00:00 • Tom
Hi everyone. I’m Tom Shaughnessy. Welcome to Disruptors by Delphi, an invite-only 12 guests per year seminar series where we host the brightest minds on crypto, not only to educate the Delphi team, but to share the guest’s vision and knowledge for the entire space. Today, we’re thrilled to have on Brooks Brown. Brooks has worked on storyworlds from Indiana Jones to Star Wars and John Wick all the way to Avatar. His directorial work has garnered him several awards, including a Sundance Film Festival jury selection and the Tribeca Film Festival Storyscapes Award. Through working with Brooks, it became abundantly clear how special a person he is. When you speak with them, all you want to do is sit down and listen for hours. It is truly exciting. Today, we are hosting Brooks to cover, “Changing what immersion means with NOR.” Delphi is a proud investor in NOR, and this will be a presentation by Brooks with questions sent in our chat that will be addressed at the end of the presentation. With that, we open it up to Brooks

01:16 • Brooks
Thank you for the incredibly kind introduction, Tom. It is a crazy thing for me to be here. It feels amazing. It’s been an honor to have Delphi be one of the early people that we met with when I had this crazy idea and we started really working on it. I had my team pushing it in front of everyone. The encouragement from Delphi, the ability for us to see that you guys do have a real vision around what you want to be doing in crypto, i.e. that it is not just more of the same, was encouraging. It has helped us really garner our vision and concretize it. I hope to share a lot of that with you today because what we are talking about here is the nature of play. It is a thing that I have seen bounce around inside of the crypto space for the last two, three, maybe five years.

02:06 • Brooks
I’ve been doing random consulting work, “What is play? Why do people play games? Where can crypto integrate into games? How can it all work?” I believe we have an interesting and unique answer, and I’m hoping that I can communicate at least some of that today because in order to get there, we have a few things that we have to get through first before I get to what is NOR. Some of it is going to take a little bit, so please bear with me, and again, do not hesitate to jump into the chat. Do not hesitate to ask questions. This is meant to be a bit of a back and forth. As I go, please let me know if I am not explaining anything well enough. We kind of have to start at the beginning, and it is a big question: what is art? Art itself isn’t an image. We have this idea that there are pictures out there, that there are images out there, and the image itself is the art.

03:00 • Brooks
It is not the case. Art is the experience of the image. It is the experience of the person viewing it. It is a diagram of elements created for a second artist. There are always two artists inside of every painting. There is the person who painted it and then there is the person seeing it, and nothing shows this more than Las Meninas. It is one of my favorite pieces. If you’ve ever read some Foucault, it is one of the pieces that The Order of Things mentioned in extensive nature. Las Meninas, when seen in person myself, emotionally I was fairly overcome because it is a unique piece. On its face, it is just a painting. It is a painting commissioned by Ferdinand, the king. The idea was he wanted a portrait. He wanted this artist to tell a unique, interesting portrait, and it is, just that, a painting.

03:50 • Brooks
When you start looking through it and you start noticing, maybe you’ll see Las Meninas, ‘The Little Ladies’ as it is, their dog, who they are, what are they doing? Well, they are preparing to have their painting made, their portrait drawn. Well, you may notice the creepy figure in the back. Who is he? Where is he going? What is he setting up? You may see the paintings in the back, which are actually two very old, very famous paintings about moments that man beat the gods at their own game and the gods struck them down; beat them with a flute, in one case. All of this is because the artist himself is looking at you. Off in the back in the mirror, you will see Ferdinand. Oddly, the subject of the portrait is in the mirror looking back at you. Wherever you are standing near the painting, it is looking at you.

04:42 • Brooks
The question is, if Ferdinand is in the mirror, who is actually looking at the picture? This journey that you get to go on is because paintings have a canvas. This canvas gives us boundaries. It gives us a space for our eyes to wander that we’re able to go, “This is what the artist wants me to look at. This is what the artist has put in front of me. This is what is on this odd stretched out piece of paper, or leather or metal or whatever it may be.” Video games also have a canvas. Kim Swift and a handful of other incredibly talented game designers who went through a series of very good college courses gave a really good description of what makes a video game canvas. It is not as explicit as an easel with a canvas on it, but we have these three things:…

05:31 • Brooks
…We have the mechanics of games, the dynamics those mechanics give us, and then the aesthetics, i.e. the way it feels and the effect of the game. Spelunky, if you haven’t played it, I recommend it. It is a very simple Indiana Jones style game where you run through an underground, ever-changing labyrinth of caves. You steal treasure, kill bats, kill skeletons, get chased by evil ghosts, and all of that fun stuff. Let’s pull back and look at the canvas because with the whip itself (this is taken from a piece by Stephen Lavelle, also taken from a wonderful presentation by Clint Hocking… I have never found a way to better describe this, so thank you, Clint, for not knowing that I stole this.)… The whip in Spelunky, like in real life, requires you to wind back and then throw. This means it has to be raised before it can be hit. You don’t just hit the button and out it goes like in a shooter game.

06:33 • Brooks
This means that inside of this, the dynamic created is that it encourages a degree of premeditation. It creates an atmosphere of deliberation, and this slows the game down. This gives you a moment where you can say, “Wait, where do I want to jump?… Oh, if it is a flying creature I have to hit before I leap, or even as I leap depending on the arc.” It forces a game to not just be the mechanic or the dynamic but altogether with everything else that the game does, it makes you deliberately move through the space. This setup is the way that the canvas of a game works. It is how we, as people who play games, feel about it. These elements and this complexity gives us that emotion, that aesthetic, at the very end. Ultimately, something as seemingly simple that we’ve never really considered as the whip in Spelunky or pick a game/choose a mechanic…

07:28 • Brooks
…is a canvas that we are able to actually play through where we get to play as the artist. In video games, we call this the magic circle, this place that the canvas plays within where these dynamics play because outside of the magic circle is the real world. Inside the magic circle, we find where our own agency and freedom are, the same way that when a child is playing with Legos, if you’re not yelling at them and if there aren’t a million distractions, if they’re free to just play… I have a four-year-old and it’s wonderful to watch. It is a space where he is concentrating; he feels free to explore, experiment, create. If I am constantly yelling at him as the outside world, the magic circle switches up a bit. Inside we have the rules, we have the narrative, we have the immersion, we have all these things that make a game what it is,…

