Fancies explained

Converting symbolic capital into NFTs

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7557/23.6666

Keywords:

Blockchain, NFTs, artificial scarcity, gaming communities, storytelling, failed games

Abstract

The concept of symbolic capital, introduced by Pierre Bourdieu (1986), has been applied to explain the circulation of value between game communities and the industry. The bottom-up approach can be found in the studies of so-called “gaming capital” accumulated by gamers (Consalvo, 2009), while the top-down approach focuses on the agents who hold the most power in the gaming industry (Nichols, 2013). These perspectives may require reconfiguration today: since the end of the 2010s, traditional power relations have been contested by ‘decentralized’ gaming that uses blockchain technologies and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Their early adopters suggest that NFTs may disrupt traditional circulation of value to the benefit of players as opposed to major corporations. Many gamers, however, vehemently oppose NFTs in games. By combining these top-down and the bottom-up approaches, this article explains that the specific symbolic gaming capital remains systematically underappreciated in blockchain gaming, which operates along different vectors of power. To support my argument, I turn to the longest-running blockchain-based game CryptoKitties (Axiom Zen, 2017), and analyze the elements of the role-playing genre that appeared in the game during the collective process of continuous development. In the first case, these elements (‘fancies’) were added by the developers of the game, and in the second case, an RPG-like extension emerged as one of its fan spin-offs (KotoWars). I conclude that symbolic capital is community-specific in the case of blockchain gaming. It is only available to those who already possess considerable symbolic, and, much more importantly, financial capital within the crypto community.

References

Almohsen, H. A., Banaweer, G. M., & Alharthi, S. A. (2022). Players trust and awareness of blockchain gaming and NFTs. In Graphics Interface. https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.22224.99844

Animoca Brands. (2022, March 15). F1® Delta Time to cease operations; announces rewards for supporters. Animoca Brands [blog]. https://www.animocabrands.com/f1-delta-time-to-cease-operations-announces-rewards-for-supporters

Arnedo-Moreno, J., & Garcia-Font, V. (2022). Research opportunities in the application of blockchain in video games: A scoping review. In 2022 IEEE International Conference on Omni-Layer Intelligent Systems (COINS), 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1109/COINS54846.2022.9854939 https://doi.org/10.1109/COINS54846.2022.9854939

Axie Infinity. (2020). Official Axie Infinity whitepaper. https://whitepaper.axieinfinity.com/

Axiom Zen. (2017). CryptoKitties [Web]. Dapper Labs. https://www.cryptokitties.co/

Blockade Games. (2022). Neon district [Web]. https://portal.neondistrict.io

Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511812507

Bourdieu, P. (1986). The forms of capital. In J. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education (pp. 241–258). Greenwood.

Bourdieu, P. (1987). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. Harvard University Press.

Bourdieu, P. (1990). In other words: Essays toward a reflexive sociology. Stanford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781503621558

Bourdieu, P. (2018). Social space and the genesis of appropriated physical space. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 42(1), 106–114. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12534 https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12534

Calvão, F. (2019). Crypto-miners: Digital labor and the power of blockchain technology. Economic Anthropology, 6(1), 123–134. https://doi.org/10.1002/sea2.12136 https://doi.org/10.1002/sea2.12136

Castronova, E. (2005). Synthetic worlds: The business and culture of online games. University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226096315.001.0001

Castronova, E. (2008). Exodus to the virtual world: How online fun is changing reality. Palgrave Macmillan.

Castronova, E. (2020). Players for hire: Games and the future of low-skill work. In A. Larsson & R. Teigland (Eds.), The digital transformation of labor: Automation, the gig economy and welfare (pp. 200–212). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429317866-12

Chen, J.-T. (2020). Blockchain and the feature of game development. Frontier Computing: Theory, Technologies and Applications (FC 2019), 1797–1802. Springer Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3250-4 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3250-4_239

Coffeezilla, (Director). (2022, December 17). Investigating Logan Paul’s biggest scam [video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=386p68_lDHA

CoinGecko. (2019). Love what Kotowars is building [Forum discussion]. Reddit. www.reddit.com/r/KotoWars/comments/axwd1o/love_what_kotowars_is_building/

CoinGecko. (2021). CoinGecko [Website]. https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/bit-coin

Consalvo, M. (2009). Cheating: Gaining advantage in videogames. MIT Press.

