Games should promote “play and earn” instead of “play to earn”

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There is probably no piece of entertainment that has best captured our present and future dystopian times than Charlie Brooker’s television series Black Mirror, and there may be no better (and more cynical) vision of what the current future of gaming could look like than in the series’ second episode, “Fifteen Million Merits.” If you don’t recall, in that episode, society was driven by a “merits”-based currency, which people earned by riding stationary bicycles. They could then use these credits to buy food, virtual accessories, and virtual avatars, or as a way to skip through the mandatory advertising present in the giant video spaces that dominated their living spaces. 

Sound familiar? Ever since going online at about the same time payment processing itself went online, gaming has walked hand-in-hand with similar virtual currencies and rewards. MMOs in the mid-2000s had virtual treasure chests that would soon give way to often divisive loot boxes in games like World of Warcraft. It didn’t take long for loot farmers to game the virtual rewards systems of these MMOs in a scheme that resembled a digital sweatshop.

There now exists a bridge between fiat currency and the items and currency of gaming and virtual worlds that makes the digital sweatshops of the MMO boom look like child’s play and brings us closer to that world ofBlack Mirror where gamers are pushed into accruing as many “merits” as possible rather than, well, gaming. That is a very dangerous crossroads.

The potential for such shenanigans has only grown with the implementation of gaming tokens and NFTs that can be sold for popular cryptocurrencies or