08:20 • Brooks
…and we have stuff that we bring to it. I have my past experience. I have the social norms of the society I live in. I have the environment I am playing in. I have the cultural context that the game exists in, given the time, given me and my place inside of it. All these things from the outside world come with me, but the magic circle is fairly sacrosanct and important. The second part of this is: because this magic circle exists inside, we are able to actually play in a state of flow. This is a psychological term not directly related to video games, per se. Flow study is a big psychological phenomenon that happens to almost everybody because beyond just video games, when we’re in that odd state where we’re in this perfect place of challenge and skill, we’re able to flow. Now, some wonderful work by someone whose name I cannot pronounce…

09:22 • Brooks
…did some great work on giving us a handful of places that people can be inside of this place where skill meets challenge. And, you know this, everyone’s been through it: when you have very little skill and you’re up against very little challenge in a thing, it’s just not exciting. You’re not interested in doing it. I highly suggest anyone play the game Candyland with a child. You will know exactly the feeling. The setup works in every direction, specifically though you will notice that flow is this high challenge and high skill place. This is where we get to play and where we get to sit. The third component of this, the third setup, is that you need to be so engrossed in the experience that other needs become negligible. The magic circle does not come out of nowhere. The rest of the world around the magic circle has to necessarily be out of it…

10:16 • Brooks
…so that way you are able to be in this flow state. How we have gotten to the point where we’re at today and how flow state has evolved over time is worth going back into history. A major event of the last one hundred years was the Trinity explosion. For those who don’t know the name Trinity, it’s the first nuclear bomb that was ever set off. The Manhattan Project, The U.S., World War II, put together this huge group who went out and figured out how to make a bomb. One man who happened to be there, who was actually the head of a lot of the technology that they used to build this and to do the test to set it all up, His name was Will Higinbotham. He came away not excited about the prospect. Very few people there were excited when they came away, but Will specifically came away and wrote a note.

11:11 • Brooks
He said, “I am not a bit proud of the job we have done. The only reason for doing it was to beat the rest of the world to a draw. Perhaps this is so devastating that man will be forced to be peaceful. The alternative to peace is now unthinkable.” His letters from here on in the rest of his life became sad, morose, lacking hope in the world and praying for the world. People called him a good man, but they said he had a fantastic sense of play. He loved games. Shortly after the Trinity explosion, he went back to his laboratories and sat around. He did not have to worry about the rest of the world. He already had that in its place, and he created the first video game. Of all the people in the world to do it, it is really fascinating.

11:56 • Brooks
Tennis for Two was the name of the game, a precursor to Pong. He said this line, “It might liven up the place to have a game that people could play which could convey the message that our scientific endeavors have relevance for society.” It feels happy to me, a rare opportunity for him. Now, Tennis for Two was a fascinating game. Let’s talk about its magic circle. Inside of it is simple: the controller, two people, you hold this, and there’s a knob. When you turn the knob, it aims where your shot is going to go. When you press the button, the ball is hit. There is no racket. You do not get to see it. It’s just simply snap, and it reflects, it bounces, and it plays back and forth. This requires this aim to be contingent on the ball and how it is coming to me, how someone else is hitting it.

12:48 • Brooks
I don’t want to over-hit it or under-hit it. It forces me to be deliberate, to anticipate, and this center game of skill becomes my entire world. Now, this was sort of in the back for a while. He took it to a few shops. He took it to a few conferences. He had a lot of people play it. They had a blast. He thought it was going to be the future of play and games and sports, and a handful of people saw it. They got a chance to run with it. Magnavox famously took it and made the home Pong console. Magnavox Odyssey was a unique one. They basically turned this thing into this package people could buy as if it was a group of party toys. It came with cards, chips, fake money that you could use for gambling, trivia cards; it was intended to be for a party.

13:41 • Brooks
It was the first time people really had a chance to buy video games or play them, and this was giving them a chance. Of course, it was exclusive to Magnavox televisions; no chance hooking it up to anything else. But you know, that’s kind of how this starts. What ended up happening with all of this though, was trying to recreate the arcade experience and the promise of games coming that were fun, and it did not happen. For anyone who doesn’t have rose-tinted glasses of the past, this is what Pac-Man was on the Atari. This is not Pac-Man by anyone’s definition of said thing. E.T. itself is sort of famous for this coming crash of the 1980s. People blame it for a lot of things, but it is not really E.T., E.T. was a symptom of this larger problem of over-promising and under-delivering games. Because, for the first time, people had to buy them. Video games were not a thing, and sports weren’t a thing people had to purchase, let alone have only on a TV and have as part of a very expensive ecosystem of other purchases.

14:45 • Brooks
So, you’d get things like the Kool-Aid Man video game. The text for this game says, “Simulated network game for the Atari 2600.” ‘Simulated’ would be a nice way to put it. This is what it actually looked like. Let’s just say – disappointment was normal. The goal of the game was literally to mix Kool-Aid and become powerful when you drank it; odd game. Arcades though, at the same time as this, they were taking off. They didn’t have this issue. You simply played the games you liked, and they had to be good because, in order to play, you had to put in a quarter every time. You didn’t spend $50 or $100 or multiple hundreds in today’s money in order to even start. You simply would go in and play.

15:40 • Brooks
I put Tron in here for a reason, although I also put Star Wars Arcade in here because it’s one of the greats. To this day, if I see a Tron arcade machine, I will pop quarters in that thing until I get the number one spot. I played a lot of the Tron arcade game for a long time. I love that. There’s a unique moment in the way arcade games work where, I put in a quarter and it’s as long as I can last, and it’s on me. It’s my chance to do it. Arcades always had this strange setup like that because my skill could grow. How I interact and my flow state was possible, but not just flow state, the ability for other people to see that flow state to have an understanding around it. Video athletes became a thing.

16:25 • Brooks
Now we call them e-sports pros or whatever we want to call them now, but video athletes was the term they used. Man, did people gather together. Man, did people really super get into these f*****g games. If you’ve never actually seen it, it’s really incredible to watch this stuff. The old documentary on the Donkey Kong guys is a great hilarious story, and it belies the real point. Arcades had viewers the same way that local tennis matches or little league games. Arcades as games, people watched, people played, and people practiced. It was unique. It was different. Now, the home market shifted. After the crash, out came Nintendo and they brought out a pile of games. At first, they were trying to ape the arcade games too. You’d have three lives, we knew that one, and things would get progressively more difficult, a handful of levels enough you’d know.

