity. Let's remove that no scarcity thing. Like, [ __ ] no scarcity. We don't care about that. Let's go ahead and make these things scarce as hell, and let's just charge players whatever the market says these things need to be, and then we'll add drops. And this happened

without anyone going back through time and looking at the video games that actually did this. And we can go There's an MMO that exists that's finally closing its doors. God, I thank God. That literally has this mechanic. It's not a distributed ledger, but that's just a database in a video games. Who cares? I can log in, I can play, and I get items that I can sell on the marketplace, and I can get cash, sort of. It's a pain in the ass, but it exists. Um it sucks. People hate it. Players hate it. You know who likes it? A very particular class of people. Uh we would normally call them whales. I just flat out call them capitalists. I don't There's nothing It's not a negative term. It's just people who like playing with capital, meta-game players, you can call them.

And they play this game they get really good and then they hire other people to play the game, too. That's the That's the fun thing that happens is this now they're paying other people to play and now they want them to kill this swamp rat in this one corner of this planet because it has a 0.1% chance of dropping this thing. Now, granted that's going to take 3 or 4 weeks, but that's like if I I go outside, "Hey, if you dig in the yard one time in the next month, probably you'll find a lottery ticket worth a million dollars, I'm not on this podcast anymore. Thank you, it's been fun. I'm out digging in my yard." And so that's kind of the mentality here. And we we saw it biggest though with the auction house with Diablo.

And everyone has this really, I think, mistaken understanding of why gamers hated it. It's not so much the people could pay their way to the top. I don't actually think really anyone who played Diablo was that upset about it. For the most part, you could save up gold and buy items in the regular auction house anyway. What people were upset about is it changed why you played. And there was a lot of streamers who quit and one put it really eloquently. He said, "Before, I would just play Diablo cuz I enjoyed it and I'd go through and I'd he had his own like he'd play like I think he was a necro witch doctor, maybe. He really loved playing this and he was trying to find like rare items and he was joined with friends.

But the the thing is with Diablo, like with every game, even systemic ones, there's a perfect way to play. A specific class with specific items, specific ways, specific times, specific dungeons, specific mobs that you kill over and over for an optimal path to that next level. No one does this because it's incredibly boring and sucks so hard. But if at the end of that boring sucky thing, there's a good amount of money, people will do that.

And that's what play to earn is. It's this I am now going to make a thing that is not fun. It's not a good game, but at the end of it, there is a chance at you getting some good capital out of it, and we all need to pay rent. This is Sounds like you're describing uh investment banking or some other finance work. I I I It's a [ __ ] job. It Well, it's a It It It is investment banking. This is the thing people don't understand about a lot of these play to earn games, especially when you start looking at the number of wallets that have that are involved in them. You're not talking about like um Elden Ring broke a million concurrent players.

There's no crypto game who's touching that, and that's a single-player game. This This isn't a thing. The number of wallets in any of these crypto games, it's a small group. And what it's made of is kind of two kinds of people in my experience. None of them are gamers. There are people who are really into the meta game, and I get that. I I have friends who are investment bankers. Like I I am not that. There's a mentality and a type of way of looking at things and a a way of wanting to play the markets. Eve Online is a game of meta banking. Like that's what it is. Eve Online is that game. Um the ability for us to sort of play with that and and and work that into games is possible. However, when we have only that class playing and their entire world is set up, it changes

the game, especially when the game is designed to basically become a job. And it's my the thing I and I will always say, if tomorrow I just magically gave everyone in the world a million dollars, would your game still have players? Like that's that's the that's the question. And I I ask it to all the play to earn people. They don't like answering it, but if the answer is no, then you didn't create a game, you created a job. And that's fine, and I'm not against people making money. Like especially people and as it turns out uh uh Americans don't gold farm.

Right? Like we all know who gold farms. It's impoverished third world poor. Like we know who these people are. That's fine. People need to make money. I prefer this to like, you know, dangerous sweatshop work, for sure. Um but the reality is kind of the other direction, which is is that what we want to be making? Do we want to make that because games like Dota tomorrow if I gave all the pro Dota players or all the guys who spent thousands of hours a million dollars, they'd all play Dota tomorrow. I know this because my buddy Dendi won a million dollars and he played more Dota tomorrow. This This is because they love the game. Uh Messi is has a fortune. Does he play purely for the cash? I'm sure the cash

matters. Do not get me wrong. He He loves playing. Like these people like the game. Uh tomorrow if he had if he had all the money in the world, would he never play soccer again? No, he has all the money in the world and he's playing soccer again. Like this is there's a line and I think there's a way for us and it's essentially the thesis of Noir. We can build games that take advantage of crypto and also games that allow and take advantage of the meta gamer, the the capitalist, the investment banker, the people who really love this space and its possibilities and like playing that game. We can have both. There's no reason we can't. We just can't allow them to mush together.

That's the I I I've I give talks occasionally on like this idea of how I'm splitting the two magic circles and I think it's an important way to look at it because if you allowed money onto the field for football or for soccer or anything else. And when I mean on the field, at any point Messi goes, "Hey, um I want better shoes. I want plus two shoes of speed and I want a shirt that people I'm invisible for two seconds. Whatever it is. I want to look like the other team for 10 And it was whoever had the most money could buy these, no one would ever watch soccer again. Like ever. Like it that would suck. Like that circle around the field is what keeps soccer pure. It's what keeps it, despite FIFA being probably one of the most evil nonprofits that exist in the world. Like they even

don't push that or break that. Instead, they're the opposite. They're like psychotic about it. You have to have uniforms of a certain material and type and size and they can't be a one piece as a team learned a few years ago that they lost their minds over a one-piece uniform. Like I and I just go I'd like to be as ethical as FIFA. So, there is a theory of why a sport like soccer is very popular, especially in developing countries, because it allows like really like it's a game where you don't have many scores, right? At most you have two, three goals per game.

And it allows for like the underdog to take over and win against the best team in the world, like Brazil, because it's just a messy game. It's not like baseball. It's not like basketball. Soccer is more poetic. It allows for these wild and outcomes, but it's very simple game and there's a lot of fairness to it. Um I go outside with my son and I play soccer. He's four. I don't own a soccer ball. I have a I had a beach ball I did this with for a while. Now it's a kickball. It's not a soccer ball. Am I still playing soccer? 100% because soccer has very particular, very simple mechanics that anyone can kind of play with anything.