CryptoKitties. (2018a). CryptoKitties: Collectible and breedable cats empowered by blockchain technology: White papurr [White paper]. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sooeAaJHzhw_XhFGMJp3VNcQoM43byS

CryptoKitties. (2018b, May 2). KnightKitty rides again. CryptoKitties Official Blog. https://medium.com/cryptokitties/knightkitty-rides-again-32fbbdd87989

CryptoKitties. (2018b, November 16). What can I do with my CryptoKitty? CryptoKitties Official Blog. https://medium.com/cryptokitties/when-you-purchase-a-cryptokitty-you-own-both-the-kitty-and-its-art-8f8f2a98c3d1

CryptoKitties. (2018c, July 31). What can you do with your CryptoKitties? CryptoKitties Official Blog. https://medium.com/cryptokitties/what-can-you-do-with-your-cryptokitties-e5f472f65c67

CryptoKitties. (2019a, February 7). How to breed Page and other Fancy friends. CryptoKitties Official Blog. https://www.cryptokitties.co/blog/how-to-breed-page-and-other-fancy-friends

CryptoKitties. (2019b, September 16). A new fancy cat has joined the Round Table of Catelot. CryptoKitties Official Blog. https://www.cryptokitties.co/blog/a-new-fancy-cat-has-joined-the-round-table-of-catelot

CryptoKitties. (2022). CryptoKitties catalogue – Fancy Kitties. https://www.cryptokitties.co/catalogue/fancies

DACOCO. (2021). AlienWorlds [Web]. https://alienworlds.io/

Dapper Labs. (2019, February 12). Final results from the Gods Unchained and CryptoKitties partnership. Dapper Labs. https://medium.com/dapperlabs/final-results-from-the-gods-unchained-and-cryptokitties-partnership-b0cd7e317a25

Dapper Labs. n.d. CryptoKitties: Fancy cats - Page’s gang. Dribbble. Accessed 22 March 2022 from https://dribbble.com/shots/9884654-CryptoKitties-Fancy-Cats-Page-s-Gang

Ducuing, C. (2019). How to make sure my Cryptokitties are here forever? The complementary roles of the blockchain and the law to bring trust. European Journal of Risk Regulation, 10(2). https://doi.org/10.1017/err.2019.39 https://doi.org/10.1017/err.2019.39

Dutton, N., & Consalvo, M. (2006). Game analysis: Developing a methodological toolkit for the qualitative study of games. Game Studies, 6(1). http://gamestudies.org/0601/articles/consalvo_dutton

Gechev, V. (2022). The strengthening case to prohibit cryptocurrencies by law. SSRN. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4203937 https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4203937

Hunter, D., & Lastowka, F.G. (2004). Amateur-to-amateur. William and Mary Law Review, 46(3), 951–1030. https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmlr/vol46/iss3/3/

Joseph, D. J. (2018). The discourse of digital dispossession: Paid modifications and community crisis on Steam. Games and Culture, 13(7), 690–707. https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412018756488 https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412018756488

Kirkpatrick, G. (2012). Constitutive tensions of gaming’s field: UK gaming magazines and the formation of gaming culture 1981–1995. Game Studies, 12(1). http://gamestudies.org/1201/articles/kirkpatrick

KittyExplorer. (2021). Kitty explorer [Website]. http://www.kittyexplorer.com/

KittyHelper. (2022). KittyHelper [Website]. https://kittyhelper.co/

KotoBaza. (2022a). All Fancies in CryptoKitties cryptocollectible Game. KotoBaza - Latest News from the CryptoKitties. https://ck.kotobaza.co/cryptokitties-fancies/