17:18 • Brooks
If you’ve played any of these games you what I’m talking about. This was the chance to make the arcade games good at home. Then, Shigeru Miyamoto had a different plan because the family was playing this, and they were selling content hand over fist. They were selling a ton of these things. He sat back and said, “For a $50 game, we don’t really have to worry about those quarters anymore and three lives. We don’t really actually have to worry about telling a person what to do.” In his first major game for Nintendo, Mario, you could only move to the right. The mechanics and dynamics are pretty particular within Mario. Mario is a wonderful game, but it did rely on those. With Zelda, he wanted you to have to not know what to do and force you to talk to people to find out why. The first thing you do in Zelda, inside of that deep dark cave where you begin, is you have to talk to the old man.

18:12 • Brooks
He’s the one who gives you the sword, “Take this. It’s dangerous.” Shakiro, originally, didn’t want to include any information about the game and force you to actually ask other gamers. “How do you beat this? Where do I go? How much time do I spend in this?” Suddenly, the game didn’t have three lives. We call them lives; they’re hearts. You have one life, and then you die, and you have to start over. The ability for a person to play inside of this grew. Agency changed what it meant inside of games because a $50 purchase now had content it needed behind it; it now had a chance to do something different than pumping quarters after quarters into machines. In time, we can say video games have improved, but, underlying, it’s the same sort of thing: “Here’s Link up against yet another, shooting those little balls at him so he can bounce them off his shield.”

19:04 • Brooks
The Octoroks of old haven’t shifted a great deal, but, underneath it, the games have become deeply complex places of agency and places for us to explore. The financialization was a big reason for that. Developers didn’t have to worry about quarters. Now they could just do single purchase big things. This changed. There’s a game that came out called StarCraft. A lot of people don’t really talk about what made StarCraft as popular as it is. Now, I love StarCraft, but here in the West, this was another $50 game with a huge amount of single-player content. The vast majority of people I knew when it came out were people who beat it in single player, occasionally playing the multiplayer. The thing is, in South Korea, it exploded. We have that current running joke of the stereotype of the South Korean StarCraft gamer. That’s not a shock.

19:58 • Brooks
It’s not a new thing. It’s not a weird thing because, at that time, post-1980s Korea was in a really interesting place financially. As broadband became more adopted and as computers became a thing, PC bang started popping up – these internet cafes where people could just go and pay a couple bucks and sit and play. What does StarCraft have to do with this? Really, at the time, people didn’t pay for StarCraft. That was not a thing in Korea. Instead you’d go to the PC bang, and you’d pay a dollar or cheaper to play for a few hours. This changed how people played with the game. Rather than for me with the single player content being the setup, you’d actually sit and play on the LAN, and you’d practice, and you’d play as if it was a sport. This setup changed. all you had to do as a PC bank owner.

20:49 • Brooks
All you had to do as a PC bang owner, if you had 12 computers, was buy 12 copies of this game. You would eat that cost and you’d charge $2 to the person at the end. If you were a player, you didn’t have to spend $40 on a game. You could try it for two bucks. When you were good, you could charge it: two more dollars, two more dollars, practice, practice, practice. The dynamics of StarCraft were pretty extraordinary; how it would grow, how it would change. This is actually where we saw a big shift in the industry and how we financialized games. How are you ever going to make money in all of Asia if $2 a pop gets a person an hour of your game? Well, you have to change how video games are purchased. You can’t just sell them for 40 bucks anymore. You have to do what ultimately Korea mastered with the company Smilegate as they came out with Crossfire, the world’s largest game, that, as far as I”m aware, I don’t know anyone who plays it.

21:40 • Brooks
Almost a billion people, I think, have logged in and used it at one point or another. They have concurrent user stats that put every game on earth to shame. The idea of the free-to-play model was born here because of this. You couldn’t make money giving games away for free. Developers have to eat. Financiers can’t give money to people who are going to give away games for free. Now, we had this shift. We could charge people for items in those games. Let them play as much as they want, and let’s give them a blue skin or a red skin, or let’s let them maybe have a shittier time at the game unless they give us money. We’ll make it so it’s slower, and you can pay me to speed things up.

22:22 • Brooks
The nature of free-to-play changed the financial model, it changed how we made money, it changed how we designed. Very quickly, we’ve now gotten to the point where these free-to-play games are onerous by anyone’s measure. You don’t have to look at the reports of tons of governments that come out that are very clear saying that half of whales are in gambling. We’re talking about children 12 to 17 who spend $50 a month on these games. Why do they do this? What is the setup here? Why do they play these games? We’re talking about art here and we’re talking about how this sets up. This started moving over into what we might call the traditional game, the Zelda-likes. There’s a photo of the first really angering moment for a lot of gamers when it came to micro-transactions: horse armor in Oblivion. One day, a lot of people woke up and you could buy horse armor in Oblivion for about $2.50.

23:27 • Brooks
The horse armor did nothing. It just looked cooler. It was a single player game, and it changed forever how people would regard their games. It upset a lot of people, but it made an absolute metric ton of money. As we started getting to the point where free-to-play games took over and the financialization of games shifted, suddenly we have games like War Robots where it’s flatly pay-to-win. It is flatly so. This is an example of a hangar that is about $7500 worth. You could outright buy it. You could not buy anything…well, you still have to spend $1125 on the base robots, but then you could grind out the 612 days it would take to level up to that. Obviously, no one’s doing that. It’s just not going to happen. So, pay-to-win, wins. This is one of those things that, when you start including pay-to-win, when you start including micro-transactions, when you start including all of these things, you start seeing this magic circle that has odd edges because it’s no longer this solid circle.

24:36 • Brooks
You have the mechanics in the middle: how shooting works, how movement works. But, you also have wandering odd moments, “I want to play against poorer people.” You don’t want to play against rich people, I’ll tell you that for damn sure in all of these games. “Do I have time to play or do I need to be doing homework? Because, if I’m not spending money, I need to put 212 hours a week into this game. Am I bad or am I just poor? Is there room on my credit card? Can I afford these purchases?” It is really awful when you think about it. Where is your challenge and skill level? This is one of the beauties of a lot of these games and it’s the reason a lot of people play them because they start to believe that they have skill.

