Mark Zuckerberg cast as web3 supervillain in forthcoming game
My Pet Hooligan is a desktop PvP video game built in Unreal Engine 5.0. In this play-to-earn game, Hooligans earn $karrots and raise hell in the streets, fighting against Meta Zuck Bot to end the centralized metaverse.
I've never heard about this project, but if I know one thing:
People absolutely hate on Mark Zuckerberg to no end.
It's not that hard to see why but, damn.
This is brutal!
Metazuckbot runs the in-game ZuckCorp, where the thuggish but cute bunny protagonists from the My Pet Hooligan NFT collection were previously imprisoned and forced to mine Karrot. Now free, they roam the city alongside the villain’s former slaves, ZuckBots, which were also released as an NFT collection earlier this week.
Wow... lol
Do I think it will be a good game? I mean... probably not. There's really no way to set up play to earn games in this matter where players simply earn money just for playing the game. Bots run rampant within gaming ecosystems even when there are no direct financial incentives. Create an actual incentive for people to cheat, and before you know it the entire economy has been exploited to the maximum by Sybil attack.
I believe there are many solutions to this, but I've never seen a game even attempt to implement them. The first solution is a small player-base by design. Small community, invite only. The community regulates themselves and makes sure no one is cheating.
Something like this would be very hard (if not impossible) to do on certain genres of games like first person shooters. Some people get really good at FPS and get accused of cheating on a daily basis even if they aren't. If winning and losing comes down to an instant headshot, that headshot is reported by the client. Trusting the client is not an option, especially when that client is being rewarded with crypto.
The ultimate solution to Sybil attack is to not reward users for simply interacting with the product, but actually building something that has value. "Quality Content" and whathaveyou. Of course who determines what is quality and what is not is up for debate, as there are many different implementations for this as well.
The NFT launch came the same day as Meta’s dismal Q3 earnings announcement.
Excellent timing!
“We’re always exploring what makes us laugh and what we would like to see in a game. With the Zuckbot-related lore, it was mainly inspired from the fact that big corporations are mining our data and making the users the prey for them to profit off of. We were basically tapping into the ethos of what we see happening around us,” said COO and producer Luke Paglia.
Narrative Matters
While the chance that this project is a legitimate community owned endeavor seems to be quite small: telling a story matters. What people believe matters. The narrative of this story is quite simple: we can't trust big tech and we eventually need to move against it and support the underlying communities over their supposed overlords. Love to see it, even if the opening iterations happen to fail.
Conclusion
I can't imagine I'll have anything to do with this game My Pet Hooligan, but it's still fun to see indie game developers flipping the bird to big tech. It's quite easy to rally a community around hating on Mark Zuckerberg; after all he is quite an easy target to dislike. The real trick will be building something that has real value rather than being a novelty designed to siphon money from community to the dev team's pockets. It's supposed to be the other way around. Devs are supposed to build value within the community and participate directly inside of them as key players in the fight against tyranny. One day.
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