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NOR is a platform for play. It’s a fully-realized universe with its own history, its own future, its own economy, and its own natural laws. This is where players compete for coin and glory—and where death truly matters.
Listen in as groundbreaking leaders discuss what they have learned. Discover the books, podcasts, presentations, courses, research, articles and lessons that shaped their journey. Hosted by: Kevin Horek, Gregg Oldring, & Jon Larson.
Gregg Oldring: Welcome to the learner.co show hosted by Kevin horic and his fellow learner co-founders listen in is groundbreaking leaders discuss what they've learned, discover the books, podcasts, presentations, courses, research articles, and lessons that shaped their journey to listen to past episodes and find links to all sources of learning mentioned. Visit learner.co that's learner with two L's dot co.
Kevin Horek: Welcome back to the show today. We have Brooks brown. He's the founder and CEO of consortium nine guys. What are you looking forward to hearing from Brooks today? I know, I know we had them on the show recently and now that his platforms launched, I'm really curious to see what he's building with his gaming platform, John and Greg, what do you guys think?
Jon Larson: Yeah, this is our first follow-up show. The first time we've had a guest on and now we're following up with them on what they, what they teased us with the, in the initial episode. So I'm excited about that. We've gotten to that point and I'm really interested in what they're doing. He's doing something with NFTs and we'll let Brooks explain it. I, I'm always excited about how people are applying at FTS, because I think we're all trying to figure out what that's gonna look like in five years.
Gregg Oldring: Yeah. That's a really great setup, John. It's. It is super interesting and well, Brooks is super interesting right off the bat. So, so it's great that he is such an interesting guy. I hope actually, Kevin, you're able to coach a few more stories out of them as well. Cause I, I I've you've told me that there's some other good ones there, but we'll see. Yeah, I mean the whole NFT is something that we hear a lot these days and not everybody, it's not an easy thing to wrap your head around. Just learning about something new, like that's something that's right on the cutting edge. How do you figure that out and explaining what this is? It's going to be fun looking forward to it.
Jon Larson: I think this will be an exciting episode for our gaming listeners too, because it's a different approach to gaming.
Gregg Oldring: Yeah. You should play a game. You should play a game while listening to this episode.
Kevin Horek: I like it. I like it. Very cool. All right. I want to show Brooks welcome back to the show. Thanks for having me, Kevin. Yeah. I'm excited to have back on the show and kind of do a follow-up the platform is launched now and I'm really excited, announced, okay. Announced. Okay. That's fair enough. I'm really curious to actually dive into that, but I also think it makes sense to maybe give a bit of a background on your career because you've worked and done some amazing things. Do you maybe want to give us a bit of background on yourself and your career and then let's dive into the announcement? Yeah, sort. So the very.
Brooks Brown: Version is I am a person who very early on decided I wanted to be in video games. My brother and I, when were younger, were playing monkey island and monkey island two specifically. I just remember us talking about how this is all we wanted to do. We were, were very young and, I ended up for various reasons not going to college. I was involved with the, was a student at Columbine. It was a really rough high school post high school life for awhile. I didn't respond well, we'll say, but over time I, got into game modding and community moderation and writing and a whole bunch of different things and found my way to actually working at Lucas arts lo and behold, alongside my brother. We both worked on the relaunch of monkey island one and two as remasters. I got to be a pirate in the scum bar, which as far as like my life is concerned, if that's where it ended, I would consider my loop complete.
Brooks Brown: I suppose. That's amazing. While I was at Lucas, I started originally just writing for star wars.com and doing some light web work. Thanks to how they operated when my boss quit, that boss quit my life back-filled into their jobs. Slowly I ended up taking over digital marketing. At some point I started making arguments for more than, 50 grand websites and brochure ware sites. At one point they gave me a large budget for the new Lego star wars game. I got a chance to make a, what they were calling at the time advert games, but a web based demo for Lego star wars that kind of launched my career as my first project I ever really led and won a Webby for best online game, which was a hell of a thing. And I'm still proud of that. Congrats. That's huge. Yeah. I did a whole bunch of really fun stuff and got to work with some amazing people from there, right?
Brooks Brown: As the Disney sale happened, I happened to be putting in my two weeks, I ended up working as a vice-president for James Cameron's light storm entertainment and heading up digital for the avatar franchise for four years, which was a leap to say the least. One of the most extraordinary work experiences anyone could ever have. My, my joke is often that I skipped college and I saved it for a while. I worked for Kathy, John and Jim, because they are, they don't accept. They accept people who need to learn. They don't accept people who can't and to a lot. You have to spend a lot of time, really, really caring about what you do. It is, it was a learning experience from there. When I realized that the avatar films weren't going to be released until 2022, and this was 2016. So few years ago. Starbreeze came along and offered me to take over their us ops, hit up their VR.