25:17 • Brooks
They believe they have challenges because, again, a lot of that is based on the perception of what’s within the magic circle. The nature of the magic circle here shifts, and whales are really being abused. You end up in this strange place where you feel as if you are this high-skill and fairly high-challenge person. You are not in a flow state, but you’re nearing it. You feel you are getting closer. The reality is, you’re not. You’re in a low-skill, low-challenge state. They’ve manipulated people who spend a fortune of money. That’s way it works in almost all of these games. The famous example that we can talk about here and I’ve actually heard a lot of people in various crypto podcasts, of course this is the moment people go to: They have a very significant misunderstanding of the anger around this. Diablo Three, a very wonderful game…

26:07 • Brooks
…I’ve played the s**t out of way too many hours as a witch doctor or a monk, depending on the title. I adore these games. The loop is pretty basic as it’s set up. Now, Diablo Three didn’t have a wildly crazy loop. You basically go out, you do things, you do damage. You gain experience. Experience leads to levels. Levels leads to skill. As you level up, you also gain stats, but also, as you do damage, you get: gold, gems, crafting material which becomes gear. This gear increases your stats which fuels this loop, and it is a really good compulsion loop. It is very solid. They added an auction house. This auction house enabled players across the board to spend money. You could flatly buy the best items in the game. That was one aspect of it. The other aspect is you could sell all the items you do not get because…

26:59 • Brooks
…As part of the Diablo loop, you end up with a ton of stuff that your character cannot use or you don’t give a s**t about because it’s not based on the skills and the way you’ve built your character. These extra bits of things usually sell for a meager amount of gold in game. It’s actually a weird frustrating moment when you have something that’s a really rare yellow item and it goes for nothing, so they added this auction house. The idea is that if I am playing and I get some cool yellow item that only a witch doctor can use or only a Druid can use, loo and behold I put it up, and then Tom,who only plays the Druid, he has got a couple extra bucks and he has less time. Why doesn’t he just buy it? This is the refrain I hear a great deal from our crypto friends. This idea: why can’t I just sell that?

27:40 • Brooks
I can then make money. I can set this up. We point to the auction house, and everyone thinks the anger here is because, “Gamers hate pay-to-win.” That has almost nothing to do with it because what happened is: the game changed. The magic circle shifted. Why I played changed. This is Jay Wilson. It is my favorite flattering photo of the gentlemen who basically gave us the auction house, championed it publicly, and put it in front of us. He said and streamers said, and people said across the board, “The issue is that item rewards became meaningless, since such items can be found easily at auction houses. With that money became a major motivator rather than killing Diablo.” People no longer played the game for the game. People did not play the game for the mechanics. People did not give a s**t about the mechanics. There is technically, in every Diablo game,one type of play that will do more damage and be more efficient than everything else.

28:35 • Brooks
Players do not really care about. Players care about having a level of creativity and about doing other things within it and having their favorite archetype, their favorite spells, their favorite things. That’s what people care about, and Blizzard put this out and it crushed it. I will tell you right now, what crushes every magic circle is if someone can pay their f*****g rent because that is all that matters. If I play Diablo, and it will pay my rent for me, I will play Diablo so it pays my rent. That’s better than McDonald’s. It is better than a lot of things. Suddenly, the magic circle is almost irrelevant inside of the games as we know them because ultimately, we have a problem now. We need to figure out how to solve this. I need to pay my rent too. I am a game developer.

29:20 • Brooks
Tom has to pay his rent. He is a finance guy. Dendi, my buddy, if you’re not a fan of Dota, he’s a very cool dude and a very nice player. Bait is a wonderful Dota team; follow them. They are great. He needs to pay his rent too. We all need to pay our rent. Welcome to the world we live in. Video games, themselves through all this history, have always relied on financing from somewhere: from gamers, venues, investors, whatever it may be. Right now, players are the perpetual financiers. They play with money, and that money gives the cashflow. Whales have the startup capital, and we lie to them. We tell them that they are good at their games. We tell them that they are actually skilled when they’re f*****g not.

30:04 • Brooks
We tell them these things and we pretend as developers that that’s okay. Then, the people who spend hours and hours playing, we thank them because, effectively, they are content for the whales. If players are content and financing, what the hell do we do now? Tough place for us. Let us take a look back. Let’s go back to the magic circle because here’s this magic circle of what I would say is the modern game. As someone who’s played a lot of these mobile games especially, I run into this. Anyone recognize anything that may be a part of the magic circle from some crypto games? For sure. Basically, we’ve made gamers care about market forces and the social world when they just want to play. With market-minded people, they’re forced to care about orgs. That seems odd. What if instead of having this broken circle, what if we solidified it? Ramified it. Give it strength. Make sure that inside of the game everything is there.

31:13 • Brooks
All this stuff goes around the outside, but maybe I don’t how I phrased these. Maybe we can change and actually talk about the financial game that is actually being played, where people care about smarter investments, where they talk about how much risk they’re able to take. “What time does the Asian market open? I have got to be there when that happens.” “Wait, about those NFTs – who has got the data on what’s selling?” “Well, my portfolio is not doing as well as Tom’s. Is it because I don’t have as much money? Or is it because Tom is smarter than I am?” This feels like its own magic circle. In order to see what we do next, we would need a technology, and it would have to be something that existed to enable a ramifying of interactions and affirmations.

32:01 • Brooks
Ideally, in the Nietzschean sense of affirmation of the distance between financial capital in an abstracted form and the core of human experience in the form of play. Actually, I could probably name this section, “Crypto is a thing.” Technically, this really comes before section three because let us talk for a second about what crypto actually is. Hey, it’s a Fluf. It is an NFT. Are NFTs art? Walter Benjamin was a wonderful writer from once upon a time. He talked about how the digital reproduction, or reproduction in general, is destroying art. To him, the ability to take a photo of a piece is not the same as the piece itself. The piece itself has what he called an aura; the idea that it had a feeling. I was recently watching Billions and there’s a scene where Paul Giamatti is talking with someone and he’s like, “ I’m pretty sure it was the real thing.”

33:01 • Brooks
…They say, “No. Rich people put the fake ones up. The real ones they put in storage.” He’s like, “No. There’s a feeling you get when you are in the presence of the real one. I felt that.” That’s the aura. We get that. We do not get that from digital things. No matter how much we may think we do. It is not really how it works. If there is an example of that, it is these people who I hate, and I’m sure I have a few of you here, a few of you watching this. Nothing like someone filming a concert in front of you or an entire audience. It is not the same as being at the concert. That is why we’re there and paid for tickets. We know this. NFTs are interesting. They serve really one purpose. They’re not art, the NFT at least. They are not items. They are not a thing. They are this embodiment of actual existence in time and space.

