Primer: Will Robinson has an interesting background. He majored in the Sciences before pivoting to Film Studies and finally ending up in Video Game Studies. He shares with us his thoughts on the various aspects of video games (e.g. addictiveness of games, in-game economies, etc.) and his role in leading the gaming accelerator at DeFi Alliance.
Background
Was in the Sciences in college. Realized that he wasn’t cut out for it
Went to McGill to study Film. Realized that his peers were better at Cinema than he was
Decided to focus on video games while at McGill
“Why would you even bother studying games in a cinema program? And I said, well, they're telling stories. And they are leading players down these sort of paths of entertainment, and they're communicating philosophical ideals, and they have their own biases.”
- Will Robinson
Did his undergrad, Masters, and his PhD thesis exploring ways in which game designers incentivize players to behave in certain ways
His cousin told him to switch careers and go into crypto because Bitcoin similarly incentivizes people to behave in certain ways
An accounting firm hired him and he eventually became the in-house expert on cryptocurrency financial audit
Saw a job opening at DeFi Alliance and went over to them
Switching From Sciences —> Film —> Game Design
Was following his passion
Thinks of it like a map consisting of different hills. As he is climbing a hill, he sees another hill in the distance and pivoted to climb that new hill
Was not studying Cinema, but popular culture. Television and music were all part of it
“Because popular culture is a reflection of who we are, and is the best place to exercise like high end philosophical debate in theory because although it's kind of cool to see what people are doing like 500 years ago, it's more cool to see what people are doing now.”
- Will Robinson
Was addicted to playing World of Warcraft (WoW)
What Factors Go Into Making A Great Game?
His focus on what makes a great game wasn’t really what other people cared about
From his Cinema studies, the greatest movies are not the most-watched movies. The greatest movies are niche arthouse masterpieces
The kinds of stories that can be told with games are not the same as cinema and literature
One of his favourite games is Passage. It cost $1 on iOS and takes 5 minutes to play. It’s one of the first games to ever been placed in the Museum of Modern Art
Players have to make a decision to get married and score more points by walking forward to seeing the world or give up on a spouse and chase really hard dreams that are through narrow corridors that one cannot drag your spouse through
What Made World Of Warcraft So Addictive?
World of Warcraft exploits the feeble part of our brain
It drops random loot so that players repeatedly kill a monster over and over again in hopes that they will get the item they desire
Additional layers can be added on top of that. WoW forces people into producing community because some monsters can only be defeated in groups. Makes their lifestyle revolve around the game
Most Games Are Designed To Be Addictive. What Are His Thoughts On This?
It’s a negative thing and it’s inevitable
This is the same way how Casinos work
Wish to have shorter games that are full of important ideas that game devs are trying to convey in the way that we think about literature or cinema
Another of his favourite game is Dota 2. The addictiveness of the game is totally different from WoW. The addiction is all about whether the game itself will be fun
Are Most Things In Life Designed To Be Addictive?
Thinks that most things in life are not addictive
Cinema is not addictive. After watching a 2-hour movie, you are done
Television is addictive as it’s cliffhangers after cliffhangers
Finds play-to-earn sad. A market forms because whales are willing to pay for rare items from players who are grinding the game and not because that the game is fun
Did He Explore In-Game Economies During His Game Studies?
Wasn’t particularly relevant to what he was studying
His interests were spread across a few domains:
User-generated content — Warcraft 3 was famously good at this. Players created their own “levels” (e.g. tower defence games; MOBA games). Minecraft and LittleBigPlanet also did this
Feminist Critique of games — most games were made by men for men
Game mechanisms and the incentives around them — how do game designers dangle carrots and threaten with sticks?
Thoughts On In-Game Economies
Wrote about the history of items and games. Games gate-cap to manage in-game items
A game called Chainmail evolved into Dungeons & Dragons
Different tiers of items, with stronger ones requiring the defeat of strong monsters
Players had to level up to get the best items. This is to stretch out their interest in the game
In Team Fortress 2, Valve introduced cosmetic items that have no impact on gameplay. They ended up having value, which shocked people
“And people then started to, over a very long time, believe that cosmetic items being so valuable, meant something unexpected. In the way that people buy fancy clothes to express their identity in the real world, they're going to buy fancy digital clothes to express their identity in the virtual world.”
