The launch of the world's first decentralised, community owned gaming platform, called Loot on August 27 has the potential to upend how we do business. We need to pay attention.
Even as the business-school and consultancy industrial complex has consistently churned out ever more jargon over the last few decades, the way companies have been organised have remained remarkably consistent since the 18th century: top-down structures with limited liability, run as mini-dictatorships within a set of rules.
Along the way, everyone from anarchists to communists have tried to upend these structures in the name of liberty or equity, and in general met with the same dismal fates. It has simply proven too difficult to replicate the wonderful set of incentives that have hitherto so successfully driven prosperity.
Technology is changing all that - and yes, so is blockchain. While we all know that the entry of crypto bros generally prompts as much of a rush for the bar at most parties as would the entry of any especially zealous door-to-door salesman, in this case - they are on to something.
Through the remarkable technical wizardry of blockchain, that allows transactions to be recorded, sliced and diced and tracked without the intervention of any centralised authority, opportunities are being created to assign incentives and ownership to things in a way would not have been possible before.
Take Loot for example. The way it works is that you can spend money to create a list of items that you own. A literal list by the way, just consisting of a picture of text! You can own and trade these items for real money. The magic of blockchain, which allows these lists to be recorded as 'non-fungible token' means that your ownership is recorded in a way that cannot be disputed.
The premise behind Loot is that it is meant to be the precursor to a video game. Think about how a video game is traditionally created. The first step is that high powered executives gather in a room with creative writers and throw out ideas. You can think of this earliest iteration of Loot as that process - except the ideas can come from anyone on the internet with a bit of cash - and they can be bought and sold. The whole process, from financing to creation, is decentralised and open.
And whilst it may sound absurd to shell out cash to produce the equivalent of a fantasy shopping list - the magic is what happens after - and what is already happening.
People are beginning to fill in the blanks. Artists are jumping in to create artwork based on the lists, writers are beginning to sketch out stories. The idea is that eventually people with harder skills will build out graphics. Others will do the back-end technical work required for game engines. The result, creator Dom Hofmann hopes, will be a full-scale video game created from scratch from the ground up - without any centralised authority involved.
It is early days yet, and the platform is relatively clunky, and the incentives remain untested. But this type of experiment, if successful, c
