Game developer Mark Venturelli received a spirited ovation at Brazil's International Games Festival on Friday after he surprised the audience for his "Future of Game Design" talk with a new title: "Why NFTs are a nightmare." It was a loud statement against blockchain's push into gaming, one of the most divisive trends this year. The festival's list of 2022 sponsors include several NFT and blockchain companies and the festival's programming included panels from those sponsors, such as Web3 and the New Generation of Games.
Who is best known for the game Chroma Squad, didn't just push back against those talks by calling NFTs a nightmare: He argued in detail that they're bad for gaming and run directly counter to his vision for the future of game design.
In a follow-up interview with PC Gamer, Venturelli said the event's blockchain sponsors needed "to buy their relevance, because they're not relevant.
"Before a recording was even available, Venturelli's talk went viral thanks to a tweet opens in new tab describing the moment he announced its real name and the applause that followed his talk. "It was a bit of a gimmick," Venturelli admits. I start, 'Hey, this talk is about the future of gaming'. And then I start talking about it, and I say, 'Well, actually, fooled you!' This talk is not about the future of game design, because I start talking about all the trends that I've seen in my 15 years in the industry, and now we have new trends, let's talk about them. That's when I scratch the name of the talk and say, Why NFTs are a nightmare.
The cheeky title reveal may have been a surprise for the audience, but Venturelli made sure to clear it with the festival's organizers beforehand. Controversial as his talk was clearly going to be, the BIG organizers made no moves to censor the talk or prevent him from having his say, although that doesn't mean it was popular with some of BIG's 'Web3' sponsors. BIG had not yet provided an official statement on the talk as of press time, though PC Gamer was told one will be provided on Monday.
I've heard that the sponsors got really mad, Venturelli says. "They tried to break into the talk while I was talking, but the organization would not let them. That doesn't surprise me, because the organization, not at a single point did they censor me, did they stop me from putting what I wanted on the slides. I gave them access to the slides before the talk. There was never any kind of intention on their side to shut me up or anything like that.
"One early criticism of NFTs and other uses of the blockchain was the environmental cost of their energy inefficiency. In its critique of Ubisoft's plan called the blockchain "a useless, costly, ecologically mortifying technology." NFT projects in particular quickly became savvy enough to use phrases like "environment-friendly technology" in their press releases, but none of them grapple with the deeper criticisms of their ideas. That's what Venturelli zeroed in on in his talk and in our follow-up interview.
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