ABHIA FATMA

I opened Pixels because someone said it wasnt like the others and I knew that was probably a lie but I opened it anyway. This was maybe six months ago or eight months. Time does this thing in crypto where nothing happens for weeks and then suddenly a year passed.
Its a farming game. You plant stuff. You walk around. Other people are there doing the same thing and theres this whole world that keeps going whether youre logged in or not. The first thirty minutes I kept waiting for the catch. Wheres the part where this asks me to recruit five friends. Wheres the unsustainable APY. Wheres the moment it reveals itself as the thing I thought it was.
It didnt come. Or maybe it did and I just didnt recognize it yet.
The weird part is that Pixels lives on Ronin which is the network that Axie Infinity built because Ethereum couldnt handle all those transactions. Ronin exists because of extraction at scale. Because of millions of people in the Philippines grinding away their eyesight for three dollars a day until the whole model collapsed. So when you tell me theres a casual farming game on that same infrastructure I dont know what Im supposed to do with that information.
The game feels almost embarrassed about being Web3. Theres a token called PIXEL and theres NFT land and guilds and all the usual stuff but its tucked away. You can play for hours without really thinking about it. Plant some berries. Chop some wood. Sell it to an NPC or another player. Its fine. Its pleasant even in that empty way mobile games are pleasant.
But I keep circling back to what the farming is actually for.
In the old browser games the farming was just a loop. You did it because the numbers went up and the numbers going up felt like progress even though it wasnt progress toward anything. In play-to-earn the farming was work. You did it because it generated tokens you could sell and the whole thing was just labor with extra steps. But in Pixels I cant figure out what the farming is. Its not quite a game loop because theres no real goal. Its not quite work because the yields are too small to matter. Its something in between and I dont think theres a word for it yet.
Maybe thats the point. Maybe the in-between is where these things actually survive. Not successful enough to attract the locusts. Not dead enough to shut down. Just ticking along with a few thousand people who check in every day for reasons they probably couldnt articulate if you asked them.
I think about the people who bought land in there. Not the flippers but the ones who actually built something on it. Decorated it. Spent time on it. What are they farming. What are they getting out of this. Theres no status to it really. No one outside the game knows or cares. The tokens worth whatever it is but not enough to change your life. So why.
This is what I keep getting stuck on with all these social Web3 things. The infrastructure works. Ronin processes the transactions fine. The game runs. People log in. But I cant tell if theres anything actually happening or if were all just watching each other go through motions that used to mean something.
I logged in again last week and my crops were dead. I planted new ones. Someone walked by and waved. I waved back. We both kept walking. The whole thing took maybe five minutes and afterward I sat there thinking about what just happened and I still dont know.
Maybe it matters that Pixels didnt explode. That it didnt have some massive token event that brought in the wrong kind of attention. The games that survive might be the ones that stay small enough that no one bothers to really optimize them to death. Small enough that they can just be whatever they are without needing to justify themselves to investors or communities or people writing thinkpieces about them.
But small also means fragile. It means one bad quarter and maybe the servers dont get paid. It means the developers move on to something else. It means the few thousand people who are there for whatever reason they are there just wake up one day and its gone.
The Ronin infrastructure doesnt care either way. Itll keep running. Itll process transactions for the next thing. Thats what infrastructure does. It outlives the things built on top of it and it doesnt remember them.
I still have my account. I check it sometimes. Plant something. Walk around. Log off. I dont know what Im doing there and I dont think the game knows either. Maybe thats fine. Maybe thats all these things ever were. Just spaces to exist in for a while until we figure out what comes next or until we stop looking for what comes next and just let them be what they are.
I havent figured that part out yet.
@Pixels #pixel $PIXEL

Mi sono connesso a Pixels perché qualcuno mi ha detto che era diverso. Non un altro schema play-to-earn in stato di vita assistita. Non un simulatore di trama del metaverso sovra-progettato che sembra un secondo lavoro. Solo un gioco di agricoltura. Su Ronin. Con token, ma più silenzioso al riguardo rispetto alla maggior parte.
Non mi aspettavo di provare nulla. Ho vissuto abbastanza cicli per riconoscere il modello. Lanciare con autentico fascino e attrarre giocatori che davvero amano il gioco, per poi trasformarsi lentamente in qualsiasi finanziarizzazione mantenga accese le luci. Non è malevolo. È solo quello che succede quando hai bisogno sia di giocatori che di detentori di token e i loro interessi non si allineano mai completamente.