We're All Professional Gamers Now... The Least Bubbly Part of the NFT Bubble

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What if you made 3% of your income from video games?

You would not change your lifestyle over it. Most people wouldn't see 3% as enough income to justify dreams of a new career. Besides, most people don't want to be professional gamers.

Still, you wouldn't say no, right? An extra $300, $1000, $5000, whatever 3% means to you, you wouldn't say no.

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Time Spent Gaming vs. Income Earned

Hobbyist gamers might spend anywhere from 5 to 30 hours a week playing games. They'll spend some extra time engaging with the hobby through live streams and YouTube content. Many people use gaming as the "second monitor" theme of choice, always making room on the screen for a muted feed of a top player winning games.

Right now these games offer no income. You can have the best loot of all time in World of Warcraft, but there's no way (without breaking TOS) to earn money from those items. You only can derive clout and perhaps a gameplay advantage from these items.

NFTs are the counter-example. Imagine someone playing Splinterlands for 10 hours a week. Rather than spending $60 to buy WoW, they spend that money on some initial cards to spruce up their collection. Then they just play, clearing daily quests and earning twice-a-month seasonal reward chests.

This activity builds real value. The player may hold their collection for decades, only to sell valuable old cards when the time comes to fund college educations or equivalent opportunities for children or grandchildren. Upon one's death, their NFT collection might be passed down or liquidated to provide funds for the next generations of the family. All this coming not from an investment plan, mind you, but from a video game hobby.

Normalized Monetization = Accruing Value for Humanity

Now imagine this across all fields... a person who does their best work, engaging in various hobbies and pursuits across a lifetime. Not all of them will succeed. Yet, if the person's life adds up to 10 music albums, a dozen video game NFT item collections, a few visual art galleries worth of paintings, and perhaps a lifetime's worth of Hive blogs, of musings and journals to document a life well lived -- 100 years of creativity for personal growth can turn into a lifetime's worth of cryptocurrency value.

After all, robots will continue to replace basic human jobs. Stocking shelves and scanning items at the cash register will no longer be an activity that exists for humans to spend time on. The notion of work will change.

It won't be evenly distributed at first. We already live in a world where, for better or worse, some are born into significantly more comfortable circumstances than others. All that stuff still exists, and this is going to take generations. But, clearly, if the broad consensus of where technology is heading comes true, then repetitive tasks that just have to get done will be done by robots. Eventually, most of the jobs stop needing to be done by people.

And, leaving aside issues of AI/conscious machines, the robots will not get paid. So how do we divy up the money?

Universal Basic Income via a centralized government is OK, maybe, with extreme checks and balances... imo decentralized cryptocurrency systems are probably a lot better for divying up the value.

We pay people to pay video games. And to make music. And to paint, to write, to review whiskey and to post photos of the beach in a beautiful location. What we think of today as "content creation" will come to be a large part of what humans do for work in a post-scarcity world. After all, content creation is creativity combined with storytelling... and THAT, above all else, is uniquely human.