On Friday August 27th Vine-founder Dom Hofmann released Loot for Adventurers, an NFT collection featuring 8 RPG gaming gear items. No graphics, simply a black image with 8 lines of text on it, and each line of text stored as metadata on the Ethereum blockchain. According to data from DappRadar Loot for Adventurers and its derivates have been responsible for more than $190 million in just one week, but what does this even mean for blockchain gaming?
You noticed the word derivates in the introduction? Even though Loot for Adventurers has been the biggest story so far, its open nature spawned a whole lot of side projects. See, Loot for Adventurers literally gives you 8 randomized items that you might use in a Dungeon & Dragons table top role playing game. Some items are rare, perhaps creating value. Some players might form a guild around a certain type of item, and thus creating value. Yet, these lines of text represent just items. The community has now created all kinds of side projects that create a universe. Now there are realms, treasures, enemies, familiars, mounts, planets, quests, companions, encounters and so on.
It’s a bit complex to say that I know where this will go, because I simply don’t know. Seeing that the original Loot items are selling for thousands of dollars, we could argue that these NFTs could spawn a series of generative avatar collections. Perhaps certain games will tap into these items, simply to include those users and their wealthy wallets. Players are right now forming DAOs, so perhaps we’ll see airdrops for certain bag holders, content access or other benefits.
Metadata as a framework for building community
However, now I’m missing out on the role playing game. Loot is, well, a set of loot items, or at least the text that describes them. What we’re waiting for, is for someone to create a table-top-inspired role playing game that taps into that. I also guess that the game developer would pick a couple more of the side projects, simply to deepen its community and create a framework for their fictional world. So we might have Loot, Characters, Goes, Mounts and Familiars all in one package as a framework for someone who’s going to make a role playing game on the blockchain. This way certain DAOs and communities will be included. We can imagine The Six Dragons or Mirandus to include a certain loot item mention in the Loot NFT collection, tapping into a strong community.
Now you might wonder, where is the game? Where’s the role playing game that will really use these assets? What if, and this is just hypothetical, we are already playing it? Through Loot and its derivatives we’ve invested in virtual goods, virtual worlds or virtual groups of people. These NFTs bind people to a group, and when they become organized to some extend that group becomes valuable. We are already playing the game.
Look at what’s happening around the Loot Project right now. First of all there’s a wide variety of tools available to dive deeper into the on-chain data, in addition several guilds have been established. For example, there’s the Dragon Guild for those who have dragon loot, and there’s the Katana Garden for – you guessed it – those with a katana. If you want to join one of those guild, there are a variety of market trackers allowing you to filter easily through all NFTs.
Connecting to the Avatar NFT trend
Unless you’re new to the space than you know that avatar NFTs are among the most wanted projects right now. Projects like CryptoPunks, Bored Apes, and many others have seen over $700 million in trading volume in the past week. What’s interesting about Loot is that it basically taps into exactly that avatar NFT trend. Instead of showing the avatar, it describes the avatar. As a result we can create the same avatar in a variety of styles. On a technical level it is what a metaverse passport will become. It’s a description of you as a person, but the visual appearance can alter greatly. This would all depend on the virtual world you’re in.
At the moment there are almost 30 NFT collections that tap into the hype of Loot. But only a few allow us, others, developers, software builders, avatar creators, to interpret you as an individual in the metaverse. If you’re into fantasy than Loot would be the best pick, but Gears offers the same for cyberpunk designs. On top of that you can have Extension Loot, or xLoot. Perhaps we can add Characters to that as well. Those are all you really need to get a description of your metaverse avatar. He will have a Wizard Hat or a Cyborg Eye. However, dependent on the virtual world it will show as an animal character or a voxel person.
It will be interesting to see if Loot for Adventurers, Gears and xLoot will get any follow-up products. Of course I don’t mean derivates, but I’m more thinking about implementations into existing games, new games etc. We’ll see, and as trading is slowing down, we can sure say it has been a couple of exciting days!
