(This work of fiction is how we envision of the game we build can look like in the future)
It’s 11:45am in Ho Chi Minh City and Phuong is finishing the last email of the morning, ready to head out for lunch. She checks her calendar, she has about 5 mins before she needs to walk over to the restaurant across the street and meet with her besties. They are a group of 4, and have been close to each other ever since 10 years ago, high school time. Lots of things changed during those 10 years, they go on different paths too. Phuong is the only one who pursues the finance field, now an Analyst in an investment fund. The other three one goes for IT, one goes for marketing, and one goes for HR. Anyway, they keep a regular meetup schedule and catch up with each other frequently once every 2-3 weeks. This time they gather near Phuong’s company and thus she doesn’t have to drive out for lunch. She just needs to walk over.
Phuong arrives at the restaurant first among the group, takes a table for 4, orders an ice tea, and takes her phone out and logs into CryptoWar metaverse. She has some minutes to spare while waiting. Phuong has been hanging around CryptoWar metaverse ever since it came out, about a year ago. Back then when the game just launched its metaverse, it’s only a town hall, acting as the gate where people pop out into the metaverse when they log in, over a vast grassland, connecting itself into a few Roman style stone roads leading to other buildings: a Game Arena, a Blacksmith, a Tavern, and a Marketplace. The rest of the game world looked beautifully empty, expanded to as far as anyone can scroll the screen around, filled in with trees, snow capped mountains, flowers, and well, more grass. People can just wander hours in those endless grass fields back then, searching for something that doesn’t exist just yet. Most of the time they just bumped into other gamers that did the same thing. At least in Phuong’s case, she did that a few times during insomnia late at night hours and actually formed a few good in-game friends.
One of the game-friends she met that way, OreoBlack3528, became her crewmate in the Saturn Ring Space Race Championship III, 2 months ago. They won that tournament, winning a pairs of Saturn Ring Shoes for Phuong and a pair of Saturn Angel Wings for OreoBlack3528 and split the tourney token prize of 2,000 $xBlade, worth about USD $10K+ at the time when $xBlade price soared up to more than $5/xBlade. That tourney was particularly crowded, attended by 7,285 teams, each team has 2 members, one on the racing and one on the shooting: targeting space objects and other teams. Phuong did the race, OreoBlack3528 - a 13 years-old kid from Netherland, did the shooting. The teams had to travel around Saturn Rings for 20 laps. All team started at once and the shooting happen immediately, along the laps there are traps that are planned into the rocky ice rings of Saturn: bombs, automatic guns, teleporting space gates that by random either send the teams up one lap or back down one lap, biochemical toxic air that can erode the spaceship, Solar flares that can disable spaceship electricity, meteor showers, et cetera. The rule doesn’t require the teams to actually finish the race, they just need to be the last one standing. So when OreoBlack3528 shot down the last rival, they won the race at about lap 18th.
Phuong comes to the game as a casual gamer. The money was cool to have while having good entertainment during her breaks of work. But most of the time she just stacks up whatever $xBlade she won from the game, back from it were just mere $0.035 when she first knew about it. For the tourney prize, her avatar is still wearing the Saturn Ring Shoes in the CryptoWar metaverse. It was a pair of glowing shoes in Saturn’s beige color with a layer of rings floating outside of the shoes that lifted her avatar up about 20 cm on the metaverse street. When it’s night time in the metaverse, her shoes and her avatar are one of the brightest things on the street. Everyone knows immediately Phuong is one of the Saturn Ring Space Race’s champions through the artifact anywhere she travels to in this metaverse. OreoBlack3528 is a different kind of animal though, he is more like a mercenary and is really active with selling things he gets from the metaverse. The kid sold the Saturn Angel Wings right after the race to an artifact broker from Rigel Zone. Rigel Zone is an underground marketplace below the Vega mountain in the far North. Gathering around those underground streets are artifact traders, brokers, dealers, fashionistas, designers of real world brands, indie artifact makers, deep pocket professional NFT collectors, and crypto sharks who wander these streets in search for first hand market data of how healthy CryptoWar marketplace is as a metric for how booming or declining CryptoWar metaverse can be in the next 3-6 months in order to make speculative bets. So, OreoBlack3528 sold the Saturn Angel Wings for a cheap additional 500 $xBlade (about USD $2.5K) just to see those wings went on into the top of CMSB (i.e. the infamous CryptoWar Marketplace Statistical Board) for a whooping 5725 $xBlade a month later. Rumors have that the final buyer is a wealthy rich kid from Seoul who the broker somehow gets to know through a series of introductions. OreoBlack3528 was certainly pissed about the whole ordeal and blamed himself for selling it too cheap at the time. But hey, the dealers know how to navigate their clientele and at least when the final sales happen $xBlade price declined to only $4/xBlade and so OreoBlack3528 didn’t have to sit through during that price decline. He is a kind of gamer that doesn't sit on top of any $xBlade. The kid makes token from winning many in-game contests, selling 50% of it all into PancakeSwap for BUSD and then use that to buy the newest and hottest Lego sets come out in Amsterdam where he lives, the remaining 50% he uses to buy and trade other gears in-game in order to make more wins from other contests. That’s one of the reasons why team Phuong and OreoBlack3528 have a good baseline to win the Saturn Ring Space Race Championship III, their ship got some coolest guns from OreoBlack3528’s assets and the ship is the newest type produced. All thanks to Phuong’s savings with xBlade back in the early days (now worth a small fortune) and thanks to OreoBlack3528 tirelessly gear-up: seek out the newest gadgets, and guns that come out from Rigel Zone.
