来源/ WorldEconomic Forum

编译/Ivans

随着游戏行业的去中心化，玩赚游戏可以将数字身份、资产和所有权带到玩家手中。这就是现代电子游戏可能引入新的范式，一种适合各种新兴的数字环境和价值创造的形式。这些游戏也在引领着物质世界和数字世界的日益融合。

本文是出自两位大学毕业生。你可能想象不到的是，他们支付学费的方式，一个走的是"常规"路线：学生贷款、暑期工和父母资助，另一个则是玩电子游戏。

早在电子竞技被广泛认可为一种职业之前，像《暗黑破坏神II》（2000年）或《Runescape》（2001年）这样流行的玩赚型PC游戏就已经创造了成熟的数字经济，其中最强玩家能够通过游戏来谋生。高盛银行前副总裁，《暗黑破坏神2》排名第一的电竞玩家MoritzBaier-Lentz，早期能够通过完成游戏中的挑战并将获得的奖励卖出换取真金白银来资助他的本科和研究生教育。就这一点而言，他比全球其他1300万活跃玩家都要成功。

然而，21世纪初是数字资产、虚拟所有权和在线身份的“狂野西部“时期，电子游戏市场和交易从未完全合法和安全，使这样的故事成为取巧的个人创业精神的案例研究，而不是可行的专业追求。

游戏业的巨大增长，建立在集中的价值体系之上

今时今日，全世界有近30亿人在玩电子游戏，而且围绕职业游戏有一整套基础设施，为顶级玩家创造了大量机会和财富。他们中的佼佼者被称为职业选手，作为受薪团队成员，在锦标赛中可以分享奖金，并可能签下赞助。而其他玩家则通过在Twitch或YouTube Gaming等收视平台上玩游戏来赚取自己的直播费用。

根据BITKRAFT风险投资公司的数据，电子游戏现在代表着一个3360亿美元的产业，涵盖软件、硬件和知识产权。随着游戏的发展，电子游戏已经成为世界上最大的媒体类别，超过了线性电视、点播娱乐、电影和音乐。重要的是，几乎所有基于游戏的经济活动都是集中的，使开发商和出版商有权控制游戏中发生的一切。这样做的商业理由是为了赚取从销售游戏内容、数字项目和订阅中产生的数十亿资金，但这也意味着，如果不走职业化道路，绝大多数玩家自己几乎没有分享价值的途径。

随着行业的发展，这种历史上的所有权和利润分享的保管模式一直存在，但随着所谓的"玩赚"游戏的到来，这种模式可能处于转型的边缘。玩赚游戏允许玩家 "真正 "赚取和拥有数字资产，然后他们可以在游戏之外自行出售。

玩赚模式可以把数字身份、资产和所有权给到玩家手中

如果个人要在数字环境中分配大量的时间、注意力和个人投资，那么建立一种对其数字存在和商品的持久性以及经济稳健性的信任是最重要的。早期的实施表明，这确实是可以通过区块链技术实现的，该技术使用密码学，可以确保数字信任和分散的价值存储。

区块链已经被应用于从金融到艺术的广泛领域，电子游戏也不例外。玩赚游戏依靠区块链技术，包括NFT的形式，作为创造价值的基础。NFT是对一个独特的、不可互换的数字资产的数字担保所有权要求。在实践中，NFT在虚拟世界中可以有多种形式：角色、物品、土地、装饰性的个性化功能，如数字服装等等。人们可以通过玩游戏玩得好，来 "赚取 "最有价值的物品，并可以按照自己的条件将它们卖给现实世界转换成金钱。

真正的创新在于这些数字项目的去中心化的完整性和安全性。它们首次超越传统的所有权、监护权、公司甚至政府的自由裁量权。举例来说，不再依赖出版商或其他第三方的许可或规则，游戏中的资源可以在游戏内部和外部的市场上自由销售。

最近，无数社区的例子涌现出来，强调了玩赚游戏在建立新经济方面的潜力。最值得注意的是，一款名为 "Axie Infinity "的电子游戏表明，这不仅仅是一个梦想。这款颇受欢迎的游戏，在几个月内从4000人推进到200万日活跃用户，在菲律宾和委内瑞拉特别受欢迎。对于像这些国家的玩家来说，他们在这个数字世界中能够赚取的收入远比他们当地的实体经济所能提供的要多得多。

此外，像Yield Guild Games这样的 "奖学金平台"，赋能并教育新兴经济体的玩家参与到玩赚游戏当中。目前已吸引了大量投资，在几个月内成为价值十亿美元的公司，在价值上超过许多最受欢迎的电子游戏。通过以这种方式使基于游戏的NFT市场全球化，玩赚游戏以及其周边平台如今就是一个无阻碍的商机和跨地域的择优参与范例。现在是2021年，似乎世界从未有过这么好的商机。

