Chain reaction

For a good while, ‘NFT’ has been just another entry in a long list of threeletter initialisms that was easy to ignore. Like so many technological fads before it, the thinking went, it would surely simply fizzle out. But with millions of dollars of investment in the space, an explosion of players in blockchainpowered games, and now the highprofile involvement of Will Wright, it’s clear that it’s not going away. And that’s despite Valve going so far as to amend Steam’s publishing rules to outright ban any applications that trade in cryptocurrencies or NFTs. The question today is becoming inevitable: what legitimacy, if any, do these technologies have within videogames?

For the uninitiated, NFT stands for non-fungible token – meaning one that is unique and not interchangeable with a similar equivalent, which has its ownership and transaction history recorded on the blockchain’s ledger. Most commonly, it’s associated with a digital object, with the NFT used to convey ownership of something that is, ultimately, intangible. But importantly, the two things are separate entities. Buying an NFT for a piece of digital art, for example, doesn’t grant you any rights to that work’s intellectual property, nor