Back at lunch time between Phuong and her besties, she logs into the metaverse while waiting for her friends. It’s about 6am in Amsterdam too and OreoBlack3528 is still sleeping. Looking at the game world now it’s so different to the time when it just comes out. It feels encouraging with all of the developments that gamers can see in real time. About 2 weeks after the CryptoWar metaverse was released, the Game Arena became bigger, and added a few portals for gamers to play on some more different games. At first, this Game Arena only has a mini-game where each player controls a few heroes, each hero belongs to an element: Fire, Water, Lighting, Earth - the gamers then use their heroes to battle with monsters and if they win they win some $xBlade token. It was a very simple play-to-earn game. Then the Game Arena expanded it into 1v1 PvP mode where these heroes can fight each other and the winning side wins the token of the losing side. Then the game was upgraded to become an on-chain/off-chain structure where gamers can see their heroes running around in the battlefield, firing arrows and slaying other heroes with their blades. 3v3 Team playing mode and death match mode (last man standing will win a battle royale of 50) was added. It was then the first time gamer’s heroes can actually die and the NFT can be destroyed from the battlefield. To compensate for this risk of heroes dying and weapons getting stolen when heroes die, the rewards for the winners go really lucrative and everyone races to arm up their armies for bigger winning and more fierce battlefields.
Phuong, however, is not a big fan of battle royale games. So during these early days, the main reason Phuong joined CryptoWar metaverse is because she likes the notion of getting into a new world, getting lost in there, and seeing the city grow. Also, she likes the idea of having her own avatar in a virtual game world where she can change shape of the avatar into something else, see it ages (yes, avatar in CryptoWar metaverse will age through time), wear different cloaks, or put in on top of a horse and ride around. It reminds her back in the days of secondary school when every kid in the class went nut to raise virtual pets in a small device with LED screen showing black-and-white big pixel virtual pets. Though that trend died out quite fast, it was something of remarkability. For the first time people could raise a cat that has no fur in a tiny digital box, and these cats don’t chew up people's chairs nor push glass of water on the table down to the ground. Phuong likes an idea like that and treats her avatar in the metaverse just like a digital cat. Of course, she can change it into a girl or a dog if she likes too. So during the early days of CryptoWar metaverse, she just hung around the town hall, met a lot of people running around in all directions in the streets, changing the avatar’s clothing once every couple days, and pretty much didn’t play any of the game.
Then the game world developed and became bigger and provided more activities for gamers. First was a completely new town area toward the South of the town hall that was developed into a food court, there are a few boutique restaurants and a private whiskey lounge where gamers have to buy lifetime membership to access in. The membership is a small ancient looking ring that is worn on the 5th finger on the avatar’s left hand. When this new food area get set up, a new game resource get introduced into the metaverse too: From then on, every avatar that logs in into the metaverse need to go eating at least once every 4 hours of play, else the avatar will run out of stamina and pass out due to exhaustion. If the avatar is passed out for long enough time, in order to bring the avatar back to active, it needs to be cured at a hospital, locate at the North West of the town hall for 10 times the cost of the cheapest meal on the metaverse, these costs are for: ambulance to the hospital, health check-up, stamina restoration treatment, and then rest in the hospital for one-day without the ability to go out and do other thing. When this got rolled out on the first time in the metaverse, a lot of gamers forget to go eating, and thus ambulances run all over the street bringing avatars everywhere back to the hospital. The hospital makes so much money that a few more rich gamers bid to rent out the lands and build other hospitals around the town hall. The cost to get into the hospital is actually really cheap for gamers, but the fact that they can’t play for a day because of the stamina restoration treatment really irritates them: they can’t go around in the metaverse and play games, trades, chat chit, and hang out. Through time people get used to eating at the right time and pack food in their backpack so that they don’t get picked up by ambulances anymore. Speaking of this, restaurant and food businesses were also hot areas for gamers to jump in and build their own business in CryptoWar’s virtual world. Restaurants come out everywhere and canned foods get produced and sold into grocery stores. When grocery stores first come out, everything they sell is canned food.
