Like holographic Charizards on steroids, rarer Axies sell for eye-watering figures: In 2020, someone shelled out $130,000 in cryptocurrency to secure the ownership of a portly, winged angel Axie. The game isn’t about the game, though it’s about the economy. Represented by NFTs, players’ Axies battle to win cryptocurrency tokens, which can in turn be used to breed new critters. Then in 2019 Catdicax chanced upon Axie Infinity, a blockchain-based video game where players collect and level up collectible Pokémon-like virtual pets, called Axies. It felt like a waste of labor, a fruitless grind, to work so hard for Runescape’s digital axes or cloaks. And it paid off: After 10 years of playing, she had amassed a menagerie of high-end relics.Įventually, though, Catdicax became restless. For Catdicax, a Finnish woman now in her 30s, the online fantasy role-playing game Runescape was a place where she could obtain more and more in-game items through hard work and time.

Video games are about power fantasies, the conventional wisdom goes: Fight enough dragons to reach level 99, sell enough wolf skins to buy a gaudy gold cape, and become rich or strong or accomplished in the world of the game-even if you aren’t in real life.

The escapist youtube