33:51 • Brooks
Their aura itself added to a digital thing that has none. Not to get too wonky and nerdy, but there is no such thing as an original JPEG. JPEGs aren’t even pictures. They are technically decoded lines that are processed as they go through. There is no photo sitting on your hard drive. We know this. The first photo you have ever saved from Photoshop, that image you may have on your phone somewhere. That is not even the same image. It is a different version of it that has been copied and copied and the original erased. We have a digital world where all that is lost. The NFT is a weird one though because it makes this moment, this digital thing, have permanence, have reality inside of time and space. NFTs are weird. NFTs are strange like that. Crypto itself, all of this, is enforced by this larger smart contract system. I am not going to explain how smart contracts work.

34:47 • Brooks
I would be dumb. That is not what I’m here for, but it’s important to know this is how NFTs are regulated. This is a series of mechanics that dynamically come together to create an aesthetic, almost a like game. Let’s talk about what NOR is. NOR is my project. This is the first time people are hearing about it. When this goes live, this is going to be it. This is our announcement. We have not told anyone about it except people under severe NDA. Thank all of you, by the way, for being those people. First rule we know and what NOR is: play requires an unbroken magic circle. There are not exceptions. Yes, you’re allowed to whatever games you like. This is not saying they are not games. They are games. They are not play. There is a difference. There’s just a difference. It is not a new idea. This is not some crazy thing that I am making up out of stuff.

35:38 • Brooks
We’ve lived this with sports for our entire lives and beyond our parents’ lives as well. There is no such thing as money in soccer. Now, there’s money around soccer, but it flows around the game. It does not change play. On the pitch, no one has to worry about whether or not they’re going to eat dinner that night. They may worry about that later, but the people who are good – it’s actually how sports works – if you have your head in the game, if you are not focused on the outside world, if your eyes on the ball, whatever s****y sports reference you want to use, it’s about knowing that magic circle is important. Keeping that thing tight. Keeping that thing set up. FIFA, as an example, has extremely strict rules about how every single one of their uniforms needs to be. Famously, a few years ago, I think it was Cameroon pictured here…

36:34 • Brooks
…Used a one-piece outfit instead of following these guidelines, and people, including the leaders of FIFA, lost their s**t. You have to submit your uniforms to FIFA in order to have them in play, and somehow someone had approved them, but maybe the guy at the top hadn’t. It was this huge controversy over the slight style change in a single piece of fabric. This is because, to FIFA, there is nothing more sacrosanct than keeping that space clean. That keeps the finance out of soccer. I know FIFA is famously not a group of people who are greedy and only after money and only care about money and do not care about the game at all. I’m sure there’s nobody inside of soccer who would say otherwise. I’m saying I would like us to be maybe ethically better than FIFA because this is not how video games really work.

37:29 • Brooks
By the way, let us go back. StarCraft, as a real sport and the idea of e-sports in South Korea was the same thing. The magic circle was intact. There was no micro-trans. Go take a look at how StarCraft 2 is doing versus the original StarCraft. It is not a thing. For us it is simple: NOR is free games. Not free-to-play; free as in beer, as in, “If you see me and you like the games, buy me a beer. That would be nice. I mean come on.” We are not going to charge. We are not going to set it up. We are not going to have any of that s**t. We hate it. We are players who hate it. We are developers who hate it. We think the magic circle is important because we want games that mean something to a person. With that though, Rule #2 for us is flow depends on skill and challenge and freedom from distractions.

38:23 • Brooks
This is a tougher one because I have a lot of friends who work at these companies, but there’s nothing in Battlefield running up against Santa Claus, or a hot dog shooting at Batman, shooting at Spiderman. These outfits in all of this are micro-transactions that utilize your love of an IP and your love of being silly to add things to a game that actually are just distractions. That is all they are. We know this because in video games we understanding of a thing called silhouette theory. The way it works is when you’re playing a video game, it’s important that every single bit of information you’re getting, especially in fast games like the ones I just showed you ,give you all the info as you’re playing so that imminently and immediately that who you’re up against team fortress.

39:17 • Brooks
Team Fortress, the example here, is so good at it. At least they were. You can see from each one of these guys what they’re supposed to do, but damn right you can recognize and tell them apart at a glance, just from their silhouette – you don’t even need their colors. Now, compared to Overwatch, you can tell a lot of information from the pure silhouette of the Heavy versus the Zarya. Again, I love Overwatch, but which direction is she facing? Does she have a weapon? Which way is he facing and does he have a weapon? It is even clear in black and white, but let’s make it a slightly more obvious contrasted play. I still cannot tell anything about the character on the right. It turns out her gun is pointing that way, and Heavy is going to kill you. The ability to see that stuff is instantaneous.

40:04 • Brooks
It is required inside of these games to have. To identify these characters in Team Fortress, it takes you a second, and that is the difference between life and death in all of these games. For us, it means no micro-transactions, no vanity items inside of the gameplay itself, and no purchase pathways in the games at all. For players, they are not going to spend money. I know it sounds weird, but I do mean that. I’m quite serious when I say that. There’s just no way; they can’t. It is not an option. What do we do about our whales, though? Because whales exist to spend money. How do we handle them? What do we do? Because really, we’ve trapped them inside of our magic circle. All of you whales who love the marketplace, the metagame, the playing with things, the testing all the meta storylines and how to buy this or do that.

41:01 • Brooks
How do we treat you? For us, it is simple. We want you out of our magic circle and we want you into your own. We moved the financial game itself to its own magic circle, so gaming within both circles is affirmed. I was not talking this entire time about video game players who sit on an Xbox. I am talking about people. Anyone who interacts with this is playing. We consider everyone who touches this a player. That includes the financial side of it. Of course, take Eve online as an example and tell me right now that the people who play that game and are into the financial side are not players. Of course they are. So we have our two circles. We separate them. We call them the games and the market, and we want to make them both fun, but we need them to be separated, set out a little differently, and yet, utilizing crypto, tied together.

