Pooping in space is hard. There’s no gravity to help your colon along, and things stick to moisture, leaving you sporting an umbilical cord that’s almost impossible to sever. The solution to this is a containment device attached to the spacesuit, which uses airflow to suck the waste into a plastic bag.
“It’s actually pretty hard to get things to dislodge from your body and go into the containment devices,” Richard Garriott, game developer, entrepreneur, and astronaut, tells me. “And people work out a variety of things, from bouncing to hand manipulation. Then they try to clean themselves. It’s not fun.”
Garriott is the creator of the Ultima series. He’s also the president of the Explorer’s Club – an international organization dedicated to the advancement of field exploration and scientific inquiry. He’s also the only person on the planet who’s spent a week orbiting Earth on the ISS and been down to the Mariana Trench, a part of the ocean so deep that Mount Everest would have two kilometers of headroom if it sat at the bottom. If that’s not enough, he’s been pole to pole, across all continents, and been trapped in a submarine that was stuck to the stern of the Titanic’s wreckage.
“I don’t really find any of them to be particularly scary, but the one you should be scared of the most of those would be space,” Garriott says of his adventures. “But the times I’ve come closest to killing myself were none of those. It’s been in much more mundane situations – I’ve been in very bad situations while out rappelling. We were stuck under the stern of the Titanic, which could have been easily fatal, obviously. But, the big four – north, south, up, down – actually felt relatively comfortable. The one not great thing about being in space is the food is pretty blasé – you’re eating military rations. And the one thing that’s really a hassle is personal hygiene. There’s no running water. There’s no flushing toilets.”
Now, along with long-time friend and producer, Todd Porter, Garriott has founded DeMeta, a game development company that’s creating an MMO built on blockchain and NFT technology, where players can own and profit from in-game land, items, and community creations. It’s a tough sell.
Garriott says the idea to make a game on the blockchain initially came from wanting to fund the project outside of the traditional publisher model. Both he and Porter want to make something that resembles Ultima, but with triple-A production values and without publisher interference – something that, Garriott says, heavily impacted the quality of Ultima VIII.
“We decided to go for a combination,” Garriott says. “We have direct investors, but we also wanted to engage the public, but in a way quite different than we had done with my last game, Shroud of the Avatar.”
Where Shroud of the Avatar was crowdfunded on Kickstarter, the new game will be, in part, funded by people staking claim to plots of land. It answers the age-old question: what if video games let you become a landlord? And for those with less money to spend: what if video games let you pay rent?
Those early adopters, I’m told, will reap the benefits of the productivity of that land, earning money in-game that can be cashed out in crypto wallets, which can then be traded for real money.
“We decided to use the blockchain, and that’s probably one of the most controversial aspects of what we decided to do because there’s lots of gamers that are very much blockchain naysayers,” Garriott says. “And by the way, we, historically, are also big blockchain naysayers. We see the majority of the stuff that comes out that people kind of slap blockchain into, they’re what I would describe as soulless.
“But by us using blockchain, open ledger, and NFTs, it means that people can do things like, ‘Let’s literally let people buy into the lands that we’re going to build.’ They will be able to sell that land for a profit or they can hold the land. The productivity of that land and people hunting and getting wood or coal or iron or gold from monsters, being an owner means you share the productivity of that land. Or if people build shops on your land, you get a share of the productivity of those shops.”
All of this stuff will be incorporated into the game, meaning players don’t have to worry about crypto wallets or any of the complexities attached to trading NFTs and crypto, unless they want to withdraw their earnings, in which case they will have to create a digital wallet and figure out how to turn the crypto into real cash.
“We’re just using the blockchain because it’s the most convenient way for us to unify these ideas,” Garriott says. “And we’re gonna put a front end that lets people just play as normal, buy things as normal. But behind the scenes, it does happen to be on the blockchain. We’re not pushing NFTs, we’re just using this as a backbone to unify player participation in the economics of the game. Before the game exists.”
This made me wonder exactly who will profit from all of this. Because the people who are earning money, that cash has to come from the other players. The house always wins.
“People will be purchasing land and creating magic shops and weapons stores, etc,” Todd Porter explains. “All of these will have value in the game. And because they’re early adopters, that value will increase, because things will get more expensive, and it’ll be more expensive to buy land if the land sells out, and then it’ll be buying the buildings, etc. So there’s a kind of a natural economy that happens from that, and we were stressing very carefully to make sure we raise money from our venture partners, as well as our crypto partners, to make sure that we have sufficient funds to operate. And then we look at whatever the community generates, which tells us how big a world we’re creating.”
