Ex-Valve economist says play-to-earn could be "the apotheosis of misanthropy"

rockpapershotgun.com:

Mostly, I want people to shut up about NFTs and cryptocurrency and the metaverse and play-to-earn games. Maybe if we turn away and pretend they're not there, it'll all burn out when scammers grow tired of being scammed by other scammers. However, one of the few people I do want to hear talk about it all is Yanis Varoufakis, who was Valve's in-house economist before becoming Greece's finance minister then an MP. In a wonderfully long new interview, he is not impressed by much of the hype, and it is DELIGHTFUL.

The Crypto Syllabus recently interviewed the self-described "erratic, inconsistent Marxist", touching on subjects including Team Fortress 2 hats, NFTs, cryptocurrency, metaverses, and how so much of the current metahype is garbage. Honestly, brew a cuppa and settle down to read the whole thing. It is very interesting. He's not opposed to technology (spoken before about liking the principle of blockchains (if not cryptocurrency) but boy howdy he's not a fan of a lot of what's going on.

I'm going to dump random quotes to entice you into reading it. Yanis on things he learned from his time at Valve:

"Today, a decade later, it is clear that gaming communities like the one I studied at Valve have been operating as fully-fledged metaverses (to use Zuckerberg’s term). Gamers were drawn to them by the game but, once 'inside', they stayed to live out a large part of their life, making friends, producing goods for sale, consuming entertainment, debating, etc. Zuckerberg's ambition is to insert his billions of Facebook non-gamer users into a Steam-like digital social economy – complete with a top-down platform currency that he controls. How can I resist the parallelism with a digital fiefdom in which Zuckerberg dreams of being