目前，值得注意的是，玩赚游戏并没有从本质上完全消除游戏中的中心化，它们仍然需要出版商的权威来定义、发行和约束最终作为NFT交易的资产。相反，玩赚游戏的最大前景在于其对数字资产的创造、所有权和交换市场的去中心化潜力，以及当这些市场与传统经济和法定货币相连接时产生的潜力，这可以允许玩家将其数字时间、努力和收入转换为现实世界中的可支配收入。

不过，迅速抓住机会的玩家已获得了巨大的经济回报。

对于玩家本身来说，玩赚模式可能代表了一种新的、灵活的赚钱方式。但除了财务和税收的问题外，它还反映了与数字经济相关的一些危险，比如滋生出大量的"打手服务"，有限的工作保障，公司和游戏打手之间不稳定的关系，以及缺乏社会安全网。鉴于自由职业者在创意经济中的比例已经过高，这些都将是政策制定者必须考虑的问题。

这只是一个开始：玩赚成为了元宇宙的招聘职位

虽然玩赚模式仍然是一个新兴市场，但它可以重新定义不仅仅是游戏领域。事实上，我们认为它有可能改变人们与金融机构、市场和政府等传统社会经济结构的互动方式和看法。这是因为游戏提供了一个自我主权的金融系统概念证明，一个开放的创造者经济，以及普遍的数字代表和所有权，这些都适合各种新兴的数字环境和价值创造形式。

事实上，玩赚游戏似乎正引领着一个更大的趋势：现实世界和数字世界的日益融合。随之而来的是传说中的"元宇宙"的出现，它既是近期学术辩论的中心，也是最活跃的企业议程内容，最突出的是Meta（即Facebook）。在NealStephenson 1992年的小说《雪崩》或《头号玩家》等电影的视觉印象的诱导下，大多数关于元宇宙的讨论都围绕着技术细节、功能属性，或以高保真3D和扩展现实头盔形式的终端用户实现。

但相反，元宇宙可能只是人类社会的一个时间点，在这个时间点上，数字身份和资产比它们的现实对应物更有意义。从这个角度来看，我们向元宇宙的过渡成为了技术和互联性的结果，是一种社会经济的转变。作为人类，我们重视物品和经验，我们生活在一个世界和一个时刻，这些物品已经被社会赋予了价值。元宇宙标志着数字资产、经验和关系被赋予比我们的现实环境更大的价值的时刻。

而对许多美国，委内瑞拉和菲律宾人而言，这种过渡可能已经开始。

以下为英文原文：

• Play-to-earn games could bring digital identity, assets, and ownership into players’ hands as the gaming industry is becoming decentralized.

• This is how modern video games may introduce new paradigms that lend themselves to a wide variety of emerging digital environments and forms of value creation.

• These games are also spearheading a recent development: the increasing convergence of the physical and digital worlds.

This article is written by two university graduates. Surprised? Didn’t think so. But what may be more intriguing is how we each paid our tuition. One followed a ‘conventional’ route: a combination of student loans, summer jobs and the good fortune of parental financial support. The other played video games.

Long before esports—the industry of competitive video gaming—was broadly recognized as a profession, popular play-to-earn PC games like ‘Diablo II’ (2000) or ‘Runescape’ (2001) created fully-fledged digital economies, in which the best players were able to make a living simply by being good at the game. Indeed, Moritz Baier-Lentz, one of your coauthors, was able to finance his undergraduate and graduate education by completing in game challenges and selling the resulting rewards for real money—at some point, more successfully than any of the other 13 million active players worldwide.

However, the early 2000s were a ‘Wild West’ of digital assets, virtual ownership, and online identity—and video game marketplaces and transactions were never fully legitimate and secure, making stories like this a case study in crafty individual entrepreneurialism more than a viable professional pursuit.

Enormous growth of gaming industry, built on centralized systems of value

Today, almost 3 billion people around the world play video games, and there is an entire infrastructure around professional gaming— one that has created significant opportunities and wealth for top players. The very best of them are considered athletes: employed as salaried team members, sharing in prize money at tournaments, and commanding lucrative sponsorship agreements. Others monetize live streams of themselves by playing games on viewership platforms like Twitch or YouTube Gaming.

Video games now represent a $336 billion industry, according to BITKRAFT Ventures, accounting for a wide spread of software, hardware, and intellectual property. As gaming has grown to become the world’s largest media category ahead of linear TV, on demand entertainment, film, and music, certain characteristics have developed with it. Importantly, almost all game based economic activity is centralized, giving developers and publishers the rights to everything going on within their games. The business case for this is to capture the billions of dollars generated from the sale of in game content, digital items, and subscriptions—but it also means that the vast majority of players themselves have few ways to share in the value without following the route of professionalization.

