ChainBreaker Podcast Episode 7 Review: Talking about Metaverse + Loot

The following is a summary of the viewpoints from this live broadcast event.

Background Introduction

Recently, the blockbuster movie "Free Guy" has once again brought the concept of "Metaverse" to the forefront. Some praise the "Metaverse" as the next carrier of human civilization, while others question its overheated hype. What exactly is the "Metaverse"? What stage are we currently at in the development of the "Metaverse"? Are there any highly completed "Metaverse" games available for everyone to experience? In addition, a new NFT species Loot has emerged, with trading volumes on OpenSea continuously climbing, recently reaching the number one spot on the OpenSea leaderboard in the last 24 hours. What exactly is Loot? What is its charm?

Mr. Block Chain Chris

The biggest difference between the Metaverse and regular games is that there is a community supporting the Metaverse, which is very valuable. Loot has recently achieved great success, and many people want to create a new version of Loot. The code can be copied, but the community behind Loot, which was established within a week, cannot be replicated.

Loot is about "Composability." Anyone can use Loot to create anything.

Managing Director of the Digital Renaissance Foundation, Cao Yin

Metaverse, I don't really like to call it that; I prefer to refer to it as "Digital Beyond." It is the other side of another world. In the Metaverse, everyone can start anew, regardless of your ethnicity, gender, past educational background, or professional identity. In the Metaverse, or the Digital Beyond, everyone starts from scratch, and each person can rebuild a social network based on their talents, beliefs, and understanding of the world. Everyone can have new social capital.

This is actually one reason why I like YGG. During the pandemic, many friends in Southeast Asia lost their jobs due to the downturn in the tourism industry or the economy, but they found work again in YGG. Not only can they find jobs, but they can even regain respect or become respected individuals for the first time, which is truly remarkable. Many people did not develop well in the traditional world, but it may not have been their fault; it could be due to societal issues. The Metaverse gives each of us a chance to start over.

The open world of the Metaverse is actually very different from the games we have now. People play games primarily for leisure. In the Metaverse, for example, Axie Infinity, people still treat it as a game, but I now see Axie Infinity and any blockchain games that emerge in this era as social networks with gaming scenarios, or as social networks with a degree of gamification. Through gamified features, or initially using games as a purpose, it brings together talented individuals like the friends from YGG in the Philippines, forming an organization, completing internal divisions of labor, and allowing some very talented people to emerge as leaders, engineers, and evangelists to influence and help more people. At that point, Axie Infinity as a game becomes less important; what matters more is that it serves as a starting point to trigger a great DAO and a significant social network, enabling these people to do many things and achieve great things in the future.

So I think the biggest difference between the Metaverse and games is whether games are a means or an end and what the purpose of playing games is.

Currently, these blockchain games definitely do not match the experience of some single-player games and PC online games that have spent a lot of money to develop. For example, Axie Infinity feels like a game from 2008, and Decentraland resembles the earliest 3D modeling games from 2003. However, I personally believe that the gaming experience is not the most important aspect; what matters is the social networks on top of it and what kind of value it conveys to everyone.

After Loot came out, the entire blockchain gaming scene began to diverge from the original single-player games on the blockchain, and blockchain games started to find their true purpose, just like when Uniswap appeared. DeFi is no longer just CeFi on the blockchain; it has its own new paradigm and economy, which is a very important point.

In the future, I look forward to the emergence of what is called the Loot Universe or Lootverse, a complete, new interactive on-chain metaverse.

In the past, the experience of blockchain games certainly did not match traditional games because they all aimed to achieve the experience of traditional centralized game servers using decentralized but underperforming blockchains. Therefore, the gaming experience was definitely inferior to traditional games. But now with Loot, something that traditional games could never achieve, only possible in the NFT and Crypto world, the gaming experience of future blockchain games will be very different from previous games.

I believe Loot has two meanings. The first is that from a gaming perspective, it is a brilliant, genius game idea, a very crypto-native game concept.

The second, if we look at the bigger full picture, considering human civilization over the past 6,000 or 7,000 years, Loot will bring a huge, disruptive change to our concepts of religion, which need to be based on dissemination, faith, and worldviews.

Loot is essentially the mathematical rules of the Metaverse. If we abstract our world, it is mathematics; adding a little something turns it into physics, and then we see all the various things or technologies, such as semiconductors and the internet. Loot in the Metaverse is like the mathematical rules of our world.