So, anywhere in the world, you need a ball and you can play soccer. Like that's literally all it takes to just start. And that's a beauty in it. Baseball, mm, you need a stick. Well, no. No, you don't. You need a you need a [ __ ] Louisville Slugger or you need aluminum bat early on or they like there's there's issues with that start. But even still, you're talking about less of a less of a cost of onboarding than a lot of things, but anyone can do it because the mechanics are basic. Ball goes that way, don't touch it your hands.

Uh there's a few other rules, but that's basically soccer. And and that skill growth, that simplicity means that as I watch, as I play, I'm able to immediately sort of grow all my understanding. Um my son watched the World Cup with me. It took him 20 minutes to understand everything and root for the team Daddy was rooting for. Like I He was He was two or three. Like he was He was young. It's not a difficult sport to understand. That's the beauty and that's the sort of hyper democratization.

Again, the the things that people are able to put in is everything. It's you. It is your time, your sweat, your work, your effort, but you can see it pay off in the simplest ways without having to spend a fortune on equipment or or, you know, plus two shoes of speed or whatever. It You don't need the best cleats in the world to be a good soccer player. Uh there's a reason that like a lot of teams from all over the world do exceptionally well in the World Cup despite being poorer countries. And, you know, the US hasn't won a ton of these.

It's not like basketball where we had the Dream Team and it kind of was hilarious and everyone kind of was laughing about it. Soccer is very different. It's a very different beast. So, how do you relate this to what you're building in Noir? Um Well, so we're starting with and it's uh it's like a game designer's wet dream. Uh we've had everyone we've hired where where I just got off an interview with uh someone else we're bringing on board. And it's I just start by saying, "We're wanting everything to be deeply systemic to the point where we're not building a game yet." Um uh Mark uh Ferver, who's who's leading our design, he calls them gamelets, and I really like this because we're building movement. That's it. That's our first

thing we're doing. Uh and then we have other people working through other things, but we're like movement. We want it to feel solid and good just to move through a space. Then we have that gamelet, and then that system because that's how it works for us. We learn how to move. Um my my daughter's 4 or 5 weeks old. My son's 4, he's very adept, way more than I am. He's grown over time. He's learned because for him movement was one of those base things. I'm teaching him how to box. I love boxing. It's like one of my favorite things when I was younger.

Um the the skills are layered. No one just jumps to being a Taekwondo master. You have to learn to walk. You have to learn hand-eye coordination, fine motor control. These are all things we don't realize we did up until like we were like 5 or 6. And then at some point you start doing, you know, balancing and tumbling and like these are the things. So, we're building our game like life works where it's here's the movement system, and it's not like a wild crazy one. It's literally just running, jumping, parkour type stuff. Great. Done.

Then once that's done, it's baked and it's done. Then we move on to fighting, punching, kicking. How do we want to set that up? How do we build that system? Because once we do that, we then add it to the first one. Now we've got a a free-running game. If we want a pure parkour like sports game, and now we have fighting with that. So, what does that look like? Well, is it is it like Road Rash with parkour, which would be super fun, I think. Is it now on its own where it's just straight up an arena boxing match.

That's great. Two games, nice and simple. Now we have a third, guns. We have a fourth, driving. It each of these systems, each of these individual things we're building as its own thing rather than trying to build towards a gigantic thing. We're building from the ground up, the same way experience works. And so, this gives us a chance to have, by the time the end of the year rolls around and we have three or four of these systems built, you know, our art team and level design teams are already building the games for them at that point and they layer together, however. So, it's running and driving, running, driving, and shooting. Those are two different games. And then we also have skydiving. I don't I don't know, pick a thing, card battling. I don't care, like grab a thing and we throw it in and then

these things sort of start mashing up and we end up with an exponential number of games from these gamelets. This sports-style mentality, we think there's a lot of room, there's a lot of things that I know resonate with sort of the traditional gaming audience, which I think is a big deal if we're ever going to have crypto become a broad thing. It's not even an option. Uh and then if we can design them and build, like I said, those two circles where we have the financial crypto side able to do what I think it does best and there's a whole abstract conversation up there. Like, I really love what crypto does in its in a weird way. I love it differently than I think a lot of people do, but um the power of crypto, we can do something truly unique and that's let people play games and also allow the

developers, the people building them, or the nonprofit, the DAO that sort of supports all this, and the people who are financialized and really love that meta game, let them play the game they want. We we jokingly say, let Monopoly players play Monopoly, let Peter Forsberg play hockey. There's no reason that they can't, you know, coexist and both make a good amount of cash and have some fun. We talk a lot about this idea of interoperability in in the metaverse and web 3. It started with DeFi with like this idea of composability.

And now a lot of people strikes me that they're talking about games being interoperable. And perhaps the only web 2 game that I can think of is as Super Smash Brothers, where like you had Nintendo game studios smashed together literally, uh you know, and you could play and if you like Donkey Kong or Yoshi or whatever, they were all being this arcade. But, absent that, I'm curious like you're building these gamelets. Do you see How do you think about the experience of the user in this idea of growing, of developing, of of going through this journey of growth in these different gamelets? Is there cohesion? Does it matter?

Um from the mechanics, it matters a lot. Movement needs to be movement. Um a a good way to describe this is to talk about Mario, actually. Uh speaking of Smash Brothers, but if you go back to Mario 64, um the way they designed that was they didn't build a game. The first thing that they did is they sat down and they made a rabbit. Uh because they we didn't have 3D games. Like this wasn't a this was new. And 64 was like this wild new thing of like, wait, we can move on a 3D plane. How does that even work for Mario? He's 2D. Holy [ __ ] How do we even move? So, they built a rabbit, and the rabbit ran, and they worked on his movement system until it was fun to catch the rabbit. That was it. That was how they built Mario, and ultimately

every Mario since, because what a lot of people don't notice, if you've played all the Marios, and I have a lot, um every like after the second one, once they hit like Mario Sunshine, and they started getting on especially to Odyssey, the first level of every Mario game is a weirdly overdone dramatic version of the rest of the game. In Mario Odyssey, you become a Tyrannosaur. You never do anything that grand until like the very end of the game again. But, this first level is intended to literally just make you feel as if you've always been playing this game, because the movement system is the [ __ ] same. The directions work the same, the jumping works the same, the everything is really within a certain level, and you're react you're you're

jumping into the water to see how you can swim this year. Is kind of how it works. The the mechanics are identical. And so while they have the consistent mechanics, every time I play it feels like I'm playing one giant Mario game and I start with a ton of skill, which puts me in a really interesting place of almost a sunk cost fallacy where I'm Oh, I know I'm really good at this game. I've got to finish it. It's brilliant, but it works really nicely. Um when we start talking about um composability and how these things sort of move across mechanics and all of this um I have a deep skepticism of the idea that we can have a composable metaverse that people are able to bring assets