While Porter and Garriott believe the game will make some players rich, there will no doubt be many more who are left holding the bag. The ambition of the game is also directly tied to the initial investment; those who are willing to speculatively buy up plots of land before the game even launches, similarly to how Star Citizen – a hyper-ambitious space sim that’s been in development since the formation of the universe – is funded in part by its future players buying virtual spaceships that don’t yet exist.
Garriott claims that the blockchain allows the team to make sure all the trading happens above board. He remembers back when Ultima Online launched and players sold virtual swords and shops located in the heart of the city for thousands of dollars. All of this happened through eBay, which not only meant the developers didn’t profit from it, but it also meant that a simple game update could revert the sale, even though it wouldn’t be reverted on eBay. The people who lost money that way would be annoyed with the developers, even though they didn’t condone the meta economy in any way, shape or form.
“The nice thing about blockchain is it’s safe since it’s a public ledger,” Garriott says. “It means all trades are perfectly tracked, there is no debate as to whether the things were exchanged. And so we don’t have the issue of rollbacks. It also means you can write smart contracts that say, every time there is a trade, who should get a cut of that trade. The original owner, the person who basically helped fund the existence of that land – even if they’ve sold it 10 times – maybe they should get a cut of that money because they were there from the beginning. And so we’re able to now write this out to where those who are in early, the speculators, can participate long term in that economics.”
“Our focus is on making an experience,” Porter adds. “We’re doing the blockchain and smart contracts and NFTs as a verified provenance tool, that’s all we’re looking at. We don’t see it in any kind of fancy way, and we don’t think that people coming in should have to deal with it right up front. We don’t want that to be a barrier to entry to play. We want to make something that’s actually compelling. We’re trying to build a real game here. We also want to make sure we’re using eco-friendly technologies for the NFTs, and we are in talks with a few companies.”
Porter mentions the fact that Garriott is president of the Explorer’s Club, which aims to advance science in field expeditions around the world. “Explorers Club isn’t much of a club if there’s nothing to explore,” he says.
It’s an admirable goal, but Garriott and Porter won’t be drawn on what blockchain they’re planning to use, and whether it’s proof-of-stake – which is less harmful to the environment – or it’s proof-of-work, which is potentially catastrophic. Many companies, including the WWF charity, have minted NFTs using an allegedly eco-friendly method called Polygon. However, Polygon still works by using a set of contracts on the main Ethereum network, meaning there are still substantial carbon emissions involved with each transaction. A single transaction on one of the most environmentally friendly solutions uses around 430g of C02 per transaction, which is the equivalent of driving a diesel car for 2.5km.
One of the other major concerns with this technology is how open it is to money laundering and scams. According to Porter, he’s drawing on his experience in the casino industry to help combat this.
“I spent three years in the casino business and saw the procedures we had to put forth so that we wouldn’t have that similar thing, which, by the way, happens – money laundering is a real thing,” Porter says. “So we are setting up two types of currency in the game. There’s in-game currency – gold – which is for the more mundane things you have to do in the game. On the NFT side are actual registered entities that can be bought and sold on any of the major trading systems. And we are very careful to make sure that we don’t pollute the other side – we don’t want to have people using virtual coin to somehow turn it into cash, because you’ll get in trouble with that very quickly.”
“I am a World of Warcraft player, and I will happily confess to buying bountiful amounts of gold through eBay,” Garriott adds. “So I understand it from a player’s perspective, but it’s actually very tricky to figure out how to shut down gold farming and therefore also money laundering from organized groups of players, and botting [where people set up AI routines to farm in-game resources when they’re not playing] is a related concern. But those are not unique to this project and not unique to using a blockchain data method. I personally am more than just suspicious that a lot of cryptocurrencies are being used for more nefarious purposes. But I think the solution to that is things are evolving across the platforms with more transparency, allowing you to know who the investors are and what the trades are. And so we’re definitely on the bandwagon of saying cryptocurrencies don’t need to be anti-government secrecy wells. Cryptocurrencies have an incredibly valuable role to play, while still being above board and transparent.”
Garriott and Porter worked together across Ultima, an RPG series that’s revered by OG PC gamers and immersive sim developers alike. But whether that’s enough to make the audience bite on a blockchain and NFT-based game remains to be seen. There are still far more questions than answers at the moment, and despite talking for 90 minutes, I left with only a vague sense of what the actual game will be like. Like space, NFTs suck all of the oxygen out of the room, and convincing the audience that this is the one to solve all the concerns attached to them might be more difficult than squeezing out a turd in a vacuum.
Written by Kirk McKeand on behalf of GLHF.
