15/07/2022 Developer Ambushes NFTs In Public Talk, Makes Crypto Sponsors Real Mad

Mark Venturelli's presentation had crypto sponsors of the event 'trying to break into the talk'

During Brazil’s International Games Festival last week, developer Mark Venturelli (Chroma Squad) was scheduled to give a talk called “The Future Of Game Design.” A few seconds in, he flipped and revealed the presentation’s real title—“Why NFTs are a nightmare”—to a room full of applause.

The talk absolutely rails on the idea ofimplementing NFTs and “play to earn” in video games, attacking the environmental cost, predatory practices, and the fact that they’ll turn games into salt mines and sweatshops, rather than creative works people can simply enjoy. All things we already knew, but it’s always lovely seeing a developer reinforce the point in a forum among their peers. Even better to an audience featuring perpetrators of such practices.

A video of the talk has been uploaded to YouTube, but since it’s all in Portuguese it won’t be of much use to most of you. It should, however, autoplay below to the moment that Venturelli pauses, laughs and makes the switch, a universal moment we can all enjoy.

AsPC Gamerreports, an important thing to note here is that he pulled the stunt with the blessing of the event’s organisers. The Brazil International Games Festival had among its main sponsors a number of crypto, NFT and blockchain companies, some of whom were furious at the content of Venturelli’s talk.

“These people are outsiders here, they’re not important,”he said of the scam peddlers when talking toPC Gamer. “They’re just trying to buy their relevance, because they have no actual influence over the future of our industry. If you just give them this space uncontested, you’re just giving them exactly what they want, and buying their narrative that they’re relevant.”

Venturelli added, “I’ve heard that the sponsors got really mad. They tried to break into the talk while I was talking, but the organization would not let them...There was never any kind of intention on [the organizer’s] side to shut me up or anything like that.”

While the video of the talk was in Portugese, Venturelli has since uploaded a translated set of the slides accompanying the presentation, which you can check out here.

Arts

https://kotaku.com/nft-blockchain-crypto-scam-brazil-video-games-1849166901

Interesting NFTs
#2921
By OthersideDeployer
CryptoKitties
Oh hi! I'm Kitty #377604. I'm a Train Conductor by day, and I like swiping left by night. Sometimes I daydream of a life full of reciting poetry, wet food, and swiping right. Let's pawty!
Another Day In Paradise
Just as the book speaks to intelligence, the image in all its muteness speaks to the heart.
CryptoPunk #6649
The CryptoPunks are 10,000 uniquely generated characters. No two are exactly alike, and each one of them can be officially owned by a single person on the Ethereum blockchain. Originally, they could be claimed for free by anybody with an Ethereum wallet, but all 10,000 were quickly claimed. Now they must be purchased from someone via the marketplace that's also embedded in the blockchain.
The Scion
A young figure caught in a moment of distraction, aware only ephemerally of his unconscious being, as it engages in psychological and psychedelic layer spaces. His right arm casually cradles a moray eel; the figure is comfortable but not truly aware of the potentials for danger in such negligence. His shirt reads “Bello” in Pokemon style font, harkening back to a childhood straddling the millennial threshold. To his right side, out of the unconscious deep, shrouded alien heads propagate as a fractal totem, each new iteration a more sophisticated rendering of emotional masking over the cold mystery of the greys. As the scion of the Budgie-Sattva, the young man, in his distraction, is also simultaneously aware of higher levels of self discovery. To his left a psychological topology sets beneath the oracle side of an 8 ball ,hovering; its message a purest concept of acceptance. The “Scion” lettering is in 80’s HeMan style bold declaration. The lower right side of the painting is like a hybrid of melon, feathers, and seeds. The crystals in the background bring light; conducted, refracted, reflected, and dispersed, to balance the dark shadow of the figure’s physical body. The aura of the scion succeeds in layers to point, with a finger, and the crown chakra, toward a center of a mandala existing as nigh pure application of strokes, in essence painterly abstraction, but also revealing hints of the Aura of migraine, and the bi-hemispherical nature of the brain–noting concerns of the possibility of inherited mental disease. Yet the flourish of chakra as it sets against that center is robust, active, coherent, and reveling against all fear. Fundamentally, the piece speaks to the activation of one’s potential to begin to “Know Thyself”, and find greater awareness out of the enigmas of the mind–as an inculcated seed given to the rich soil of one’s own birthright.