- Will Robinson
In-game cosmetic items changed culture. Steam opened that economy to players where they can trade them against one another, with them taking a cut
In Diablo 3, the real money auction house broke. Players were able to buy items that were strong enough to kill the final boss. It broke the gameplay loop and ended the game
Today, we have Axie Infinity and plenty of Filipinos have become banked because of a video game
Thoughts On Pay-To-Win
Game designers have 2 choices:
Say that code is law
Rewrite the rules of the game and make these items less powerful
The latter undermines the very value proposition of NFTs
Vitalik Buterin had written a blog post before stating that he had a powerful item in World of Warcraft. The item was nerfed by the devs and it made all the time and effort spent on acquiring the item worthless
The difference in blockchain games is that there is a shift to playing and owning the protocol of the underlying game
The AXS governance token is a representation of control over the protocol/game itself. In 2023, there will be a governance vote to decide who will maintain the game from that point on
This governance format for Web3 games ensures that the players are aligned. If the game is boring/is ruined, they might band together to improve it
The World Of Warcraft Economy
WoW introduced bind on equip and bind on pickup. This meant that the item is untradeable
Making some items that are outside the scope of purchase meant that players had to play the game to excel at it
This removes items from circulation and creates scarcity
The auction house was also interesting. There were people who only played with the auction house because they loved that part of the game so much
Another aspect is that all items become worthless over time, including the powerful items. Characters level up —> monsters kept getting stronger —> monster drop better rewards —> economy continues to run —> goalpost gets shifted —> getting players hooked
What Would Happen If NFTs Were Introduced To WoW?
Doesn’t think that it will do anything if items are still bind on equip and bind on pickup
The problem with WoW is that everything decays and become worthless over time. Hence, if there were NFTs, they would be cosmetic in nature
Thoughts On The Future Of Blockchain Gaming
The design space is sufficiently rich. Impossible to predict what will happen
Following the Dark Forest game very closely. All the rules for the game are on-chain. The NFTs are rewarded for winning
People are hoping that one day, these rewards/trophies would be related to the governance of the game or become something meaningful
What he found interesting was that the builder community gets rewarded with NFTs as well
What Are The Incentives For Traditional Game Developers To Integrate NFTs?
His stand is that large game companies are too large to become Web3 native
Will see interesting disruption from companies who are Web3 native from the beginning
Doesn’t see traditional game companies giving up control and ownership to the community in order to get more builders and a robust community
Are There Downsides To Using NFTs In Game Design?
Gas costs from using a wallet
Exposing themselves to regulatory problems
What NFTs do well is that they help coordinate strangers on the internet together to build a strong community
DeFi Alliance
Has been around for 1.5 years
Focused on providing institutional grade liquidity to DeFi protocols
Accelerated 15% of the top 100 DeFi protocols
Because of his background in games, he thought of starting an accelerator for games. Currently onboarding a variety of teams into their accelerator for games
Recently admitted AI Arena. It’s a fighting game where your fighters are productive AI assets/NFTs that can be trained to fight better. Players can be paid for having their NFTs train other NFTs to fight better
Thoughts On The Metaverse
Had the Metaverse for a very long time:
Living in WoW for most of his days
Talking to his friends on Discord
People will own parts of the Metaverse
Doesn’t think the Metaverse has to be in AR or VR
If He Had $10 Billion And Unlimited Access To Technical Talent, What Would He Do?
Would just build more of what he is currently doing at DeFi Alliance
Would allocate money to the companies he talks to in DeFi Alliance and make sure they succeed in their adventures
Single Favourite NFT
Owns a Bitchcoin
Sarah Meyohas created a fork of Bitcoin called Bitchcoin in 2015. Handed out these coins on envelopes that contain private-public key pairs in the middle of Brooklyn
There was a transition from the Bitchcoin network to ERC-721 NFTs on OpenSea
Had thousands of petals, with each petal representing Bitchcoins that she had mined. Had labourers select the 3291 nicest petals and minted them on-chain on Ethereum
Most Controversial Thought
Loves OlympusDAO, but thinks that there’s a powerful (-2, 1) strategy that can be used to attack the protocol
If You Could Improve One Thing In The Space
Improving wallets to make them more seamless and better
Try to fix the Bitcoin Maximalists community
Someone He Looks Up To And Why
His cousin, Dan Robinson, who’s Head of Research at Paradigm
Helped him to get into crypto
During the 2017 ICO craze, Dan told him what works and what doesn’t work
Looks up to Andreas Antonopoulos for his book Mastering Bitcoin
Brian Gu, one of the main team members at Dark Forest
NFT Ecosystem In 3 Years
A lot of NFTs are going to be worthless
A lot of NFTs are going to be worth hundreds of times more
Going to see way more NFTs as people start organizing themselves around them
Will see real world assets being turned into NFTs
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