1997, THE BAY AREA
My future wife tiptoed into the family room at midnight after everyone had gone to bed to fire up the 28.8 Kbps modem, courtesy of AOL. Still busy signals, damn it! She picked a different phone number and finally broke through after the device squawked out its bizarre ping-static-groan now characteristic of the Matrix. Logged in to Gemstone III, a text-based MMORPG, she elevated her Oregon-Trail-home-row-typing-class skills to 100+ wpm, attacking rats in caverns. About a month later, her family got a big surprise- a $2600 bill. Apparently, using those alternative phone numbers had per-minute costs associated to them even though they were in the same area code. It was an expensive typing lesson, and she got her first job shortly thereafter.
2000, CALGARY, ALBERTA
I knocked on the door with my boot while struggling to keep my grip on the bulky white box I’d lugged up the sidewalk. One of my buddies swung the door open and headed back to the kitchen for a beer as I navigated my steps over crossover cables. Connecting with switches and hubs, we tethered together in our valiant effort to defeat latency with a homegrown Local Area Network- or LAN- party.
Each with our own monitors, keyboards, mice and custom-built towers sharing a broadband connection on a server we could see with our own eyes, in some dude’s basement. Canada got broadband before the US, so we’d slay in Counter-Strike (as long as we didn’t run into anyone playing on a faster connection). Though largely mapped out, this multiplayer online game included some early “wallpaper” like the legendary OMG Spoon cat- but there wasn’t much personalization or role-playing. The game itself was a mod of Half-Life- created by Gooseman and associates, later to be owned and licensed by Valve, who saw the value of the extremely popular online community.
TODAY, EVERYWHERE
Fast-forward to the Sandbox Metaverse, where players can create their own games, OWN, build, rent and profit off of pieces of the game, completely alter and edit their realms, earn digital ERC-20 tokens called $SAND, and engage in an ever-evolving, interactive world.
SHARED CREATION, VOXELS & EQUAL-ACCESS ANIMATION
We’ve all scoured virtual worlds looking for health-boosting kits, tearing open crates to review ammo or plucking special weapons off some poor sap’s digital corpse. But have you ever wanted to create your own, bad-ass fiery sword or some other unique item that no one else has? In the past, unless you were a game designer, there wasn’t much you could do to make those dreams reality. Now, with VoxEdit, you can download the software for free that allows you to create your own items and animate them- without special coding skills. Oh, and you can sell them in their marketplace, or resell NFTs you acquire for more than you bought them for in the first place. Those games they help you create with their tools? You can monetize those too.
It almost boggles the mind that someone in the gaming industry would be willing to let gamers create components, let alone allow them to own those items, and to make and keep profits associated with them. If the spirit of this intrigues you but you don’t know much about it, start researching the DEFI movement as a whole- these democratic environments have unlimited possibilities in our future.
You may ask yourself, how did I get here? Younger gamers may see Sandbox’s pixelated style as quaint, but that was pretty snazzy back when our version of $SAND tokens were endless quarters into Donkey Kong at the arcade. It was the evolution of two key aspects that helped us arrive at this fascinating point: blockchain technology and gaming philosophy.
BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY
Technology itself has evolved so far beyond the days of LAN parties, programmers have found a way to explore strange new worlds by boldly going where gaming had never gone before- the blockchain. This decentralized system shares the DNA of early MMORPGS- as servers worldwide participate to make it possible- but like Pichu evolving into Raichu, it does so much more. Digital assets within Sandbox are Non-Fungible Tokens, or NFTs, that are monetized and retain their value. Real dollars can be turned into $SAND tokens, the currency of the game, which are used to buy land or game components. Unlike your standard mobile game with those “in-app purchases”, that money can come back out of Sandbox too- as profit.
GAMING PHILOSOPHY
Even with the existence of blockchain and its application in gaming, Sandbox itself is also built upon a foundation of shared creation — a gaming philosophy that may have changed even more than technology over the past few decades. Games were originally delivered purely as entertainment, with levels that played the same way every time- heck, we couldn’t even save! A few years later, The Sims showed up on PC and console, giving players the chance to “play god” and watch their characters’ lives unfold.
The Half-Life engine (which was actually a heavily modded version of Quake) made it possible for people who could code to begin editing parts of the game in a more detailed way. Valve Co-Founder Gabe Newell said the team aimed to create an immersive world rather than a “shooting gallery”, but it was still very scripted.
But the currency leap started with Second Life- in which Linden Dollars were used in-game, but jumped the gap to the real world when players gained the capability to buy Linden Dollars with US Dollars. At its height, over $12 million dollars/month were transacted between Second Life players.
“We can build a corporate presence in the digital gaming world and find great candidates there!” I explained to my boss in 2007. Working as a technical recruiter, I was constantly learning about new technologies while trying to match highly-skilled engineers and programmers with competitive roles in the Bay Area.
“I don’t know, man..” he replied, as we paused on the corner, returning from sushi (back when that was a food and not a liquidity mining token). Just then, a group of people wearing full animal cosplay waited at the stoplight, walking up the street to an apparent Furry convention. “We should get together on Second Life!” one of them said, through colored screen in its fox-head.
My boss raised an eyebrow and turned to me. “I’m thinking no,” he said.
13 years later, companies like Atari have their own estates within the pre-sale lands of Sandbox, embracing the opportunity to enrich the customer experience in exciting new ways. Things have come a long way and adoption of things like this is just beginning. It may seem intimidating and different to really wrap your mind around all of it, but if the makers of single-button, joystick-based Pong can come along for the ride, can’t you?