KotoBaza. (2022b). KotoBaza. KotoBaza - Latest News from the CryptoKitties [Website]. https://ck.kotobaza.co/

KotoBaza. (2022c). Timeline of all Cattributes and Fancies in CryptoKitties. KotoBa-za - Latest News from the CryptoKitties [Website]. https://blog.kotobaza.co/timeline/

KotoWars. (2019a, January 8). Kotowars alpha tokens (KAT) for early adopters. Medium. https://medium.com/@kotowars/kotowars-alpha-tokens-for-early-adopters-dd6d55d559eb

KotoWars. (2019b, January 10). How Kotowars interprets the CryptoKitties NFTs. Medium. https://medium.com/@kotowars/how-kotowars-interprets-the-cryptokitties-nfts-dcd1234f9861

KotoWars. n.d. CryptoKitties in KotoWars. KotoWars - Play with Your Cryptokitties. Accessed 21 March 2022 from https://kotowars.com/cryptokitties/

Kraft, D. (2019). Game-theoretic randomness for blockchain games. ArXiv. http://arxiv.org/abs/1901.06285

Lapointe, C., & Fishbane, L. (2019). The blockchain ethical design framework. Innovations: Technology, Governance, Globalization, 12(3–4), 50–71. https://doi.org/10.1162/inov_a_00275 https://doi.org/10.1162/inov_a_00275

Lee, J., Yoo, B., & Jang, M. (2019). Is a blockchain-based game a game for fun, or is it a tool for speculation? An empirical analysis of player behavior in Crypokitties. WEB 2018: The Ecosystem of E-Business: Technologies, Stakeholders, and Connections, 141–148. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22784-5_14 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22784-5_14

Lee, S., Lee, J., & Lee, Y. (2022). Dissecting the Terra-LUNA crash: Evidence from the spillover effect and information flow. Finance Research Letters, 53. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.frl.2022.103590 https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4250029

Lehdonvirta, V., & Castronova, E. (2014). Virtual economies: Design and analysis. MIT Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt9qf5t6 https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9525.001.0001

Lehtonen, M. J., Vesa, M., & Harviainen, J. T. (2022). Games-as-a-disservice: Emergent value co-destruction in platform business models. Journal of Business Research, 141, 564–574. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2021.11.055 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2021.11.055

Low, K. F. K., & Mik, E. (2020). Pause the blockchain legal revolution. International and Comparative Law Quarterly, 69(1), 135–175. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020589319000502 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020589319000502

Matsuda, Y. (2022). A New Year’s Letter from the President. SQUARE ENIX HOLDINGS News. https://www.hd.square-enix.com/eng/news/2022/html/a_new_years_letter_from_the_president_2.html

Matsuda, Y. (2023). A New Year’s Letter from the President. SQUARE ENIX HOLD-INGS News. https://www.hd.square-enix.com/eng/news/2023/html/a_new_years_letter_from_the_president_3.html

Min, T., Wang, H., Guo, Y., & Cai, W. (2019). Blockchain games: A survey. 2019 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG), 1–8. https://doi.org/10/ggjkc9 https://doi.org/10.1109/CIG.2019.8848111

Muse. (2020, September 1). Muse CryptoKitties. Muse Official Website. https://www.muse.mu/news/cryptokitties-322231

Nichols, R. (2013). Bourdieu’s Forms of Capital and Video Game Production. In J. C. Thompson & M. A. Ouellette (Eds.), The Game Culture Reader (pp. 30–46). Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Paul, C. A. (2018). The toxic meritocracy of video games: Why gaming culture is the worst. University of Minnesota Press. https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctt2204rbz

Pérez Latorre, Ó. (2016). Indie or mainstream? Tensions and nuances between the alternative and the mainstream in indie games. Anàlisi, 54, 15–30. https://doi.org/10.7238/a.v0i54.2818 https://doi.org/10.7238/a.v0i54.2818

Pfeiffer, A., Kriglstein, S., & Wernbacher, T. (2020). Blockchain technologies and games: A proper match? International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games. ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3402942.3402996 https://doi.org/10.1145/3402942.3402996

