I’ve been playing video games from Pong & Pac-Man through Skyrim & the newest MW2. I had a WoW obsession, the Dreamcast, N64, gameboys (color to advanced), the GameCube, Wii, PlayStation 1-4, first xbox-XS, the handhelds, & on and on the list goes.
Most of my life thus far gaming has been counter culture - you were thought to be a loser with no prospects & you certainly wouldn’t tell the woman you were dating you played. By the time I was an adult, esports were not a viable career path.
“Slowly then all at once” innit?
Getting started
I’ve been thinking about pfp’s and how lazy, yet necessary of an introduction they are to onchain culture (the real goal of NFTs we could argue).
Here are some questions worth asking:
- how do we ‘measure’ culture irl?
- how do we measure it ‘online’?
- if you could ‘own’ things online (NFTs) how much overlap would the measurements be for irl vs online?
- who creates culture?
- who is the custodian of culture after birth?
These questions don’t have one definitive answer, and they will morph the more we develop tech & our understanding of memeware (read more here).
But as things stand I feel that pfps are the equivalent of ‘Pong & Pac-Man’ for video games. There’s some excitement, a clear interest in the future development of it, but it’s heavily counter culture & it’ll look absolutely rudimentary in about 15-20 years.
Anecdote
I’ve been in the space daily for 2 yrs now. I’ve switched my pfp more times than I can count (a big no no apparently). I’ve owned BAYCs, Cool Cats, Toadz, Gutter Cats, MetaHeroes, and on and on the list goes. I can never stick to one of them for long. It just doesn’t sit right.
Now part of that is I’m quite chaotic and don’t like things being set in stone when it comes to others perception of me. The other insight though, the one that may be transferrable to the onchain culture conversation, is that why in the world are we using a 400 x 400 pixel placement to express ourselves in the newest development of decentralized technology?
It’s boring quite honestly. At first it’s exhilarating don’t get me wrong. But when I dive deeper into it, the part that was exciting was adorning the new pfp and joining in the degen party with the others in that community (like the famous UNC meme).
So through this incredibly small data set I wonder if pfps are only hot because it’s really all we have at the moment to express these new cultures. And if we’re being honest, the culture we were expressing was traders/gamblers getting rich off risky bets.
Ok??
I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with that either. I just believe it’s boring. Think of 2030.
- major corps use NFTs daily
- musicians sell tickets as NFTs
- cryptoart is pop culture
- education & employment leverage blockchains
Will a profile picture that was meant for your Twitter avatar really be the ‘it’ thing? I just find that hard to believe. But I could very well be wrong.
The good news if I’m anywhere in the ball park is that we are still incredibly early and there’s tons of opportunity to build culture or support others as they build it.
It seems more than coincidence that the same kids who grew up gaming are now the adults who are building this onchain world. Maybe this time we won’t let the ‘authorities’ tell us there’s no future in it & we’ll experiment until we get what we want.