How the Metaverse Could Be a Game-Changer for NFT Gaming

The tale is a broad allegory for the power of decentralization. If a game skill or item was an immutable blockchain token – what we would now call a non-fungible token (NFT) ­– a company like Blizzard Entertainment couldn’t nerf, or weaken, your Siphon Life even if it wanted to. This suggests a further possibility: Because non-fungible tokens live on public blockchains, they can be read by any game’s software. If Siphon Life was an NFT that lived on a public blockchain, there was a possible future in which you could use it not just in World of Warcraft but in Assassin’s Creed or Uncharted or, who knows, Tetris.

Vitalik would have been about 16 at the time this happened, and the story is more of a winking goof (“I cried myself to sleep”?) than a serious design proposal. But it has been taken quite literally by some as a call for games built using immutable tokens to represent skills or equipment. Several rough World of Warcraft equivalents proposed to do exactly that during the 2017-2018 initial coin offering bubble, selling things like virtual swords and armor before even building the game.

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