Popper, N. (2021, February 8). Elon Musk and Snoop Dogg push cryptocurrencies to record highs. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/08/technology/dogecoin-bitcoin-elon-musk-snoop-dogg.html

Postigo, H. (2003). From Pong to Planet Quake: Post-industrial transitions from leisure to work. Information, Communication & Society, 6(4), 593–607. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118032000163277 https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118032000163277

Sako, K., Matsuo, S., & Meier, S. (2021). Fairness in ERC token markets: A case study of CryptoKitties. Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2021 International Workshops, 595–610. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-63958-0_42 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-63958-0_42

Scholten, O. J., Hughes, N., Deterding, S., Drachen, A., Walker, J.A., & Zendle, D. (2019). Ethereum crypto-games: Mechanics, prevalence, and gambling similarities. Proceedings of the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play, 379–389. ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3311350.3347178 https://doi.org/10.1145/3311350.3347178

Serada, A. (2020). Why is CryptoKitties (not) gambling? FDG ’20: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games. ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3402942.3402985 https://doi.org/10.1145/3402942.3402985

Serada, A. (2021). Vintage CryptoKitties and the quest for authenticity. Proceedings of IEEE CoG. IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/CoG52621.2021.9619106 https://doi.org/10.1109/CoG52621.2021.9619106

Serada, A. (2023a). A list of ‘Fancy’ CryptoKitty tokens categorized by themes and possible story lines [Dataset]. ResearchGate. https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.307-41.60645

Serada, A. (2023b). Effect of artificial scarcity on value of ‘fancy’ CryptoKitties [Dataset]. ResearchGate. https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.30274.25283

Serada, A., Sihvonen, T., & Harviainen, J. T. (2021). CryptoKitties and the new ludic economy: How blockchain introduces value, ownership, and scarcity in digital gaming. Games and Culture, 16(4), 457–480. https://doi.org/10.1177/15554120-19898305 https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412019898305

da Silva, I. R. R., & Omar, N. (2021). Real and virtual token economy applied to games: A comparative study between cryptocurrencies. In K. Arai (Ed.), Intelligent Computing: Proceedings of the 2021 Computing Conference, Volume 2 (pp. 869–880). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80126-7_61 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80126-7_61

Strehle, E. & Ante, L. (2020). Exclusive mining of blockchain transactions. Scientific Reports 2020 – Conference Proceedings of the Scientific Track of the Blockchain Autumn School 2020, 87–95. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3686529

Tjahyana, L. J. (2022). Crisis response strategies during cryptocurrency crash: A netnographic studies of Lunatics Community. Petra International Journal of Business Studies, 5(2), 145–154. https://doi.org/10.9744/ijbs.5.2.145-154 https://doi.org/10.9744/ijbs.5.2.145-154

Valve. (1998). Half-Life [PC]. Sierra Studios.

Valve & Hidden Path Entertainment. (2012). Counter-Strike: Global Offensive [PC]. Valve.

Valve & Turtle Rock Studios. (2004). Counter-Strike: Source [PC]. Valve.

Wales, M. (2023, January 20). Wizards of the Coast apologises for Dungeons & Dragons Open Gaming License fiasco. Eurogamer. https://www.eurogamer.net/wizards-of-the-coast-apologises-for-dungeons-dragons-open-gaming-license-fiasco

Wilmoth, J. (2018, May 24). CryptoKitties quietly suspends ‘CurryKitties’ promotion. CCN. https://www.ccn.com/cryptokitties-quietly-suspends-currykitties-promotion/

Zagal, J. P. & Björk, S. (2018). Game design and role-playing games. In S. Deterding & J. Zagal (Eds.), Role-Playing Game Studies: Transmedia Foundations, 323–336. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315637532-18

Downloads

Published

2023-12-14

How to Cite

Serada, A. (2023) “Fancies explained: Converting symbolic capital into NFTs”, Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture, 14(1), pp. 55–79. doi: 10.7557/23.6666.