Phuong’s avatar also got to the hospital a few times, too. Working at a private equity fund is a stretch for any 25 year-old girl who wants to prove herself with a team of all solid professionals that do deal in USD $M. So she frequently forgets to feed her avatar when the stamina runs out. But it’s not too big of a deal because she comes to this game as casual as it can be and she is fine not logging into the game for a good one week long at any moment her work becomes too much. What actually makes Phuong stuck into the metaverse was after the shopping mall was built after the metaverse got released in about 4 months. Phuong was never into monster fighting and all those heroes fighting battle royale like other gamers. However, she is certainly into shopping. When the first shopping mall was created, Phuong went into there and was amazed by the wide variety of digital clothing she can put onto her avatar: shoes, socks, pants, shirts, jackets, scarves, necklaces, bracelets, jewelries, hats, magic wands, mage’s staffs, tails, and all other things she can’t even imagine out from the first place. So Phuong and her friends went on a shopping spree and just cosplay in the metaverse every week at the digital park right on to the left of the town hall. That’s a wide, triangle-shaped park, with grass and trees, with small fountains - simple looking yet elegant, where avatars of real world friends often hang out and chat, or regroup before engaging in a team mini game over the Game Arena. All 4 of Phuong’s besties are into buying stuff and décor their avatar once every week, contesting to see who’s the best beauty or come up with the best cosplay idea. That’s when suddenly Phuong realized that she spent too much money into the game buying stuff without really making anything from any mini games that are offered in there to make some token back. And when she tried out some of the games, she knew she was a really, really good space racer.
Suong was the first of Phuong’s friends to show up at the restaurant, about 5 mins past noon, named Ganh from Pham Ngoc Thach street in District 1, HCMC.
“Hey Phuong - good to see you!”
“Suong - good to see you too! How’s your quest on finding a house over the West Forest of the Rigel Zone?”
“It was cool! I visited a couple houses during the taxi here, have some good options, but I don’t really like any of the houses just yet. At first I think of buying just a small house with a good view into the Rigel Marketplace, but later on I like the idea of buying a duplex and rent out half of the house to cover some costs, you can join me there too, are you still renting a house near the food court?”
“Yes, I still do. I might probably buy a house too, cut out monthly rent, save a few xBlade on that end and actually can sell the house if the NFT goes up in price too. If xBlade goes up in price it will be a double gain, right!? I was just wondering should I go for a really expensive house or not, you know, I can probably put out about USD $2K to invest into a good house right now and can sit with that NFT for 6 to 12 months”
“How much is that in xBlade? I forget what xBlade price is at this moment.”
“Let me see, xBlade's price right now is about $4.12. That mean I can bet about 500 xBlade into a house”
“Oh that’s even more expensive than some duplexes I just check out over the Rigel Zone! hahahaha you have expensive taste!”
“It’s alright, I have accumulated a lot of xBlade from early on and I still have money from winning the Saturn Ring Space Race with the kid from Amsterdam. And this is more like an investment rather than spending, you know, like it’s not like we buy clothing for good money and sell or trade it out for bad money like we all did!"
They both laugh out loud and that’s when the other two come into the restaurant too. Phuong logged out of the metaverse and fully joined the present with her friends. But make no mistakes, besides catching up with life and work, they all will have a good time talking about their adventures in the metaverse and share to each other what they are after. Probably the 4 need to check out the next tournament schedule from the Game Arena and join some team esport contests.
It’s always fun to compete alongside your friends and win some high value artifacts. And they need some more xBlade to buy houses too, so why not?
20220219 - Austin, TX
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This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
CryptoWar Team 💜