My first real exposure to GameFi secondary markets and the experience I built almost all of my understanding of NFTs and the potential of what GameFi could be would be trading card games, chiefly  Magic the Gathering. For the uninitiated, it’s a game where people build their own decks of physical, nonfungible pieces of cardboard with drawings, text and numbers on them and play against each other and putting them on a field in a turn-based fashion.

Before I get accused of FUD-ing, I want to preface this by saying I am very impressed with Gabriel Leyton, Limit Break and DigiDaigaku and I have assigned them a high probability of success. Hearing him talk about his ideas on a podcast interview was an incredibly eye opening experience and I became a little obsessed with digesting them. However, biases from my own experiences kicked in and I had some cognitive dissonance that I hope to use this write up to work through. This is because Gabriel Leydon has been a pioneer of the Free-to-Play model of video games, which is the model of video game monetization I grew up on and I realized had some proto-opinions about, which I’ll do my best to explore here, one by one.

In the past few months, I’ve learned that the hardest part about breaking into on-chain analytics is finding something you can make. It is dreadfully intimidating to see beautifully organized charts and graphs detailing how people are using arcane protocols you barely understand – and even more so to see the never-ending SQL used behind it that you can barely read. So, it was really hard for me to stay motivated, especially if I didn’t have concrete goals to focus on. After all, web3 is a bit of a sandbox: do you want to explore deFi lending protocols? gameFi? Specific NFT collections? Hacks and theft? The Merge? For the beginner analyst, the crypto world is your oyster, but only in the most overwhelming way possible.

My ENS name is olesnakey.eth. It’s derived from my handle, OleSnakey, that I use for games, Discord, Twitter, and pretty much everything else in web2 since I was in 5th grade. It’s named after an old Gmail feature called “Old Snakey” where you can press Shift+7 in your inbox to play a simple game of Snake, which I often did when I didn’t feel like doing anything else. It’s not a good name by any measure. It’s goofy, long, sometimes tricky to pronounce/spell, and some people absolutely despise snakes for whatever reason. That said, I’ve used it for so long that it’s basically become a part of me, and that’s why I’m proud to use it for web3.

Of all the crypto-lingo I’ve absorbed in the space, WAGMI was the one I had the worst first impression of, by far. This is mostly because of where my brain automatically goes when I hear it. The first image I picture is the high octane bull market fever dream of a discord server full of hodlers collectively praying for their NFT to go up by a billion percent. Then the very next image that appears in my mind are the possible aftermaths with the most painful ones the most salient: the server slowly becoming a ghost town and the hodlers reeling from their losses or deleting them from their memories by joining a new one to continue the cycle. These images create a juxtaposition that leaves a bitter, insincere taste in my mouth, the same vibe you get when you try to argue with a hypocrite.