This historically custodial model of ownership and profitsharing has persisted as the industry has grown—but it might be on the cusp of transformation, with the arrival of so-called ‘play-to-earn’ games. This type of video game allows players to ‘truly’ earn and own digital assets that they can then sell outside of the game at their own discretion.

Play-to-earn could bring digital identity, assets, and ownership into players’ hands

If individuals are to allocate serious time, attention, and personal investments to digital environments, establishing trust in the durability of their digital presence and goods—as well as their economic robustness—is paramount. Early implementations show that this is indeed achievable with blockchain technology, which, using cryptography, can ensure digital trust and a decentralized storage of value.

Blockchain is already being applied to a broad range of sectors from finance to art—and video games are no exception. Play-to-earn games rely on blockchain technology, including in the form of non fungible tokens (or NFTs), as the foundation for value creation. An NFT is a digitally secured claim of ownership for a unique, non interchangeable digital asset. In practice, NFTs can take many shapes inside virtual worlds: characters, items, land, decorative personalization features such as digital clothing, and more. People ‘earn’ the most valuable items by playing the game very well, and can sell them for real-world money at their own terms.

The true innovation lies in the decentralized integrity and security of these digital items, which—for the first time—can transcend the traditional proprietary, custodial ownership and discretion of a company or even government. As an example, instead of relying on the permission or rules of publishers or other third parties, in game resources from play-to-earn games can be sold freely on marketplaces both inside and outside of the game.

Recently, countless examples of communities have sprung up, highlighting the potential of play-to-earn games in building a new economy. Most notably, a video game called ‘Axie Infinity’ shows that this is more than just a pipe dream. The popular play-to-earn environment, which advanced from 4,000 to 2 million daily active users within few months, has become especially popular in the Philippines and Venezuela. For players in countries like these in the Global South, the income they can earn inside this digital world is far more significant than what their local physical economy can offer.

In addition, ancillary ‘scholarship platforms’ like Yield Guild Games, which enable and educate players in emerging economies to participate in play-to-earn games, have attracted major investment and themselves become billion-dollar companies in a matter of months—eclipsing many of the most popular video games in value. By globalizing the market for game based NFTs in this way, play-to-earn games and their surrounding platforms are examples of frictionless economic opportunity and meritocratic participation across geographies. It’s 2021, and it seems that the world has never been flatter.

For now, it is worth noting that play-to-earn games do not inherently and fully eliminate the centralization found in games: they still require the authority of the publisher to define, issue and constrain the asset that eventually is traded as an NFT. Rather, the greatest promise of play-to-earn games is in their potential to decentralize marketplaces for the creation, ownership and exchange of digital assets, as well as the potential created when these marketplaces are connected to the traditional economy and fiat currencies—allowing players to transfer their digital time, effort and earnings into disposable income in the physical world.

Owning and participating in core pieces of these new worlds brings great financial returns to those who believed; many of whom will be from emerging markets who were quick to move on the opportunities available.

For the players themselves, the play-to-earn model may represent a new and flexible way to make money. But beyond questions around financial reporting and taxation, it also reflects some of the perils associated with the digital economy, which risks creating “humans as a service”: limited job security, precarious relationships between firms and employers, and a lack of social safety nets. Given that freelancers are already overrepresented in the creative economy, these will all be considerations that policymakers will have to take into account.

This is just the beginning: Play-to-earn gaming as the job board for the ‘metaverse’

While play-to-earn is still an emerging niche, it could redefine more than just the gaming landscape. In fact, we make the case that it has the potential to change how people interact with and perceive traditional socioeconomic structures like financial institutions, marketplaces, and governments. This is because play-to-earn games provide a proof of concept for a self-sovereign financial system, an open creator economy, and universal digital representation and ownership that lend themselves to a wide variety of emerging digital environments and forms of value creation.

In fact, it seems that play-to-earn games are spearheading a larger trend at play: the increasing convergence of the physical and digital worlds. And with that, the emergence of the legendary ‘metaverse’—which has been as much at the center to the recent academic debates as it has been the stuff of rejuvenated corporate agendas, most prominently that of Meta (née Facebook). Enticed by visual impressions drawn from Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel ‘Snow Crash’ or movies like ‘Ready Player One’, most discussions of the metaverse center around technical details, functional attributes, or end user implementations in the form of high fidelity 3D and extended reality headsets.

But instead, the metaverse may quite simply be the point in time for human society in which digital identity and assets are more meaningful than their physical counterparts. As metaverse startup Koji quick-wittedly points out, through this lens, our transition to the metaverse becomes a socioeconomic shift as a consequence of technology and connectedness. As humans, we value objects and experiences we live in a world and a moment in time in which those objects have been assigned value by society. The metaverse marks the moment in time in which digital assets, experiences and relationships are assigned an even bigger value than our physical surroundings.

And for many people—from the United States to Venezuela and the Philippines—this transition may have just begun.

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