Comment by waffl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by waffl | Hacker News Reader

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One of the more interesting things I've felt about web3 is the idea of portable identities not being locked to centralized account management systems/walled gardens. This applies to tokens as well - eg, an asset that is no longer locked in to a particular game and could be used anywhere on chain. I'm thinking of MMORPGs having their servers shut down. It's interesting to imagine these things existing beyond the games themselves. I'm not a gamer (nor a collector of anything really), but I could imagine how interesting it would be to hold on to one's relics from these games, bringing them into new virtual worlds, even passing them down like family heirlooms. It seems like something that was often dismissed until the NFT boom lent some credence to the notion that digital artifacts need not be entirely disposable. Be it better or worse for the world, ultimately it really is a bizarre but fascinating experiment/exploration into our ideas of value and provenance.

I find it hard to imagine that a developer of a game is going to be happy with someone bringing something from another game into theirs. How would that even work? Does the developer need to create stats for every item that's been in any game that's existed up to that point to balance it? How would it work if the mechanic the item grants isn't even part of the game you are in?

If it's a standard NFT the original developers don't have a say in how a different developer wants to integrate the user's ownership of that token. If I see that your wallet has ownership of "sword of fire" from WoW and want to convert that to "saber of flame" in my game I can. I could even leave the same name, program the same design of the original weapon in, and appropriate the mechanic into my own game (ignoring the legality here and just focusing on feasibility). This is all possible because of how blockchains work -- all transactions (and the resultant change in state) are public and I can always identify which NFTs you own that way.

EDIT: I also wanted to add in that the smart contract that supports an NFT can be made in a way that allows the original developers to collect fees on every transfer of the asset. This means it might even be in my best interest as the original developer to endorse other games using my in-game NFTs because the longer I can get people transacting with my asset, the longer I can keep collecting revenue. I might even pay other game developers to integrate my item into their game to make this happen.

None of that makes any sense. I get what an NFT is. What I want to know is how the mechanics of taking a "sword of fire" from WoW and importing it into RandomNewGame will work without the developer of RandomNewGame specifically programming it in. And if the requirement is that they program in some compatibility with the WoW sword of fire, will they not need to then also program in support for all the billions of existing and infinite yet-to-be-existing items that someone will want to import into the game? You can spin SciFi tales to a different question. I'm asking for specifics on how this ridiculous idea would work.

With game assets what you'll probably find is that even tokenised you won't own the asset itself and it'll be pretty strongly licensed. For example like Meebits are: https://meebits.larvalabs.com/meebits/termsandconditions

So the likelihood of an item living on in another game could be quite tenuous. Not least because you have to hope the game developer supports your items and there isn't a strong incentive to do that.

The other side of it is whether these will have any meaning beyond being a nice reminder. In that sense you don't really need a token but to own your own data about the game. In this sense we can already see people holding onto the meaning of their previous gaming adventures, through maintaining friendships, keeping screenshots, diaries and other media about them and so on.

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