Will our future lives be like a video game?
Will our future lives be like a video game?
Will our future lives be like a video game?
January 22, 2022
By Kit Wilson
Summary
A few years ago, the software company Owlchemy Labs released a computer game called Job Simulator.
As the digital scaffold of the metaverse continues to shoot up all around us, and asvirtual reality continues to merge with, and augment, our physical surroundings, computer games will become an increasingly present, increasingly seamless feature of our everyday lives.
Most of us have at least one game, whether it's tennis, poker, or Monopoly, that, for as long as we're playing it, genuinely eclipses everything else in our lives.
Last year, nine times as many people watched the Game Awards as watched the Oscars.
Take the phenomenally popular game Fortnite which, according to the tech entrepreneur Piers Kicks, in 2018 earned '$2.4 billion , the vast majority of which was driven by one-way transactions for in-game cosmetics with exactly zero in-game utility beyond aesthetic appeal.
Gaming is - and will remain for the foreseeable future - a luxury economy.
The future of a game like Axie Infinity, as the crypto-tech consultancy Naavik admits, depends entirely on continuing to attract 'significant numbers of players happy to simply play the game for fun and put new money into the system without expecting a return'.
Reference
Wilson, K. (2022, January 22). Will our future lives be like a video game? Retrieved February 21, 2022, from https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/will-the-future-really-be-gamified-