back and forth in my lifetime. Um for for a lot of reasons. Um Forget all the technical things and there's a lot of technical things. Forget all of the like a lot of There's a lot of things. Let's just talk about me as a developer. When I build a space, I'm building a space for a specific purpose. I build the map in Grand Theft Auto. It's not just that it's a real world map. It's It has very specific dimensions because I want it to feel tighter or larger than Batman: Arkham Asylum or Batman: Arkham City where you're actually driving around also a fairly open world, but it's a different feel because GTA is

wider streets, slightly different setup. Batman is tighter because they want you to feel the speed and the power and the danger of being as fast as Batman is versus Burnout, which is psychotically faster, but you know, the the sidewalks are like car length because they have jumps on them. Like these these parts of the world are designed particularly because good games are not one item brought in. They are a holistic view of systems that people have put together. That includes the art. So if I'm going to be in a place where I'm going to say, "Oh, I've got these this model I want to bring into a game. One, I don't even know if that's going to work from a pure design perspective. I don't know if that's going to break my world. Two, why would I do that?

Like I I just don't understand why I would ever do anything like that. It does nothing for me. I don't make money off of that. In fact, it only cost me money because I need to build the system that ingests that. Uh once I built that system, let's say I've got it, that just means other people are bringing other IPs into my world, which means no one's going to need to buy my stuff. Now, it's just encouraging the purchase of secondary. And this is where I think it's important to talk about what metaverse actually means, aside from the fact that it is a dystopian MMO from a nightmare world, which is literally where the word comes from. Um so, maybe we should rethink that. But, uh what matters is the platform because to me, it's not the game that is the metaverse.

It It literally can't be. Meta means beyond, between, all of that. A universe is a coalesced thing. Uh if the GTA GTA is not a metaverse. Fortnite is not a metaverse. It is a universe that has all this [ __ ] inside of it. The metaverse is actually, and this is not being sappy, it's you. You as a person going between these different things are the actual metaverse. Your experience, the story you're telling in your life by going and playing Fortnite, then going and playing Dota, then going and watching Star Wars, the metaverse that is Brooks or Jason or Santiago or any of your listeners, that's the between. You as a person exist between things as a unique sort of weird thing that you get to go be

Wolverine and then John Wick. That's not because those universes are the same one. If they were, you're just playing Fortnite. But, if you're doing them separately, you're the thing connecting them. There There's power there. You are a unique metaverse. And this is much more the direction we're going. So, for our platform, we're going to be having not It's not just us. Again, we're DAO first as soon as the platform hits. The goal would be that we have a lot of different people tying into our underlying systems and we'll be making them available. Bring their own games, bringing all kinds of different stuff because as people move and they have that for us the Federated ID, which we're really excited to be using for crypto and for their wallet and having people have that identity that can be fungible and move between, but also the

unique non-fungible soul that's sort of at the center. So, I know where you're moving. That's where the power is of generating my meaning, of giving me a chance to explore not only who I am, but who I could be, who I would be inside of different spaces and then carry that with me when I leave. My soul comes with me. The models, let them stay. I Do you want one body in every world? If If I were to say you all could only wear one t-shirt to every concert the rest of your life, would you Which one would you wear? Would you wear Metallica to a Tech N9ne concert and get [ __ ] beaten up? Like this You need different changes in your persona. Change who you are and mutate and grow. And that's the That's the power and crypto has that

power. And we've just decided to sort of harden the old models instead of trying something new. Again, the ethos of crypto, I think backs my vision of like this idea of this composable human that's able to move beyond things and enable to be wherever they're at. The The people who are hard business people of the old world, the Ubisofts or the Zyngas or whatever it may be, they're really excited to have you stuck in their metaverse. Because as soon as they are, they know exactly how to go, well, the average revenue per user based on this cost and these kinds of things, here's what we need to be putting out so we make the most money. Is Again, is that That's the game you want to play?

Is that like No. And it It won't get gamers, but I don't even think it gets crypto people. Like I I ask crypto people I How many of you like I I into I get into Twitter fights a lot, which is super fun. I rejoined Twitter for this project. I quit all of social media a few years ago. God damn it. Um, but I get Twitter fights a lot. And my my question's always the same, how often do you actually play these games? And the the answer is they don't. Because they say, well, I I play a lot. I'm like, cool. How many hours? And they're like, oh, a couple hours a week. I'm like, no, no. I I put in like 20 hours a week on Dota. And that's one of like six games I'm playing. Like, people don't understand like people who play games play games. And it's it's

it's millions of people who are really playing games. And the stats on Elden Ring are hilarious. And it's not just streamers who are doing it and sitting all day. It's people love games. They love this. The same way people who love movies can sit in the theater all day. Tarantino sits and watch movies all day. Like, these people love these forms of art, these experiences. This is what we need to be aiming for. All right, everyone. Quick break from the show to share a big update from our friends at ParaSwap, the best platform to stake, swap, trade, farm, and more. ParaSwap just launched gas refunds.

Based on how much you stake, you can now get up to 100% of your gas refunded on all of your swaps on ParaSwap. This is huge for anyone who has spent a lot of time in DeFi or maybe is just starting out. You know how egregiously expensive the gas transactions can get. The gas fees are ridiculous at some points in time, and now you can get those entirely refunded on ParaSwap. To participate, all you need to do is stake a minimum of 500 PSP. Big shout out to the ParaSwap DAO for making these refunds possible. Really, it's just it's tough to beat ParaSwap right now. They give you the best prices. Uh, they save you money.

You've got this gas refund if you stake PSP. They've got a smooth and really user-friendly interface, fast swapping. It's really everything that you'd want from a DeFi platform. If you don't use them already, check out ParaSwap today at paraswap.io. Now, let's get back to the show. Do you believe I'm going to go on a tangent and I want to go back to one of but do you believe that playing a game means, at least for you or these die-hard gamers, a way to escape reality? There's an element to that. I mean, it's it's it's obvious. Um I escape reality is, I think, a little far. It

it depends on what you mean, I guess I would say. And then not to get too philosophical on this, but when when I'm playing a game, I am lost in it. Am I escaping reality? I'm hesitant to say so because I'm still at points aware what I'm doing, but I am inside of that space. I'm hitting what I call flow state and what other people have called flow state. When you're disappeared, you're there. Inside of World of Warcraft, where you know, you may not be hitting flow state, but you're role-playing. I'm not sure it's so much escaping reality as it is putting on a mask and role-playing. And that kind of thing, it's not it can be done and it is often done because the real world is not great for a lot of people. I get that. I've been there.

