How Play-to-Earn (P2E) is Impacting Online Gaming and the Crypto Community

William Higginbottom, a physicist, created what is widely regarded as the very first video game in 1958, and the world has not looked back since. It was a simple tennis game and won plaudits at the Brookhaven National Laboratory’s open house. Higginbottom’s game slowly morphed into a number of other games, and the video-gaming industry started booming. Virtual gaming started in the 1960s with games such as Spacewar, which focused on solo gameplay. However, by the 1970s, the trend shifted towards the incorporation of a social component to the competitive experience of gaming, fuelled by the explosion of arcade gaming. Arcade gaming was instrumental in that it allowed players competing for bragging rights at the same game to do so in the same setting. Virtual games thus built on this popularity, evolving to enable players to interact with each other primarily through competition and collaboration. This new level of interaction inevitably attracted more gamers, and developers started embedding multiplayer game logic at the core of their products. The Dawn of P2E In 1984 the Islands of Kesmai, allowing up to 100 people to play simultaneously, was released, paving the way for multiplayer-driven virtual games. The collapsing prices of computer networking in the 1990s and the increasing adoption of personal computers further accelerated the prevalence of multiplayer-driven virtual games. Early games such as Second Life and EverQuest ...