A recent story arose from eSports that caught my attention, as it concerned Supercell (a Finnish gaming company) and unpaid tournament prize money in Latin America. Supercell is taking the organizers to court over the failure to pay tournament winners the promised prizes, but it seems that it is more of a rugpull, as both Twitter and the website haven't been updated in over six months.
Looks like they need a DAO to manage prize money.
With so much money in eSports now and teams like Faze Clan going public (and seeing a 25% drop in value on the first day), it is obvious where the future of gaming is going and at least in my opinion, obvious that crypto and blockchain are going to be the dominant force in managing at least the financial sides of the business.
With any new emerging industry, there is plenty of volatility and therefore opportunity to raise value, but this is on both the positive and negative sides of approach. In gaming, the edges are slim in skill, so anything that gains a fraction of an upper-hand over opponents is used, and we can see through casual online gaming over the last decades how many are willing to cheat in various ways to feel superior over others.
Now, with the advent of eSports and the massive amount of money it generates within the gaming industry ecosystem, that mentality is going to flow into all areas of the business, meaning that scam is going to increase accordingly. Not only this, the digital aspect of it means there are going to be plenty of secondary markets, like illegal gambling involved, with some pretty interesting stories, like this hilarious one from India, where random farmers were paid a few dollars a day to don local IPL shirts and pretend to play a professional cricket tournament, while Russians were betting on the games illegally.
And they say crypto is the wild west.
But...
Scam is good!
I am not saying being a scammer is good - scammers are assholes. However, society is always going to have people who are willing to cut corners and take advantage of others to increase their own wealth and status - Governments and Banks have been doing it for years! And it is because of this that the systems improve over time, as people either get tired of being exploited or start using the same exploits themselves, reducing the value of the "hack". This happens in many ways and what is interesting in crypto is that we are doing it to.
Be your own bank.
Look at DeFi as an example, because it is essentially little different than what the banks have been doing to us for years, except for one major point - we own it. Rather than a tiny fraction of the population getting the majority of the benefits, the majority get the benefits spread amongst them. This means that no individual is going to get a massive advantage over any other.
Well, once it all comes into its own and functions as it should.
And look at Hive - one of the largest drivers of technological innovation is the combatting of various forms of exploits of the system. And, if we look at it from a larger community perspective, it is the community that drives these changes which effectively change the behaviors of those using the exploits, whether it be the shift away from farming, self-voting or the usage of bidbots.
Expecting people to "behave well" out of the goodness of their heart is never going to work, because there are always some people who do not possess that view of what is good. But, everyone works on incentive, it is just that while there are those who regulate their behavior based on the value of the community and their place within it, there are many who regulate it based on economic gains and eventually, those who exploit the economy will control those who value the community.
See the problem?
Therefore, what actually needs to happen is what crypto as a whole is targeting, the ownership of the economy of the community, by the community. itself. Through incentivizing ownership of the economy for the betterment of the community, those who only value the financial side will be less powerful and struggle to gain value, because those who value the community can compete with them.
This ownership of the community through the economy that empowers it financially is nothing new, it is just that in the current economic conditions, that tiny majority are the owners and therefore, look to maximize themselves, as that is what is incentivized. This leads toward a monopoly of industry and control and speeds up over time, which is why we have never seen such a volume of transfer from poor to rich as we are seeing now, evidenced by the increasing wealth gaps globally.
This is what the incentives encourage.
It is "in the code" of the economy, the laws of the state that protect themselves and their interests, the corporations that feed them. This makes them the owners and therefore directors of the community, but they are making their decisions for the community in order to maximize themselves, not for the betterment of the community itself - except as far as it stops them from being overthrown, which is currently on a knife edge.
That edge is getting sharper, because of crypto developments which are targeting the economy itself, bringing competion to the code, without actually forcing change of the traditional economy. This is a significant framing, because it makes it opt-in and the threat to the traditional markets isn't that it competes in product, but it competes on what is best for the community.
What people are starting to realize is that there is plenty of scam going on, but it is at a high level in the corporations and governments, using systems that the average person has no access to, let alone control over. However, once people do start taking ownership of topical economies like that of crypto gaming and Hive, they learn about the responsibility of ownership and what it takes to wield power. It isn't always pleasant and very rarely will people agree, but this is what needs to happen to change the mindset from renter to owner, rather than expecting that people who are incentivized to act to the detriment of the community, will not do so.
Gaming is an industry of the young, but currently it is still owned by the old, those who know exactly how to manipulate the code to own the community and direct behavior. As the gaming industry decentralizes into shared ownership models like that of Splinterlands and the associated shared ownership of social networks like that of Hive, the shift in behaviors change, as incentives change for the average user. In time, this flows into all kinds of decision making processes, including what products are bought and what kinds of governance are supported.
This is not a short game.
It is a complete revolution in cultural behavior that has been ongoing for thousands of years, where centralized authorities have been the ruling force due to technological restrictions. Those restrictions are being lifted however, but this doesn't mean it is going to be like flicking a light switch to change the mindset of eight billion people with generational learning that, there is no other way than what we have been taught through oppression.
There isn't an total function DAO for global society, but if you look at society itself from a very high perspective, we function as a unit, with all interactions becoming transactions that have an effect on the entire ecosystem. Decentralizing the power through the entire population through incentivized ownership means that near automatically, the organization of society shifts, turning it into a dynamic organism, shifting and evolving with the changing conditions, combatting illness and scam, even when it is coming from within.
What is really needed in the world is for the economy itself to "go public" and that is what is slowly happening with crypto. It is a a threat to what is already established, but once it establishes itself, the current economy needs to either pivot and improve, or die through disuse.
It is all about incentives.
Survival is at the core.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]