And video games are a sanctuary for that. But it's it's not fully escaping. It's not the same thing having gone down the drugs road and had friends who went down it. That's escaping reality. There's a there's a very big difference, I think, between some of those. And the most addictive, you know, players I I know people who've lost their jobs from World of Warcraft or their mortgage for their house and like Or started a network called Ethereum because they were dissatisfied with the way World of Warcraft was being managed. Yeah, yeah, there's there's all kinds of ways to react to it, but it's the the the disappearing into it, the allowing that I believe it's not so much escaping reality, but instead allowing yourself to find a space of play because

most of us uh and I Maybe maybe altering your current state of reality and more from creating a different slight variation of it with certain elements that still All of us want to play. We all want to play and and I don't mean in the pure game sense. There's a um great book called Homo Ludens that lays out this sort of idea of um you know, the natural state of humanity is to exper experiment. That we want to try things. We want to learn things. We want to do stuff. And I believe that is the natural state. I believe the real world does its best to make sure that we don't and that we constantly are sort of pushed into very specific buckets or roles or whatever it may be. And I'm not talking about experimenting with genders

or any of that like whatever it is. I'm not going to like literally tomorrow, why don't you go paint? Why why don't you go learn to code? Why don't you read a new type of book? Um the these things people want to do, but then they just don't have the energy. That thing that happens that breaks us in the real world, video games, movies, film, art give us a chance to have a space that we can do that almost within our own heads. And it allows us to do it in a way that I think uh I believe uh allows that space of freedom. So, what you tend to find and it's in my experience, there's a lot of mixes, but for a lot of people who do the escapism thing in their real life, they just don't have a lot of options.

Like literally, they go do two jobs a week and then they come home and they live alone or they live in their parents. Like there's a level where yeah, it's life is sad in in a lot of places and this is the way they escape. But even so, with that, it's all the more important that we don't take advantage of those moments because those people will dive into that and they love it, but they burn out really hard, really fast and it turns out in the end it wasn't worth the profit we took out of them at large, but certainly not for the game. So, is there a way we can give them that experience, that that growth, that exploration of their own meaning without taking advantage of that?

Instead, maybe even make it a growth path. A lot of people, when we talk about the metaverse, we are replicating a lot of the behavior that we're doing in the real world, meaning we're collecting these expensive JPEGs and flexing and or buying properties in the metaverse in Decentraland, some of these worlds. Um and it becomes a way to maybe create a digital identity that feels, candidly, very materialistic. Um at least that's so far what we've seen. If you If you were to capture most of the activity in in what's happening in the metaverse, it's I would not disagree.

And so disagree. And even Fortnite, you know, um it sounds like a lot of people are just there to roam around and just flex and, you know, interact. Is Is that a I mean, first of all, it Is that wrong? Well, no. And And it's when we start talking about like the way I get to engage with everyone, there's power in that because it works It's It's a deeply double-edged sword because there's good and bad. And the the bad, I believe personally, outweighs the good. Uh When I engage with Twitter, and if I have a viral tweet, and everyone loves it, even if there's some shitty comments, oh my god. Like the world loves me. Not just my friends, who I may have said a witty comment over beers to three people. And that's the

same thing as this tweet that went viral. That's amazing, and I get to feel so deeply special, and everyone loves me. Conversely, um if 10 people respond poorly to a tweet, and then no one says anything positive, it feels like the world hates me. There's a There's this mass of reality that exists that is the social world, or these these games that exist like this, that it feels a lot more real than it really is. Um the the the challenge we have for me, I'm not against all of these projects. I think they've been designed to actually ruin things. I don't think social media is bad, the internet's bad. I think we designed them shitty. I think crypto we're doing the

same thing with. It's um I tried I was working a little bit in VR music and I constantly get in arguments where I'm like, "Why are people trying to create the concert experience in VR?" And like a one-to-one with seats and buying tickets and being in specific spaces. I'm like, "The concerts suck. The only reason that we go to them is because we don't have a choice. I physically have to occupy a certain space. I can only see an artist when they come to my town because I can't afford to fly to wherever the [ __ ] they are. And TV sucks. So, I go in person, I have tickets, I sit next to a 15-year-old girl who won't stop screaming and she's singing the songs and saying how much she loves the artist and I leave halfway through because I hate myself." This is

my concert-going experience. Do I want that in VR? The answer is apparently people think yes. Whereas for me it's like, "Well, what if we did away with that stuff?" And that's when we talk about JPEGs and selling them, I think one of the things that we really screw up on a lot is um people got mad when people were right-click downloading and giving [ __ ] to NFT buyers. Like NFT buyers got pissy and they were like, "No, that's mine. You can't [ __ ] do that. Don't don't download my like it was really weird to watch." Instead of embracing that and going, "Please spread like and I don't know why they spread it everywhere. Please download it. Please do that." The point that's interesting inside of how NFTs

work is that we have privatized ownership but made public consumption, which is not a thing that exists in the real world. Uh it it can I if I can if I pay Santiago to draw me a figure and I buy it, I hang it on my wall. No one will ever see that again. Santiago's [ __ ] You can't get a print. He It may be his best piece of work ever. It may have emotionally changed the life of a 5-year-old girl who would go, "Holy [ __ ] you can paint like that." Like I've had I've had emotional moments with paintings in multiple museums. And like thank God someone donated it, but the fact they had to, I think is where I'm like, "What the fuck?" So, what if we had this really weird system where art could be owned by a single person, yet everyone

could consume it? What a strange thing that would be. Almost powerful. And why wouldn't we just Well, we don't embrace it because we equate ownership the way that it works in the real world. And again, we're trapped in some of these weird clichés we don't know we have. Uh play-to-earn is free-to-play hardened with these same clichés. That's all it is. It's not anyone's fault. It's they're just bringing the clichés. NFT ownership is not doing the interesting thing that crypto can do. They're starting to, but they're not really. They're mostly just kind of recreating ownership. I I've even seen NFTs really embrace the only the owner can see the art. And I'm like, "Cool. That's That's literally neck like I I don't

understand why you would even do that. I get to make money and whatever. Conversely, there's a power in the idea of a handful of people owning a thing, one person owning a thing, and everyone getting to digest it, to use it, to play with it. And that power is really weird. And if we can break those things down and understand how it works. And when I say works, I don't mean Well, I mean in a code way. I Very few people apparently know how the code of crypto works very often. But like how it works in a social way, how we think about these things and do a proper like breakdown ethno- ethnography about it, how NFTs work.

