A Future Already Past? The Promises and Pitfalls of Cryptogames, Blockchain, and Speculative Play

The article argues that blockchain games, particularly "cryptogames" such as CryptoKitties and Axie Infinity, should be understood as an emerging social practice that uses the framing of play to attract financial speculation. Rather than treating these titles as ordinary games or as examples of gamification, the analysis draws on Huizinga and Caillois to describe them as nested activities that combine play with gambling and speculative finance. Existing concepts such as playbor and modding are judged to fit poorly, because value in these systems is generated through randomized core loops and volatile token markets.

The central findings concern how these economies are structured. Play-to-Earn models are shown to skew toward early speculators and to tend toward Ponzi-like collapse, with Axie Infinity's rapid rise and subsequent loss of value offered as a principal case. Players are described as being pushed into speculative roles by obfuscated, interdependent token systems that make exit difficult and expose participants to financial risk, even as marketing presents participation as voluntary play. Security weaknesses are illustrated by a reported $617 million theft from the Axie Infinity sidechain, which underscores the vulnerabilities of localized blockchains.

The analysis concludes that cryptogame participants are best understood across three overlapping roles: speculators, players, and gamblers. On this account, cryptogames are more accurately classified as gambling or financial speculation than as play, or as work when players earn income, and these distinctions carry practical weight given the cyclical and potentially exploitative character of crypto-finance.

The scholarly and journalistic sources informing this view form a broad consensus. Developers have criticized play-to-earn models as zero-sum, and research on gamblification and labor exploitation supports concerns about financial harm. The discourse around the technology is characterized as highly polarized and promise-driven, a dynamic the analysis treats as central to understanding the field.