it_wasnt_arson

A couple months old by now, but I still find this a fascinating case study. A good old-fashioned NFT grift, unmoored from time and washed ashore as a sad, solitary UZDoom pull request in the year of the Common Era two thousand twenty six. The honorable representative of "Next Gen Software UK" seems to have taken the rejection in stride and without comment, seemingly only attempting to upstream the NFT features to promote their own fork, ODOOM.

What's the "O" stand for? Open Advanced Secure Interoperable Scalable-System obviously. That's right, they're not just making a Metaverse like in Snow Crash, they're making the OASIS like in Ready Player One, by putting a shitty social overlay into some FOSS game engines. I'm too tired to come up with a clever torment nexus joke to put here. Anyway, web3 is passé now. Their interoperability layer is web4. Their social layer is web5. Loading a WAD presumably makes it web6, and from there we'll be on pace to hit the web* singularity by 2027. That's right, AI is here too!

Now, as someone astutely pointed out, you might think that tying the ability to mint NFTs to killing enemies in a notoriously moddable game would be bad for the whole artificial scarcity thing, but our friends at Next Gen have a solution: enterprise blockchain holonic braid AI! From what I can tell, this is a delicate prompt caressing technique to write out a bunch of GOFAI symbolic logic in markdown and then get an LLM to pretty please evaluate the fuzzy logic. That's right, the cyberdemons are going to prompt so hard they'll beat you at deathmatch. In a game famous for being played at the pace of an LLM API endpoint. Blockchain-based anticheat is left as an exercise for the reader.

Obviously, this is all bullshit. One look at their generically titled landing page makes the unimaginative grift clear. You buy a token to play, the tier of token you buy determines how many loot and "quest" reward NFTs you can mint in a week so you can corner the hypothetical market by preordering, and not only are they promising a roadmap, they're so gracious that if you pay for the top tier, they'll let you write the roadmap for them! Only 20 slots left! Buy now!

I know the standard NFT project like this is supposed to prey on people who want to join a fun discord server and/or know they're looking for the next bag holder to cash out, but it still surprises me that these devs think they can get something out of it this late to the party. Did their AI blockchain compliance automation thing fall through in the wake of the Delve scandal? Did they really spend a decade in the mines preparing their get-rich-quick scheme for launch and miss the boat? …Come to think of it, "10+ years" ago is around when the Ready Player One movie was announced. Are they just really, really genuine fans of Ernest Cline's Torment Nexus?

I don't know why I felt the need to write all this, but the economic, social, epistemological, and game design failures of this horseshit, and the amount of work people are willing to put into a Potemkin software project like this never fail to astound me. Twenty-twenty-six, everyone. The best part is, for anyone actually interested in alternating back and forth between playing Doom, Quake, and a bunch of other games connected by a social layer to complete shared tasks, Archipelago already exists and doesn't want you to buy their AI-extruded membership cards. Peace on Earth, gamers.