Infinite Games: How Crypto Is ‘LARPing’
Kelsie Nabben
December 14, 2021 (as published in CoinDesk)
Crypto communities are playing a big series of “live action role playing games,” and they’re changing how we organize and interact across digital and physical spaces.
At the 2018 “Devcon” Ethereum Developers Conference in Prague, internet guru and self-proclaimed “culture hacker” Stewart Brand shared the book that changed his life: “Finite and Infinite Games” by philosophy scholar James Carse.
“Infinite players look forward, not to a victory … but towards ongoing play,” states the book as an analogy to pushing cultural boundaries and hacking society to pursue serious goals, with a playful approach. Crypto communities are doing just this, and changing economics, policy and culture as they go.
The global cryptocurrency market cap is $2.3 trillion. El Salvador has made bitcoin legal tender, challenging the role of traditional international money lending banks. Meanwhile, it’s all a big live action role-playing (LARP) game for high-profile crypto engineers, such as the Ethereum Foundation core developer team, which has opened multiple conferences by dancing and rapping, to remind the community to not take themselves too seriously and just keep on playing the game.
In crypto, we know that life and death are in the power of the meme. Memes are fragments of culture that stick in your head to propagate ideas. Memes are a communication device, they are signals that can move markets, and they can also be the life or death of a project. The latest meme in crypto is “LARPing.”
Read more at the initial publication on CoinDesk.
