Every little boy’s (and many grown men’s) dream of playing video games for a living is drawing closer to reality. The recent launch of HunterCoin and the in-development VoidSpace, games that reward players in digital currency rather than virtual princesses or gold stars, point to a future where ranking one on a leaderboard could be rewarded in dollars, sterling , euros and yen.
The story of the millionaire (virtual) real estate agent…
Digital currencies have been slowly maturing both in terms of their functionality and the financial infrastructure that allows them to be used as a credible alternative to non-virtual fiat currency. Although Bitcoin, the first and best known of the cryptocurrencies, was created in 2009, there have been forms of virtual currency used in video games for more than 15 years. 1997’s Ultima Online was the first notable attempt to incorporate a large-scale virtual economy into a game. Players can collect gold coins by completing quests, fighting monsters, and finding treasure and spending it on armor, weapons, or real estate. This was an early incarnation of a virtual currency in that it existed purely within the game, although it did reflect the real-world economy insofar as the Ultima currency experienced inflation as a result of game mechanics that ensured there was a supply. Endless monsters to kill and therefore gold coins to collect.
Released in 1999, EverQuest took virtual currency gaming a step further, allowing players to trade virtual goods with each other in-game and, though the game’s designer also banned selling virtual items with each other on eBay. In a real-world phenomenon entertainingly explored in Neal Stephenson’s 2011 novel Reamde, Chinese gamers or “gold farmers” were employed to play EverQuest and other similar games full-time with the goal of earning game points. experience to level up your characters. thus making them more powerful and sought after. These characters would then be sold on eBay to Western gamers who were unwilling or unable to spend hours leveling up their own characters. Based on the EverQuest currency’s calculated exchange rate as a result of real-world trade that took place, Edward Castronova, a professor of telecommunications at Indiana University and an expert on virtual currencies, estimated that in 2002 EverQuest was the 77th largest country in the world. rich in the world, somewhere between Russia and Bulgaria, and its GDP per capita was higher than that of the People’s Republic of China and India.
Launched in 2003 and having reached 1 million regular users by 2014, Second Life is perhaps the most comprehensive example of a virtual economy to date in that its virtual currency, the Linden dollar, which can be used to buy or sell goods and services in the game, it can be exchanged for real-world currencies through market-based exchanges. There were $3.2 billion worth of in-game virtual goods transactions recorded in the 10 years between 2002 and 2013, and Second Life became a marketplace where gamers and businesses could design, promote, and sell the content they created. Real estate was a particularly lucrative commodity to trade, in 2006 Ailin Graef became Second Life’s first millionairess when she turned an initial investment of $9.95 into more than $1 million over 2.5 years through buying, selling and trading. of virtual real estate to other players. However, examples like Ailin are the exception to the rule, only 233 registered users earned more than $5,000 in 2009 from Second Life activities.
How to get paid in dollars for mining asteroids…
To date, the ability to generate non-virtual cash in video games has been a secondary design, the player must either go through unauthorized channels to exchange their virtual loot or must possess a degree of real-world creative ability or business acumen. that could be exchanged for cash. This could change with the advent of video games that are built from the ground up around the ‘plumbing’ of recognized digital currency platforms. The approach HunterCoin has taken is to ‘gamify’ what is often the rather technical and automated process of creating digital currency. Unlike real-world currencies that arise when they are printed by a central bank, digital currencies are created by being ‘mined’ by users. The underlying source code of a particular digital currency that allows it to function is called a blockchain, an online decentralized public ledger that records all transactions and currency exchanges between individuals. Since digital currency is nothing more than intangible data, it is more prone to fraud than physical currency, as it is possible to double a unit of currency, causing inflation or altering the value of a transaction after it has been made to personal benefit. To make sure this doesn’t happen, the blockchain is ‘guarded’ by volunteers or ‘miners’ who test the validity of every transaction made and, with the help of specialized hardware and software, make sure that the data has not been compromised. manipulated. This is an automatic process for the miners software, although it is very time consuming and requires a lot of processing power from your computer. To reward a miner for verifying a transaction, the blockchain releases a new unit of digital currency and rewards them with it as an incentive to continue maintaining the network, thus digital currency is created. Because it can take anywhere from several days to years for one person to successfully mine a coin, groups of users pool their resources into a mining “pool,” using the combined processing power of their computers to mine coins faster.
HunterCoin the game sits within such a blockchain for a digital currency also called HunterCoin. The act of playing the game replaces the automated process of mining digital currency and, for the first time, makes it manual and without the need for expensive hardware. Using strategy, timing, and teamwork, players venture out on a map in search of coins, and upon finding some and returning safely to their base (other teams are trying to stop them and steal their coins), they can collect their coins by depositing in your own digital wallet, usually an app designed to make and receive digital payments. 10% of the value of coins deposited by players goes to the miners who maintain the HunterCoin blockchain plus a small percentage of coins that are lost when a player dies and their coins drop. While the game’s graphics are basic and significant rewards take time to accumulate, HunterCoin is an experiment that could be seen as the first video game with a built-in monetary reward as its main feature.
Although still in development, VoidSpace is a more polished approach to gaming in a working economy. VoidSpace, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), is set in space where players explore an ever-growing universe, mine natural resources like asteroids, and trade them for goods with other players in order to build their own empire. galactic. Players will be rewarded for mining DogeCoin, a more established form of digital currency that is currently widely used for micropayments on various social media sites. DogeCoin will also be the currency of in-game trade between players and the means of making in-game purchases. Like HunterCoin, DogeCoin is a fully functioning and legitimate digital currency and, like HunterCoin, can be exchanged for both digital and real fiat currencies on exchanges like Poloniex.
The future of video games?
Although early in terms of quality, the launch of HunterCoin and VoidSpace is an interesting indication of what the next evolution of gaming could be. MMORPGs are currently being considered as ways to model the outbreak of epidemics as a result of how players’ reactions to an unwanted plague reflected hard-to-model recorded aspects of human behavior in real-world outbreaks. It could be assumed that eventually in-game virtual economies could be used as models to test economic theories and develop responses to massive failures based on observations of how players use digital currency with real value. It is also a good test for the functionality and potential applications of digital currencies that hold the promise of moving beyond mere exchange vehicles and into exciting areas of personal digital property, for example. Meanwhile, gamers now have the means to translate hours in front of a screen into digital currency and then into dollars, British pounds, euros or yen.
But before you quit your day job…
…it is worth mentioning the current exchange rates. It is estimated that a player could comfortably recover their initial registration fee of 1,005 HunterCoin (HUC) for joining the HunterCoin game in 1 day of play. HUC cannot currently be exchanged directly into USD, one must convert it into a more established digital currency like Bitcoin. At the time of writing, the HUC to Bitcoin (BC) exchange rate is 0.00001900, while the BC to USD exchange rate is $384.24. 1 HUC traded to BC and then to USD, before transaction fees were taken into account, would equal… $0.01 USD. This is not to say that as a player becomes more adept, they couldn’t grow their team of virtual CoinHunters and perhaps employ some ‘bot’ programs that would automatically play the game under the guise of another player and earn coins for them. as well. but I think it’s safe to say that, at this point, even efforts like this alone could result in enough change for an everyday McDonalds. Unless players are willing to submit to intrusive in-game advertising, share personal data, or join a game like CoinHunter that is built on the Bitcoin blockchain, the rewards are unlikely to be more than micropayments to the player. occasional. And maybe this is a good thing, because surely if you get paid for something, it stops being a game?