There's a lot of power there. We're not using any of it. Like again, I'm I happily will say the vast majority of crypto is is kind of depressing because they're trying, but they're mostly stuck in some really bad circles. Um and uh it it saddens me, but I think there's if we keep pushing and we keep finding and and there's a lot of interesting projects doing weird stuff. Um I like to think mine's included, but there's a lot of others doing way weirder. We can start seeing some of these things and surfacing, oh wait, this is I didn't know it worked like this. It does. It turns out it kind of does work like that. Well, how do we build an incentive structure to do something with that? And then the beauty of crypto, again to go back to these modular systems, that's kind of how

that's that's crypto. That's how crypto works. Um we can build in smart contracts, which are systemic themselves, that do other things with other things, and suddenly we have, again, it's not entering a metaverse like a World of Warcraft. That's that's fantasy land, maybe someday. The interesting thing is that I get to own 92 different items, and all of them are through me. And all of them are mine. Everyone else gets to see them depending on contextually where I'm at in a bunch of different ways, and they get to work with those. We suddenly have a very different meaning of what it means to be a person in this space. And that's that's where we start having a lot of fun. In the same way that once upon a time we didn't know what being online in Web 2.0 meant, or 1.0, and how that

changed what humanity was. We have another chance, and I really hope we do better than Twitter and Facebook did, because they did they did bad. I want you to expand on that concept, which I think what makes Noir unique and interesting is this idea immortality or lack thereof when you're playing in the meaning uh of where you're you have these experiences, you're growing. There's a sense of ownership by virtue of digital proof of ownership of an experience or whatever represented on chain. But then you also have this idea of losing it all um in the game that might not be true for other games that might be more capitalistic, market-driven. Um Mhm. I I'd like for you to kind of touch

on that, if if you will, for a moment. Well, when we talk about how NFTs work, like I was just talking about the ownership thing and it's the thing we're playing with. The first one that really struck me and kind of sent me down this road is um digital objects don't exist. Like they don't they don't have a permanence at all. Um I equate them to a I If you're a big Star Trek nerd, I am, um Captain Kirk uh has died a lot, like a million times on TV. And it's because uh how a teleporter works is it actually makes a copy and destroys the original. So, we've we've actually watched death happen quite a few times. And so, the question is, when there's someone passes through and someone lands and becomes Kirk on the ground, is that a different Kirk? Well,

no, it it isn't. It's kind of the same one, but there there's a commonality and a thread that sort of carries through. In the same way that when you save a Photoshop file and you've got your image, pick any NFT, that image, just by being copied or your drive drive defragments, for example, it destroys it and rebuilds it. Like there's no such thing as an original in the digital world. It's just the concept doesn't exist. Yet somehow this NFT thing sort of attaches and it becomes an authentic one or this one is mine, even though there can be a billion copies and it could be copied a billion times and destroyed a billion times.

That's mine. That permanence I found fascinating. I watched a guy on OpenSea um cuz OpenSea allows people to basically upload pirated [ __ ] all the time and then they 404 it. Some guy had bought something that he really was in love with. It got 404'd when they took it down. And so, he owned an NFT that was nothing. But that's not really how it worked for him. For him, he was depressed, like morosely sad. And it he was mourning. And it was this moment I had of like, "Holy [ __ ] He's mourning not the image. The image was less so. It was He was mourning that one, the unique one, the way that if my son made a a plaster statue and I dropped it and it broke. That's the

That's the emotion. It's gone. It's gone. There's no I can I can't rebuild it. That's it. Holy [ __ ] And so as I started playing with this, the first place I went is well, there's one bit of permanence that video games don't have. Uh and that's life. And we have lives, a million lives. You die a million times. Um but if you become like Kirk, like who cares? Like you've died a million times. Who gives a [ __ ] anymore? Uh permadeath games attach attach to who they attach to for a reason. Uh you know, Minecraft, the most popular mode is hardcore mode because it it it gives you that hyper permanence. It's really kind of beyond creative mode, obviously. But it's this really incredible way of everything matters. Diablo, I don't even believe is possible to play meaningfully without

being on permadeath mode. So we know that gamers care about this. Escape from Tarkov is a great example. It's not the only one. There's a lot of games that have this. But how do we really harden that? Because again, crypto abstracts and hardens the same way it's doing it with the free-to-play garbage that we're bringing in. We could do it again. And so for me, and it's why we do what we do, when we mint an NFT, for us, it's not items. NFTs are you. You are the NFT that we attach it like your soul, your your unique bit. And so when you sign up, we give you that. That is our gift. Everyone who plays gets it for free. Some people have to pay. It's a whole thing we can talk about if you want to. But the everyone has one. And the way it works is we can

track you and as you play, you can play a million times and your stats and all your stuff goes in there. But at some point, we ask you to put your money where your mouth is, figuratively, mostly. Uh and you go into a tournament. And in that moment, we turn off immortality. And in that moment, if you die, we burn your [ __ ] NFT. You die. Like and there's no coming back. It's It's different than permadeath in everything else because in permadeath in Minecraft, I can save scum and copy that world over and start up anytime I want. Like people do that. In Diablo, you could get around it. We know that it's not really permanent. If If Blizzard tomorrow wanted to bring back any of my lives, they could. If I really

knew how to do it, we could do that. You can't bring back an NFT. Like There's a weird like the 0x00 contract. Yeah, just gone. Gone. And that's That's it. And so there's no There's no getting it back. So So what happens after that? Well, well, you're dead. Um and all your stuff goes with it. And uh when when you come back, we we we birth you a child and you get to start over from scratch. Uh and that's stats and everything. And so But it's a seasonal thing. We have a We have a system behind it. But the idea is very much that you are intended to build up your persona in the space.

