Loot lets you build a game character… for no game

The Future. A blockchain stunt called Loot is testing both the limits of the NFT market and the creativity of the NFT community. What started as randomly-generated lists of hypothetical adventure-game items has sprung into a thriving world-creation experiment that is now worth hundreds of millions of dollars. What Loot may best demonstrate is that tying blue-sky creation with the ability to make a lot of money can take on a life of its own, thanks to the capabilities of crypto.

NFT your kit
Dom Hofmann — co-creator of Vine, and creator of Peach, Byte, and Blitmap — launched a collection called Loot on the blockchain… and it may be the wildest NFT experiment yet.

• Loot is a collection of 7,777 bags of names of random adventure gear (literally just text lists, which you can see here) that, initially, only cost the transaction fee required on the Ethereum blockchain network.
• Hofmann’s purported goal is that buyers would then mint these bags as NFTs.

And that’s exactly what happened. Within five days, the Loot bags were minted and resold on the market for a combined $46 million, with the collection having a market cap of $180 million. Now, a collection of randomly generated, adventure-game text lists are a multi-million dollar asset.

Gameless gaming
But start looking past the financial speculation, and Loot really gets interesting. Users quickly began to visualize the lists — which included names like “‘Grim Shout’ Grave Wand of Skill +1” and “Divine Hood” — into illustrations via hand drawings of AI-generated pixel art. From there, guilds were created, digital storefronts were constructed, and communities were formed. Users essentially extrapolate item lists into an entire non-existent world.

Again, there is no actual game tied to any of this… yet. That’s the obvious next step. Someone is bound to do it in order to give all of these items (still without characters to actually use the items) a home.

And Hofmann wants to make sure that the average person will be able to participate, so he’s dropping “synthetic Loot” — non-exclusive Loot bags that are free on the blockchain.