Trying to Sell the Crow Queen in Web3: On the Resistance of Video Gamers to Cryptocurrencies, NFTs and Their Financial Logic

This paper is an encounter between an artist creating characters for video games and an academic studying how people and things are being financialized. Exchanging about the appearance of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and cryptocurrencies – technologies associated with Web3 in the video game industry, the academic, and the artist reflect on the place of playfulness, creation, and finance in our society. They observe that most North American and European players resisted NFTs and cryptocurrencies, while more Asian-Pacific ones embraced the latter. They conclude that those reactions were explained by the fact that gamers perceived cryptocurrencies and NFTs as institutional objects associated with a financial logic, whose presence threatened the gaming logic. As pragmatic friends, they nevertheless issued an NFT with this paper, a “Crow Queen.” Time will tell if the Web3 society will praise this new form of digital joint academic/art production.