Wow. It’s amazing how oblivious the defenders of a colonial system can be, but this article about an NFT/crypto gaming system is revealing, in a horrifying way. Some Western crypto nuts created a modified version of Minecraft in which players, after paying a hefty entry fee, could earn crypto money that could be exchanged for the real thing just by playing. It was called Critterz. At first, people actually did make money playing!

For a while, it worked. Some Critterz players told Rest of World that, at one point, they were earning more than $100 a day playing the game. At its peak, it had around 2,000 daily players, some of whom enlisted other players to help build their in-game empires for a cut of the crypto they earned. One U.S. player, who goes by “Big Chief,” described how his team, composed largely of young people in the Philippines, gathered building materials for him. He then paid professional Minecraft builders around $10,000 in crypto to turn those materials into a lavish casino.

“At first.” Then, like most of these crypto schemes, the grifters took their profits and left the participants hanging. In addition, Minecraft announced that you can’t use their game in these NFT cons. The value is plummeting, and is heading towards zero.

But, as with Axie Infinity, once the game became more popular, the value of its crypto token began to drop. Worth 85 cents at its peak in January, it had decreased to around 3 cents by May. But the depreciation was gradual, and many players continued playing and building.

Then, on July 20, 2022, in a post on the Minecraft website, developer Mojang Studios dropped a bombshell: Minecraft would not support integrations with NFTs. The company laid out its position and stated in bold text that “blockchain technologies are not permitted to be integrated inside our Minecraft client and server applications nor may they be utilized to create NFTs associated with any in-game content, including worlds, skins, personal items, or other mods.”

During its heyday, though, the mechanisms of the game were ripe for exploitation. If you had the capital, you could help poor people buy-in, and then rake in a percentage of their subsequent earnings. Sweet! Then you could sit back and do nothing in your wealthy home country, like the US, while the peons on your Minecraft plantation send you money.

It was clear from the languages used in the Critterz chat log that almost all guild members, also known as “scholars,” came from low-income countries, and, overwhelmingly, the Philippines. Many were also former players of Axie Infinity, and worked for guild owners that ran Axie guilds too.

Charles Franzis, a 19-year-old student at Bulacan State University, just north of Manila, got into Axie Infinity last October. He joined a guild called Big Chief Academy and enrolled as a scholar, hoping to earn some extra money that would support him through his studies.

Big Chief was the owner of the plantation, with a swarm of desperate poor peasants playing for him.

Big Chief, who is based in the U.S., owns around 60 Critterz NFTs, which, at their peak, were worth more than $300,000 (at the time of publication, they had reduced in value to around $5,000). At one point, he managed around 200 guild scholars in Critterz.

But hey, they liked playing the game, and he paid them a cut, so it was OK. It was OK, right? They got more than half of what they earned, the rest going into Big Chief’s pockets, instead of 100%, but that was the cost of his beneficent patronage.

Big Chief said that he split earnings 60/40 in favor of his scholars, and that, unlike other games like Axie Infinity, most of them actually enjoyed playing Minecraft. “These kids are playing Minecraft, a game that they already liked and played, and earning as much as a CPA (certified public accountant) in the Philippines,” he said.

It was a force for good! I’m sure every colonized country has heard these arguments, that being under the thumb of a paymaster has been a civilizing influence. Meanwhile, 40% of the wealth produced in their country is being siphoned off to a rich country, which is making no investment in their homeland.

Big Chief framed guilds in play-to-earn gaming as a force for good, arguing that they provide people in poorer parts of the world with an opportunity to make money. “That’s why it’s really annoying when people talk about exploitation,” he said. “I couldn’t tell you what the hourly rate comes to, but I could tell you that people make very little money and the cost of living is very low in the Philippines.”

Don’t forget the patronizing attitude!

Big Chief said he felt bad for his guild members who were no longer able to make money from Critterz. “I treated a lot of these kids like they’re my kids, so it’s kind of sad now that I can’t really offer them much. Before, I was really helping a lot of these kids, giving them an opportunity to make some extra cash for their families and it just kind of sucks that I can’t really do that right now,” he said.

Aww, he was so helpful to these people he saw remotely as percentages on a spreadsheet.

Critterz is doomed, it’s already collapsing in value, and once Mojang shuts them down, it’ll be a worthless game. Poor Big Chief. He won’t be able to milk this grift for profit. But don’t you worry, the designers are dreaming big of future horizons in game development. Look at this nightmare fantasy:

But he also envisions NFT games that could exploit the wealth gap between players to deliver a different experience. “With the cheap labor of a developing country, you could use people in the Philippines as NPCs (“non-playable characters”), real-life NPCs in your game,” said Kossar. They could “just populate the world, maybe do a random job or just walk back and forth, fishing, telling stories, a shopkeeper, anything is really possible.”

The big triple-A gaming companies are probably already drooling at the prospect. They could sell games at a premium to American and European customers, and then use monthly fees to buy the labor of some hungry bunch of Filipinos for a pittance, and have them do all the menial stuff of serving the valued players. Until the day the NPCs rise up in a Westworld scenario and start slaughtering the privileged players.

Nah, won’t happen. You’ve gotta keep the NPCs weak and relatively unarmed so they are helpless.

Man, this is just going to replay all the sins of the colonial powers, isn’t it?