41:50 • Brooks
We do some really fun stuff. On the one side, It is easy; players play the games. Wonderful. Easy. Done. The other side, we are going to have land. We are going to have people trading NFTs, buying and staking tokens, destroying other people in the marketplace – all the things that make the game of the market really exciting. To get there though, I want to talk about a country in the Philippines, a wonderful Philippines country. I love it. One of the things that’s really interesting about what happened there is there’s this product that’s come out. This was a few years ago. Coconuts. Once upon a time, people in the Philippines would have these wonderful farms and on it would be coconut trees. People from the West would visit and they’d be like, Oh my God I love coconuts. These are so f*****g good.” They’d buy coconuts for a reasonable price and they’d come back. Someone in the West was actually like, “What I’d love to do is I’d love to buy lots of coconuts at once.”

42:46 • Brooks
So, they started importing coconuts, and coconuts have taken over in the West. A few years ago, coconut water was literally everywhere. This is all came from Southeast Asia. People were buying all of these awesome coconuts, but, at some point, they realized, “I know you own the farm that you’re selling me these coconuts on, and I know you are producing these coconuts. I’d like to buy the farm, and then I’ll rent the farm back to you. I will make a few changes perhaps, and then you can sell me those coconuts, and I will pay you. Do not worry. Completely fair wages. You will be fine.” Prior to selling the farm, these people had perfectly fine livings and were able to feed themselves from the farms they lived on. This larger farming became monocultural. Everything was torn down and replaced with coconuts on the vast majority of these farms.

43:37 • Brooks
Suddenly, the people who, once upon a time, actually owned the ability for them to feed themselves and who were selling these coconuts, now don’t. Of course, now that they have no bargaining power, the price of coconuts has fallen precipitously, and they were getting paid less and less for the same amount of work, ultimately. As this happens over time, there’s actually a coming coconut crisis. It is a big challenge for a lot of us because, as we look at the world of the Philippines and things that come from the Philippines, we should remember the coconut. Coconut trees, it turns out, only live for about 15-20 years before they really stop harvesting. As we have those coconuts not really showing up anymore, all these people who, we were so happy that we were able to rent land to them so that they could produce coconuts that we could buy,…

44:29 • Brooks
…Won’t have a farm to work on because there is not going to be any more coconuts. For us, we don’t like the idea of selling coconuts. We don’t like the idea of renting coconuts. To us, we want our NFTs to be real. We want our NFTs to matter. We want play to be the fuel. For us, we want the economy to run free. We want all of this to run free. We are a DAO first. Everyone owns a piece, everyone who takes part in this. We want to DeFi to be really the center ethos of how this works, and we call it what we’re doing not play-to-earn, but PlayFi. The idea of an economy that is a game is something that is not new. Every video game that has ever made an economy side is something that economists adore. The economy itself plays like one.

45:20 • Brooks
We talk about it as if it is one, so why not ramify that magic circle? Why not give them that game? Why not build a city with land, with people in it, with NFTs that are allowing all that to happen and have play be at the center of all of it? Now, “Wait, wait, wait,” you may be saying, “Brooks, you earlier said NFTs are this odd digital thing, and auras, what the f**k you just said they’re real. How are you doing that?” For us, we are talking about NFTs this whole time. For us, NFTs are players. Every player gets one. Everyone is unique and it is wholly controlled by that person. It’s ready to be traded, staked, thrown together for a team, however the f**k they want to run together and however we design those contracts and those contracts are allowing them to play. For us, the NFTs are not for the sake of a market.

46:06 • Brooks
The NFTs themselves matter unto themselves. We are letting NFTs connect people with the thing they actually care about instead of forcing them to overlap and cloud with a different circle, with a circle they don’t give a s**t about. No one in finance should give a s**t about orcs, and someone who’s killing orcs shouldn’t worry about whether or not they’re eating dinner that night. Every player of both circles should have a chance to play their game without being tricked into playing someone else’s. For NOR, it’s easy: players are the NFTs. Any player in any circle owns their data and their self, totally. That’s how it’s supposed to work. That’s the ethos of crypto, at least what I was told. Oh wait, wait, wait. I know what anyone here is thinking, “Where’s the player risk?” If I’m going to be throwing in my ETH into this…

47:00 • Brooks
…That’s a huge risk. I’ve got a whole bunch of things I’m doing. Sure, I’m not worried about whether or not I’m making rent, but it’s still a risk. I am taking that risk. How do we do anything with it? Well that’s easy. For players, it’s easy. Death is forever. We burn your f*****g NFT. That’s it. When you die, you die. The physical real-world matters. When Messi goes out on that pitch, he is not able to play a hundred games that day. The reason that game matters is because Messi chose to play it, because the great players chose to play it. Michael Jordan chose to play it because he can play a game a day. Two games a day would be a hell of a thing for any athlete. It beats the s**t out of your body because we’re real. Let’s bring that to games. It’s the last step.

47:46 • Brooks
It’s the last little thing that really matters. We’ve taken games away from the arcade where my skill, my time,and my effort is the embodiment. Let’s return to it. In order to make winning mean something, losing has to mean everything. Thank you for letting me talk to you today about NOR. Please join our website. We’re sending out newsletters. We’re really excited about what we’re doing. I am here for the remainder of the time as Tom or anyone else may want to ask questions or may want to talk about any of this.

48:20 • Tom
Brooks, that was a phenomenal presentation. It goes without saying how much expertise you have here. I think we’re all blown away and we’re still digesting. I had a few questions from our chat. One from someone inside Delphi who’s known publicly as Coalie Bee. He wanted to know what you think made World of Warcraft so great back in the day.

48:44 • Brooks
‘Back in the day’ I’m going to assume you’re saying ‘vanilla’. There’s a nature to content-based games, and there’s a division between. It’s tough for me to get into. Here’s a high-level version: games work because of their mechanics. The mechanics are defined by, as I said, it’s the whip, the movement, things like that. The dynamics of these things are what ultimately give us the emotion as we respond. When we have content in a game, content can play the role of those things. An example would be Uncharted. For example, Uncharted has times when I’m shooting things, but for the vast majority it’s hyperlinear; the mechanics are simplified and I’m just moving through. The content inside of that game is what gives those things meaning: the images, the way I have to move, the things I have to do. In Diablo and in World of Warcraft…

49:34 • Brooks
…and a lot of looter shooters, the dynamic is actually the craziness of all of those different items you can get, the different ways they can interact, the mathematics, the min-maxing. I played Warhammer for a little while. If you’ve ever been a Warhammer player, this is the world you live in where it’s literally trying to get that extra two damage, that extra four damage, that extra three armor, or whatever it may be. These are the dynamics that produce the emotion. The problem with doing it as content, which is what they did, i.e. this armor set is this, this armor set is that – at some point, you need more s**t because people figure out what works and what doesn’t. That subscription model of World of Warcraft, inevitably, like all of these games that utilize items that have stat changes, any game that does this necessarily ends up on this weird ladder where either people burn through all of the content, and they figure out min-maxing, which things are the best for their class/their creative field, whatever it may be.

