As discovered by Massively Overpowered (opens in a new tab)Ultima creator Richard Garriott’s next project, a blockchain MMO previously code-named Effigy, was given an official name, Iron and Magic (opens in a new tab), as well as a website. The site features walkthroughs of a selection of fantasy locales, as well as a supporting store of plots, buildings, and the ability to “buy land in Lord British’s realm.”
In an interview with PC Gamer (opens in a new tab) back in April, Garriott and developer Todd Porter made the case for the game and its blockchain features. Despite some interesting musings about Ultima Online’s digital economy, Garriott and Porter don’t seem to be offering anything you haven’t heard from other NFT developers before: the promise of “owning” your digital assets and “earning” some form of financial compensation from the gaming you do in your spare time, or as Garriott put it, “We certainly do more for the players than just, when they put their money down, they play the game and all they get out of it is 60 hours of fun.”
For those less familiar with Richard Garriott, he is best known as the creator of the Ultima series in the 80s, an important piece of gaming history and somewhat of a “last common ancestor” of Western RPGs and JRPGs, as well as a decisive role. influence on MMOs and immersive sims through spinoffs Ultima Online and Ultima Underworld. His Lord British persona was a consistent presence in these classic games.
Garriott’s Black & White series of god simulators was also highly regarded, but his more recent MMO efforts, Tabula Rasa and Shroud of the Avatar, ran into problems. Tabula Rasa was shut down around a year and a half after launch, and SotA’s initial Kickstarter success gave way to a sequence of delays and development overhauls before it quietly died. Garriott himself has made several headlines in recent years by being at the forefront of the “rich guys going to outer space” bandwagon, and he recently traveled to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean (opens in a new tab).
It is a difficult time to launch a digital world of blockchain-backed real estate. (opens in a new tab), with Bitcoin and Ethereum plummeting in value and so-called stablecoins fluctuating in a decidedly unstable manner. That volatility extends to NFT property: Cointelegraph reports (opens in a new tab) that six of the largest Ethereum-based metaverse projects with digital asset purchases as promised by Iron and Magic saw an 85% drop in the average price of these assets in recent months. Plus, unlike real estate, you can’t do cool things like barbecue or play frisbee golf on your suddenly worthless plot of digital land.
Beyond questions of financial wisdom or tangibility, figures such as former Greek finance minister and Valve intern economist Yanis Varoufakis (opens in a new tab)as well as Brazilian game developer Mark Venturelli (opens in a new tab) have made convincing philosophical arguments against these initiatives’ promises of decentralization and the dystopian notion of “play to earn”. No matter how you slice it, I’m not inclined to buy land in Lord British’s realm.