Again, I'm a big believer that this is what we do inside of any MMO. I'm building my character, my following, my love, my my accoutrements, whatever it is. I'm I'm my personality. And at some point when I die, that's the end of all of that and I have to start over. And I have to start over from scratch. Is there Is there some like karma points of reincarnation? Um you know, for all the Buddhists out there, like do you Or is it just Some things carry over to the child like lightly. Like cuz we we we don't want it to be too painful to come back because we do want people to be willing to if they die, rejoin the platform and kind of have a comeback story as a secondary way. But we want it to be something more akin to um

you know, when Michael Jordan came back to basketball after having his hilarious showing as it was in baseball. Um we want those moments where it's like the games matter because there's a there's a thing that happens in esports that is very difficult to sort of emotionally get around. A player can play 20 rounds in a day of all these games. They very often do. And so as such, no final round has the same emotion as any single round of a real sport because I can't do more than one a day. Like it physically is a toll I am making the choices to do this round at this time in this place against this team and I'm playing my best because this is my one shot.

And we're doing what we're doing in order to bring that emotion to esports. So that way when if pick any any game I'm wearing my running man t-shirt. Um the the movie Running Man is a deep inspiration for this because and I know I've I've given you this ramble at length uh Santiago, but I I've always wanted to make a Running Man game, but you can't because there's no reason to run. Running doesn't work the same way in video games because like and what if you catch me Jason? Oh, I die. Cool, let's go again. Like whatever, but if this is like if there's [ __ ] on the line and this is my one chance and I could die, I I'm looking around corners, but it's not just that I'm looking around corners and I'm nervous and I'm trying to what

what's that noise and a uh the audience also is because people will watch when someone's nervous. When this is like a finality the same emotional reason that they'll watch an F1 race even though people can buy their way to the top. This is like a gladiator games. You know, like in ancient like there's digital blood sports. Digital blood sports. And and so so people know my wallet address. So say the question is why would I why would I go first? Like why why would I decide to stake it initially like you know, would I rather just be roam around and continue to grow and build up experience and never stay at the same

It seems like most players will probably not actually risk it to get the biscuit, right? Most Most players will just hang hang around who play soccer or chess that they they sit in the ELO that they sit at in chess. They play soccer with their friends in a field. We people should be able to play and that's for us sort of sacrosanct because that foundation also gives us the chance for the players who go, "Hey, you know what? It's worth it." Because at some point there is at some point the chance of reaching this immortality status of you are the legend. You are become that.

You're the king of the And and and and we have significant payouts the same way that Dota pays for its tournaments through sort of the fans buying things or people all of that. The these players get significant prize pots to sort of take it on. And so it's really up to the person, what is it Is it worth putting all that at risk? Do you just want to be Ninja and you just play forever? That's great. I I I love that stuff. But there's an interesting thing that it starts to play with when we start getting into why would I want to go first? And just specifically to your question because we're going to have a tournament. Like let's just say it's a speed running game. Super Meat Boy. Let's say we do Super Meat Boy. I [ __ ] love Super Meat Boy. Let's say

Super Meat Boy we put out and you just play forever get super good and then at some point we have a thousand tickets into this final round and you buy one of them and you're number one. You buy the first one. Now why would you ever buy the first one? Because how it works is you don't know what's coming. No one's ever seen these levels before. You're the first and if you die, we burn your ticket. That sucks. Well, there's a way that we can actually make it so it's worthwhile because as you make it through, we can actually set things up in the game as a little checkpoints, bits and bobs, all sorts of things that say Jason goes second and say he gets further. He picks up some of the things that you dropped and he makes his way through. The fifth person grabs both of

your things and makes it through. The 100th person grabs all of those things and makes it through. And if they get to the end, it's not one person. Like none of our things are one champion. Our thing is very much about paying out to the people who contributed, the same way you do for a team, for everything. There's a way to, thanks to crypto, where we can talk about, "Oh, I grabbed the gun that Santiago had and he found it in this corner and I used it to kill Jason and I got 5,000 bucks for that." Well, we can paid Santiago for his part in that because we can track that. It's literally Providence is literally one of the things that matters in crypto. We can follow this and so our system is able to take advantage of all of this information and make sure that people

who contribute get taken care of. The winner gets really taken care of as they make their way through and uh sort of everyone involved with that. And underneath it all, you don't even have to take part. I I'm hoping most people don't, although I think it'd be hilarious if a lot of people did. The reason soccer and all of these games work, the reason Dota works, reason League works, is not because there's a big pro scene. Big pro scene comes after there's a lot of players. Because you need people to give a [ __ ] about the game. And that's the first thing that matters. And so it's why we've got the team we're doing and we're building what we're building. We want to build a great game that people can dive into and really go wild with.

My last question as it relates to Norris uh when can we actually play this? So uh we will be this summer towards this fall starting our sort of early beta. It's non-NFT, non-crypto focused, just play tests as well as just getting people in there. Again, we're big about play being free, so it's not a big deal to us to just let people play, figure it out, grow, sort of build. It's a it's we're very open to that sort of mentality. The other side though, because there's a lot of people in your audience and you are included in that who like the meta game, who like the capitalist role, as I like to say, the Mr. Monopoly.

It It is what it is. I I've got a lot of friends who are that's their thing. Um and it's a big deal to me. the investment banker in this conversation? He's like, "Mostly, yes." I I It You You love that stuff. Like it's it's it's a thing that inflames your passions. I've heard you talk. Like I've I've heard how you talk about these things. It's what gets you. And so, you need a space, too. Like you need a game. That game um actually will be coming around the same time and we'll be starting to have the economy live, the game live, and those things going together. Uh it's what our NFT over the next few weeks uh we're beginning our minting process and our white-listing for the larger groupings. We're going to have a lot of them, but there's only ever going to be

a hundred and uh some thousand people who are ever allowed to actually play in the economy, and you have to have one of these upcoming NFTs for that. It's a deeply regulated closed-in space. We can't let people [ __ ] with what we're doing. And uh a lot of crypto projects are very happy to have like one person have 90 different wallets. That doesn't It doesn't work for us. Uh so, we've got to make sure that we we get people in the right motivation, the right incentives, and I'm really excited for uh revealing all that and getting those out there. Brooks, we uh Santi and I had Justin Kan on the show a couple weeks ago, maybe it was a month or two ago, and he talked about how blockchain-based games will be the predominant business model in gaming in 10 years.

Agree or disagree? If if it's used in a way that there's no such thing I would not say that Oath games are necessarily the predominant gaming model because ultimately no one cares if they're using Oath when they sign in with their with their login. If we are in a place where people know that they're playing crypto games, I have a hard disagree. I I don't think people One, people don't give a [ __ ] about any of that. They want fun games. Like no matter what, and you can have movies that are made with millions and millions of dollars. I I know if you saw Moonfall. It's a giant pile of [ __ ] game with a movie with a $150 million dollar budget.