50:30 • Brooks
The other side being that you keep churning and you create content. Ultimately, the dynamic place you’re playing in requires new. It never stops. It’s an easy thing with a person. It’s the difference between chess and World of Warcraft, for example. I’ve never ever cared about really the chess set I’m playing on. I’m not sure if I’ve ever given a s**t that it’s red, blue, black, white, wood, ivory, metal, ice. Chess is chess and go is go. These games have a timelessness to them because they give that dynamic nature without the other side. Those games rely wholly on content, and content needs to be continually pushed. At some point, the fun dynamics of how a rogue moves is supplanted by the overtly complex nature of the 900 different items a rogue can have, which means that the people who give a s**t are the people who can handle having thousands of stats on their screen at the same time. I’m not one of those people I left after Burning Crusade.

51:33 • Tom
Makes sense. Brooks, in your presentation and a key part of NOR is the idea of permadeath. We’ve spoken about this at length offline. When I first met you, I was like, “I would never want to play and lose all of my gear.” When you told me the story about how much time people would spend to accumulate things and how it would actually matter if you can lose it, and how people around the world would want to watch people put that time and energy up in something like a stadium to potentially lose it, how did you come about the idea of using permadeath within NOR?

52:05 • Brooks
My favorite movie from the eighties is the Running Man. It sounds silly because it’s a terrible film and it’s a wonderfully terrible film. It knows what it is. I like movies that know what they are when they’re that kind of weird, cheeky, odd thing. The world of the Running Man as a thing is one where people basically (and let’s do some inferences here): when Arnold Schwarzenegger is thrown in there and we have the gladiators going after him, the seekers, Arnold has actually worked his whole life to get in that position. If they put in someone weak, for example, no one gives a s**t about that game. It’s actually the early plot point of why they pick Arnold, why they do this, they find him, they end up framing him, all this. They need someone who’s a badass. They need someone to get ratings.

52:50 • Brooks
They need someone for people to give a s**t about. Now, it’s a cynical joke, but it’s not wrong. We only really care about watching people who’ve got 1. something on the line but 2. have reached that point where they have the high skill versus the high challenge. We want to watch that. If you’ve ever watched Speedrunning, if you’ve ever watched Twitch, feel free to watch someone who is over-skilled playing a game that is boring. That’s not fun, ever. You want to watch someone who’s playing the crazy thing against the crazy thing. If I take that and I add it to the fact that really what’s the Running Man is about underneath it all is that Arnold Schwarzenegger is a strong, badass soldier guy who has trained his whole life, and now all of that training is on the line. The reason it’s exciting for us as a fictional audience watching a fictional movie made up by people in a fictional world is because we don’t know what that outcome’s going to be.

53:43 • Brooks
That’s the exciting, because it’s final. We know when someone dies in that. It’s done. We’ve gone away from that in video games. How many times can you watch a person play Fortnite and not care when they die? Despite the weird rage build up that some streamers may pretend to have, I’ve played a lot of video games, and I don’t rage very often. Games and death matter less unless they matter totally. Rust is one of my favorite video games of the last decade. I have too many hours, and also I recommend no one play it. I call it the a*****e simulator. It’s not a fun game for people, but when you die in that game, you lose everything. That is it. You respawn as a naked human with a rock and a torch, and it is frustrating and emotional,…

54:35 • Brooks
…And I care about losing. I care about running. I am able to get in that head space. If we can marry these two things and play with the idea of seasonal or global times where people practice, they play, we have our games, and they’re set up not dissimilarly to sports, but at some point, people have to decide to go in and choose: am I willing to put it all on the line? Die a million times in our practice games; we don’t give a s**t. Practice tennis at the club with a robot that shoots balls at you. No one’s going to watch. No one cares. Practice. Ideally, like Michael Jordan, practice more than you actually play because that’s how you get better. That is how sports works. That is how life works, so we need to allow that. At some point, we need to give people the chance to really put it on the line, and to do so…

55:22 • Brooks
…Everything needs to be on the line. If Michael Jordan could play 20 games in a day, would you give a s**t about watching any of it?

55:30 • Tom
That’s great color, Brooks. One question we had come up from Jose Macedo, who is our Head of Labs, was that he loves the idea of NFTs giving meaning by virtual death? He would love to know your thoughts on using VR as the medium. How will the meaning of owning an NFT as a player change when you could embody that NFT in VR and what do you think death means in VR as well?

55:55 • Brooks
I worked in VR for a few years. My piece that you mentioned, Hero, that won Tribeca and Sundance, was a VR piece; an interactive walk-around, unreal based thing, 40 by 40 square foot room ,a VR headset. I tend to be a very big believer in the idea of how we play within ourselves, especially in VR. One of my favorite VR experiences that has ever existed, (and I can never recall the name whenever I mention this) it is two VR headsets. Each one has a webcam on it of sorts that is tied into the other one. You, as a man, and a woman on the other side behind curtains disrobe. You wear your underwear and you put the headset on. When you go out, you’re actually in a woman’s body, a tiny petite woman, or for this poor girl, a giant, hairy, overweight guy. The weirdness of being inside someone else’s body and how you then treat not just yourself but those around you is powerful.

56:52 • Brooks
It is a unique part of the VR medium. The way you approach how you behave is determined by how you think other people are seeing you. There’s a very complex process that produces your reactions, that produces you inside of everything. The ability for me to play around and switch or play with an NFTs – is there’s a lot there. Specifically with NOR though, we’re big on the idea of fungibility in personality. The NFT embodies me at any given time, and I am generally Brooks. It should behave not like the real world, in my opinion. This is pure opinion. I don’t actually have any weird theory like I do for the arts stuff to back this up. My ability to play around and explore who I am is sacrosanct for the digital world, to me. Once upon a time, I enjoyed being on 4chan,…

57:46 • Brooks
…I enjoyed being in these weird, anonymous parts of the world. There is a lot of harm that can be done in all of those places. I will not say otherwise, but the beauty of digital is that I don’t have to be who I am, and that the idea of identity is able to shift. I would love to see us embracing that more and embracing exploration of ourselves through these things. The ability for the NFT to embody that and be my digital persona, as you saw in NOR, for us, a person owning their data and owning themselves, having that level of uniqueness and having that level of self-control is absolutely important to the entire process as well.

