We created a web3 game and asked our players if it was OK to burn their character tokens if they died.

On-chain permadeath.

Complete loss of main game assets, the polar opposite of play to earn. Play to Burn.

They overwhelmingly agreed, signing up for it in the ‘choose your difficulty setting’ DAO vote.

Web3 games are in their infancy but are at the cutting edge of how game experiences of the future will play out. Most of the value proposition and roadmap for successfully web3 games is the ability to earn from in-game assets (see Axie Infinity and any graph associated with them being up and to the right).

It is more than ownership over game assets that is exciting; we explore how the combination of emerging web3 tools can be the future of gaming. The ownership, social and organizational components of web3 can re-shape how we think about games and game experiences.

#Ownership and raising the stakes

Let’s look at ownership from a different angle. Through a lens of behavioral economics (I used to work in a nudge unit).

The Endowment Effect, the Nobel prize-winning work of Richard Thaler, demonstrates people place extra value on things already in their possession by up to 200%. In other words, people have a bias for things they already own. Losing $10 hurts more than finding a $10 note brings happiness. In fact, losing just $5 hurts as much as gaining $10. (brains are weird). Evolutionarily, this makes sense in a hunter-gather sense.

Read more: https://hackernoon.com/play-to-earn-vs-play-to-burn-vvc35e5