And like people don't care. They want good. And so I don't good games are going to be the future of gaming. Whether crypto decides to insert itself in a way that forces people to adopt it, I don't believe that'll be successful at all. The The idea of play to earn as it exists will be will never hit never hit the scale that traditional gaming would. So you don't think any of these play to earn games are going to get big? I don't call them games. I I just flatly don't. They're jobs. And that's fine.

But they're not fun. They're not interesting. They don't offer sustainable if you've only got the job side of things. Correct. If you sit in most of these games, what they do is um the people who jump in and have early sort of success with them and are able to say, "Hey, I made money doing this game." The nature of that is that they then become sort of I know. It's hard for me not to just go straight to Karl Marx. Like it's really tough. Because whatever people think, he had a really interesting analysis of how industry sort of grows. If I make a lot of really good chairs, I'm able to sustain and take care of my family. At some point, I can build a factory that does this for me, and I have other people that do different parts of it for me. I pay them

dog [ __ ] I make all the excess capital. This is fine. This is how a lot of things have worked. But in games, where with the digital space, this happens a lot faster than it ever touched in the real world. When when Axie or any of these games sort of hit very early on, the the the people poor in the Philip- They needed money, and they were able to use this as a job to sort of sustain their families. That's incredible. Like it was amazing to watch, and they were deeply inspirational for this project. Like this is not me knocking on Axie or Gabby or any of them. They're brilliant. Um The The challenge is over time, what they saw is and it stopped being the the you know, people in Philippines sort of being able to buy these, then suddenly it was basically wealthy people

worldwide buying them as investments and then renting them back so people didn't make as much money. And now people don't own the items that they're using in these games, and they're doing it just for pure subsistence. And again, I go back to underneath all of it, if I gave people enough money to live and not have to worry about money, would they play your game? And if the answer's no, and it's no in the vast majority of these cases, there's no game. This is a job. And that's fine if you want to make jobs and kind of build this and have that set up, but it's be aware that this is what you're making and that there is an end to it because the digital space moves psychotically faster. Um it's the digital space is the reason the housing

market is absurd as as absurd as it is. It's the reason futures markets are in as insane as they are. Rentals markets, all of these things because it's all conglomerated into one or two websites that I'm able to go through and go, well, here's the here's these things I need, I'm buying those, and I can buy things anywhere in the world from anywhere in the world with capital. So be it, um but it moves quick. And if all of that was digital and it didn't necessitate me waiting someone to move in and live there a year, and instead I can rent someone an Axion in two days pull back some level of profit, suddenly you have things accelerating a lot faster and you hit weird inflationary bits. There's a few great pieces that have been written not just on Axie, but these other games that are touching into

these types of economies that it churns, and it churns hard. And you're not going to get gamers coming over. No matter what Justin says, and I think he's uh he's tries his best to be deeply inspirational, most of the stuff happens by accident. At Twitch, he didn't have the idea for Twitch. He built a multiplexing system that streamed webcams. That was what Justin.tv was. That's great, but as someone who streamed one of the first video game streams, Twitch Justin.tv didn't support this. They didn't think it was ever going to be a big thing. Like, we don't know what the next thing is going to be.

We don't know how these things work, but I can say very cleanly based on 40 years now of data and everything I know about gamers, if a game isn't fun on its own, they won't play. Because the vast majority of gamers are people who already have enough money. Like, that's just their they're just fine. Like, I'm not going to ever play a play-to-earn game for that unless it's like earning me a [ __ ] load, which it never will. Like, saying it like no one who's watching this is ever going to like make a million dollars playing the play-to-earn game. They will in the investment market side of it. But, you're never going to find a play-to-earn game that's paying out two or 300 grand a year. Like, these are jobs. And when I say jobs, I mean

menial, required poverty jobs. Uh again, uh Americans don't gold farm. So, then Brooks, I I I think I would assume you're what I think I know what your next take on this would be, but in terms of scarce land inside of a game and the ability to pay for land inside of the game with apprecia- with like real estate that can appreciate, I'm assuming you are against that model. I I'm I'm not against so I'm not against any of these models per se. I'm against the full set up holistically. So, all of the pieces that it it may sound like I'm anti-capitalist. I'm not at all. I believe there's a great power in capital and capitalism that we don't know how to deal with yet. I think our current system sucks, but I don't think it's

capital's or money's fault. I think there's a there's a lot of pieces moving and we need to understand the pieces before we pretend to understand how the whole works. And I think the the same is true of play-to-earn. There's pieces of play-to-earn that 100% are amazing and worth taking and worth growing off of. How do we do this? Here's this new machine I made. Well, let's take that machine and do something with it. Land is one of those things. Scarcity of land on its own, if you're doing it in a way where you're like, well, this is all the land and here is Second Life and we're never going to add more land to this and you can walk around, you're missing the point. Like, scarcity is a thing that can be utilized inside of any economy in order to drive further dynamism within that economy. That as a tool is

incredibly useful. We are going to have land. We have land. It is going to be scarce. There will only ever be a certain amount, but it will never be a oh, there's only this many experiences or hey, this person owns it and therefore they get like weird passive income things. It baking these things in and these machines can work, but it's about incentivizing people into the right direction because currently the incentive is straight up make me more money, make me more money. But the thing people don't get is that's the only incentive. Like there's no That's it. There's no like, I'm doing this for the greater good. I love the people in crypto who say that they're doing that. I appreciate it. There's a There's some truth to it, but all of us

got to pay and all of us are worried about our families and our grandkids and our and and buying what we need to buy to take care of things. We have lives. So, let me make money, but then let me build an incentive structure that allows people to make good money doing what they're doing without [ __ ] someone else. And that's the That's the thing crypto because I literally can build smart contracts that do that. If we take time to design them, we take time to think through, well, why would someone do this? What does this result in? Well, let me build a thing into the contract that prevents that. It's like, oh, that's all it takes? Yes, that's actually all that takes. Oh, cool. Well, let's fix some things then.

It's a My friend said, altered state machine. Uh they're doing a lot of plays like this, too, really trying to push what it means to have a smart contract or how these things interact. A lot of people are playing with that and that's the part where it's like, it's not so much scarcity that's the problem. Scarcity utilized to be put in the hands of a very few people. Like like the old joke that they're currently like talking about Ethereum or Bitcoin. It's decentralized into really about 20 wallets and then like another 5 million people. That's great. Is that the point? Is that really We can Can we do something about that and maybe think a second and really rebuild how we sort of consider how these things work.