58:21 • Tom
That’s awesome color, Brooks.

01:00:10 • Tom
One more question from Ryan Foo on our gaming side, he asks, “In your view, why did StarCraft 2 not reach the same zenith as StarCraft given that there is also no magic circle around gameplay? Also, why has this not changed since Blizzard made it free?”

01:00:26 • Brooks
They made it free-ish. There is a very interesting scandal around StarCraft Remastered, specifically in Korea. I would say StarCraft 2 never took off in the states. They all sold, we all played it, that is great, it is a normal game. They never hit the levels because PC bang owners who bought StarCraft in the late nineties who actually bought a legit copy, (most of them didn’t), at some point they still bought a copy per person. StarCraft Remastered and StarCraft 2 changed their business model from a purchase to a rent. You actually have to pay them per hour that someone’s playing StarCraft Remastered versus a single purchase, so these things didn’t take off. It’s a matter of financial cultural changes that have moved over here, “Oh, we are fine. $50 game? Sure. I will give you a $10 for skins on top of it…

01:01:19 • Brooks
…Also, a $70 f*****g expansion pack. A hundred dollars for the collector’s edition. Is that a black outfit? Yes. I will pay you a thousand.” For some reason, we are very cool with that. PC bang owners sued Blizzard over the push to actually charge them per hour. To them, the ability for a person to come in, and it’s a cafe – this isn’t someone renting StarCraft. This is someone renting a computer, getting food, having a social experience, was important to their experience. There is a reason StarCraft is still absolutely the biggest thing over there. It is because of it’s access. Free-to-play did some amazing things for the world. I am not s******g on it. There are a lot of really good parts. Free games is the thing it did. It changed how we dealt with that. Dota 2 is an amazing story around all of that because I mean all these free to play games….

01:02:11 • Brooks
…My buddy, Dendi, is a great example. He does not come from a wealthy family. He is from Levive* in Ukraine. He is not from some rich family. He and his brother, they would go to the local PC cafe, and the original Dota was a Warcraft expansion that everyone pirated Warcraft. Again, free, because that’s the nature of the late nineties; people didn’t pay for a lot of s**t, in case you have not seen the documentary on Napster. The way it worked is he played, but so did a lot of people. Now, you go watch the international, any year in Dota. My buddy, Marites, does the documentaries for a lot of those and flies to places. You know where he is not flying? He is not flying to Manhattan Beach in LA. He is not flying to Manhattan in New York. He’s not flying to Hong Kong, downtown. He is flying to poor areas because how it works, by the law of large numbers, is that the best players don’t have a lot of money because most people don’t have a lot of money.

01:03:05 • Brooks
So, the ability for free-to-play games to reach them, to run on the cheapest stuff,to be at these PC bangs* that are part of these social experiences, changed how people engaged and made them sports. We do not have that in the States because everything here is paid. If I had to pay $500 to play soccer with my son the first time we ever went out instead of grabbing a beach ball and kicking it in the backyard, which is how he started playing his first game of soccer, would I ever? No.Rich people would. People with money would, but soccer is literally a democratized sport because you just grab a ball and kick it. This is how games are meant to be. That is the beauty of what we did get from free-to-play.

01:03:51 • Tom
Brooks, just to round out the permadeath idea, I think there’s been a lot of talk in the past about why hardcore PvPs failed, right? How do you think NFTs, crypto gaming, and NOR changes this or addresses this issue?

01:04:07 • Brooks
For us, the ability to add players as that point of data and give them control of when they enter what we might call ‘mortality,’ let’s just say everyone in our space/in our world is an immortal for the most part, and at some point you get to choose to enter the space of mortality. When you’re playing, the ability to just play and do it over and over, the game doesn’t have to be hardcore. The game needs to be good. It needs to be skill-based. It needs to not rely on microtransactions or weird min-maxing, but instead reliant on the ability for me to judge as I move, “Should I be hitting space bar? What is happening? Should I be shooting?” All of those fun things. That line, to make that hardcore by turning on permadeath, is something that you can’t do in a lot of games. I don’t actually know of a lot of ways to enable ultra-hardcore in a way that’s going to have the same pool of players that I practice with move over to that space.

01:05:02 • Brooks
It is difficult. Take one of my favorite more hard games, Rust. Rust has a hardcore mode. It is the whole game there. There isn’t really an option there. Diablo players who play hardcore don’t mix with normies. These things are designed to be hardcore in their mechanics. For us, the game mechanics should be sacrosanct. The player should be the thing that gets turned on to be hardcore. It is one of the big changes we make and one of the big switches is we remove from the game hardcore-ness, and it becomes the player. Again, just like sports, Shaq plays basketball with his friends. Do you think he plays hard? No, but he practices with them and he plays. Some he probably plays very hard with. The way basketball works, the hardcore mode is when it’s the f*****g finals in the NBA. That’s hardcore mode. That matters. The meaning around the game necessitates tha. The economy around the game necessitates that. The player is what makes that hardcore.

01:06:08 • Brooks
My knowledge of them and how important this game is to them makes it hardcore. He is playing basketball the same way I play basketball. That is probably giving myself too big of a f*****g compliment, but it’s the same overall basketball that we’re playing. It is the same soccer. It is the same football. It is the same chess. It is the same Go. It is the same Dota. I play with Dendi. I play Dota. It is the same Dota. Why can’t it be the same ‘everything’?

01:06:33 • Tom
Brooks, I can barely shoot a basketball, so I think we should play together.

01:06:38 • Brooks
Anytime.I would love to play against you. Trust me.

01:06:43 • Tom
I can’t find my way forward on that one. Brooks, everyone from Delphi seriously appreciates you coming on and sharing your knowledge and your vision and the accumulated insight you have over being so involved in the space for so long. We are thrilled to have you on as the first Disruptors by Delphi guest, and we really appreciate your time today.

01:07:04 • Brooks
Thank you again for having me and thanks again for all your support.

DISRUPTORS: Redefining Immersion, Play, and Game Economies with Brooks Brown