That's that's that's the thing I would I would just say. The last thing I want to get your take on Burks is just DeFi inside of games. Right? I think one of the biggest issues for DeFi in general, not for gaming but for DeFi has been there are it's kind of these unsustainable yields end up attracting the capital and you see users come for the quick yield and then they leave because the the platform just aren't that sticky and people are just coming for the money and then leaving. And one thing that's been interesting to watch play out is DeFi Kingdoms, right? DeFi Kingdoms, I've got my NFT as a player. I go into the game. I I farm and I drop my jewel into the into the little yield farms. It's not a fun game. It's a crappy game. It's like It's like a 1% of RuneScape back in the

day type of game. But but like much much much worse. But the game for me is that I'm getting money. I'm I'm figuring out how to optimize the economics of the game and for me that's fun but it's not objectively a fun game. Does How do you see DeFi tying into Noor? Well this is this is the power again when we talk about the two circles. I know how to build a systemic interesting game that people will continually play and that will have a positive feedback loop of mastery, growth repetition. We can build this game. We know how to do it. We've done it before. There's lots of games out there that do it. But on the finance side, the Monopoly Man side, what do we build? Well, the beauty is DeFi when it's in a vacuum,

what you said, they end up with we'll say confusing yields I think would be a way to put it, in confusing economics because they're in a vacuum and it's not their fault. Again, they're building their systems but they just can't connect. But if we were to take like D 5 Kingdoms does and it's interesting, if we were to take the play and connect it properly to this world, suddenly you have there's no entropy because entropy is the reason that this stuff falls apart. Even if you had the best tokenomics in the world, at some point entropy flood out, that's the way it works. By having [ __ ] constantly pushing in new stuff, new games, new people entering. Oh, there's a new meta though this this person out of left field figured out you can go down this area and play with this character and do this

thing. Suddenly, that dynamism is filtering into the D 5. That's it's why we call what we're doing play 5 because it is play intersecting with finance because ultimately, and I've been around it finance people and they don't like this, but the reason we talk about the stock market being a big game or crypto is a big because you're playing. That's what you're doing. You're min-maxing in the same [ __ ] way that a Warhammer guy is sitting there and min-maxing on the table. It's a lot more complex but it's play nonetheless. And that space needs to be clear for those people to do it but they need dynamism coming in. Done. But then the other direction, you can't have power. And so

it's about building that tunnel back and forth that does the right amount of both that keeps them both flowing nicely. So that way you're able to consistently, steadily grow rather than the hilarious sort of explosions. The reality is crypto is able to abstract things from the real world and harden them. And there's a beauty in that but also a terrifying side. It's one of the reasons I don't end up getting along with anyone politically is I say things like Karl Marx but then I also talk about how great capital is because I tend to read him through Gilles Deleuze. Um look the last 100 years, we've seen changes and growth and things happen thanks to capital and thanks to how it sort of manages and grows economically, that it'd be silly to sort of throw out.

We have to understand at its base, and this is one of the things I think Karl Marx got right, is money and capital aren't the same thing. Uh we we've confused them a lot, uh but they're not. It's the reason that I keep telling everyone stop trying to get Bitcoin to be a fiat currency. Like we don't need it as a currency. The power is not that. The power is that it's pure like capital pulled away from currency. Let currency do what it does. Um inside of our space is playing with this and being able to go, how does someone who is into that min-maxing and gaming the system and [ __ ] with it and trying to make the most money, that's that's the same mentality identically as the guy who just wants to purely be the

best at his game. Like it's not like it's a it's not different. We we ascribe different meanings to it, but it's not. It's it's you just want to be best at your game and get the most out of it, and the reward is the reward. And everyone wants to make rent. Everyone wants to be taken care of. And you get to a point to me where you find the rewarding mishmash. I've been fortunate, and one of the the inspirations for all of this is I've seen the relationship between a handful of team owners and their players. That is a very unique thing. They're they're antagonistic because they're one is asking for money from the other. One wants to pay the other less money, but they're also cooperative in the sense that the player needs to be very good

and taking care of for this person to be worth anything. Um you know, this person doesn't pretend that they won the Super Bowl. But they do. They just don't think they're John Elway, or pick your team. I grew up in Denver. Um they they care about the game. The rest of it is kind of the the meta around that. And that's the power. Again, John Daly, he's not winning tournaments these days. He plays golf all the [ __ ] time. Peter Forsberg still skating around. Like I I as far as I know, he's not in any team right now. So, like the the greats, they love their sports.

They need to make money, but they love their sports. And so, can we find a way to keep that together? But at the same time, make sure that, you know, because I think one of the other great tragedies of the free-to-play and play-to-earn way is the moment you start taking advantage of what they've called whales. People who have a ton of money and do min-max, they basically trick you into thinking your skills are are high. You're great at this game because you spent so much money. And that's a lie, too. And it's as insidious as the player who doesn't spend money being told that they're less skilled. And this this is the [ __ ] we need to get rid of.

Well, Brooks, um I love that we've gone and started from very deep philosophical discussions, um and then kind of went into Noor. I don't know if there's anything else you want to cover. Um if not, like, you know, we always like to end uh you know, with with guests saying where people can learn more about what you're doing, where they can find you, and learn more about the project. Well, so the easiest for the project is welcometonoor.com. Um and from there you can find our Discord, which is wonderfully active and kind of a weird place because we don't do a lot of the stuff a lot of crypto projects are doing. So, it's been really fun to sort of play with that. Uh personally, I'm playasfree on Twitter.

Um and beyond that, uh you can't really find me. So, uh that's it. down building, not going to conferences. That is that is You are the most uh chronically underfollowed person on Twitter, I think, with a whopping 341 followers. This is amazing. Uh It's it's it's only a it's only a two-month-old account. I tweeted I tweeted something about uh I actually was not following you, Brooks. I I was like I had to go to N and then see who are they following and I found you.

So anyways yeah. I I do I I hate social doing social media because it's it's a there's a disingenuous. I love the connecting with people. Like I do, but like the I have a lot of friends who've gotten deep into the oh, I've got to do self-promotion thing and I just don't do that. I I build and if I'm not building, I'm spending time with my family or reading. Like that's it. I'm not going to spend time on Twitter. I I hate it. I hate it so much. You're looking at some of the best qualities of the best hard, you know, best founders I've invested behind. So, Brooks. I'm flattered. It's been a pleasure. Again, Brooks, thanks for coming on the pod. Really really enjoyed it.

Um and uh we'll have to do this again sometime soon. Yeah, I would love it. Thank you guys so much. Thank you so much.