Brooks Brown: Some of their us publishing their Hollywood stuff jumped at that chance have always loved VR, ended up releasing 14 games in VR, but particularly I ended up building my thesis about what VR was possible. I've always felt that game emotions have always been treated almost like carnival tricks. We enjoy surprise and shock and terror and all those, carnival jokes, if you've ever been on a roller coaster, that's basically the emotions most games do, but I felt VR could Pierce a lot of that. We built a project called hero where you were in the middle of a marketplace in Syria, and we blew you up and you had to crawl through a burning building and pull rebel off of a little girl as her father begged for her life. It was a 40 by 40 build-out. The Pune was exceptional. We had an amazing partner in that with ink stories who just know how to do storytelling and world building my team managed and built and like physically built a literal set that was 40 by 40 feet with three rooms and, backpack with a headset.
Brooks Brown: You could fully walk around and touch everything like w it was wild. What we did with then we ended up winning Sundance and Tribeca, and that's huge, both of those huge one alone. Went Lumiere for most immersive, which is awesome wild. Around this time my son was born and I was kind of tired of a lot of things. So I took a break. I started consulting and, just wanted to kind of get away from things. I started a company. It failed lots of different things happen in kind of the last few years. About a year ago, I was in a clubhouse room and I started, I have an issue where I don't really like how people about new technology. I had this problem with VR. It made me very few friends in the industry because people lie about what VR and ARe capable of in order to get investment money and drive hype.
Brooks Brown: And crypto is no different. Crypto is if anything, magnified in that problem. About a year ago, I was in a clubhouse room, explaining it to people that NFTs are not actually anything interesting. They're simply a distributed database. They don't function differently than that. If you were pretending there's some panacea to, games, profits, or player rights where all of the garbage that they tend to say, I basically spent three hours in a room called pitch mere NFT game ideas. In that time I was kind of confronted about it. I was fair. I was being an ass, but I started building towards what I have now. I sat back and I learned how to properly code web three. I brushed back up on my Java. I brushed back up on my Python. It'd been a long time since I'd coded, I've moved on to being an executives.
Brooks Brown: Don't work like at best. Maybe you learn how to do some light Excel programming because you have to for presentations. So it's been a long time. In that time, I started to figure out kind of actually how crypto really does function at a code level and that this fantasy of what we understand it as pictures or items, isn't how it functions. It's the same as saying that, CDs are music and there's no such thing, no one will ever be able to put data on them. Like, it's just a really weird way. We've kind of set up the meaning of NFTs. Well, in crypto in general. Right? I started putting together the concept for what has become Nore, which we announced a few weeks ago, and nor is essentially a take on a way I believe we can change the financialization of video games so that players don't have to spend money.
Brooks Brown: Actually aren't able to, none of our games, for example, of any purchase pathways, including being bought, there's no items in a game there's no NFT items or any of that garbage. I believe it's all deeply exploitative. And I, it makes me angry. I have a lot of reasons for that. We have kind of built like I did with hero and my thesis about how VR is capable of larger scale emotions. I'm pretty proud how we proved it with nor my goal is to prove that crypto is not simply more of replicating the way that capitalism works, but instead, an inversion of how capital versus commodity currency operates and that we are actually able to do something that truly shifts how financialization works in entertainment, happy to get into all of that. That's the best I can do as a through line of my life. A lot of other small little stories in there that I always love going into all the point rambling for the next 45 minutes.
Kevin Horek: No, I, I think it's really fascinating. I want to dive deeper into Knorr and how you guys are changing that because we talked about it last time is games are just so complicated now. They, as somebody that used to game heavily, that just doesn't have the time to game heavily anymore. They're just, I find they're so complicated. You're right. You have to buy your way to fun. It kind of just sucks the life out of it. It sounds like you're really trying to solve that problem with Nora. So how are you doing that?
Brooks Brown: It's the way we kind of came to this, I, one of the challenges of a, of things is people forget the cliches. They have there's this line of Savage music. One of my favorite writers talks about there's a famous line from Donald Rumsfeld who says, there's no knowns, there's known unknowns. And then there's unknowns. Like as this old he's mispronouncing an actual line from someone much smarter, but the thing he forgets in the fourth quadrant of kind of that diagram is that there are unknown knowns things that you don't know, you are not aware of, that you actually know the things that craft us on a daily basis, that we do not Cognos, that we don't recognize. For example, we make the assumption that every day when we play any of these free to play games, that there is nothing else more to it than, oh, if I don't spend money it's this is the way it has to be.
Brooks Brown: That game studios have to operate this way. And we start from those positions. People, when they're starting to make a game these days, they tend to decide, okay, is it a premium purchase? Are we going free to play? They don't go what's is there another option? They don't. They can't because it's not really their position. Really the way capitalism has pushed us is over time, the need for free to play games because of some very contingent things feels like an inevitability. When in reality, it's a reaction to effectively piracy free to play came out of Southeast Asia and China because PC bangs are the biggest thing in the world. Essentially PC bangs would buy 40 copies of a game one time, and then never again, and then rent those copies out to people who come into the PC bank and game studios all over the world were just like, well, how do we monetize this?
Brooks Brown: They invented microtransactions in order to counteract this thing that had happened, but they never like thought through, oh, well, there's other implications beyond this. What else? Like, it's just this very strange thing. We make the assumption that it's like a natural evolution of the previous thing for me. If were to separate it all out, what games are and need to be, can actually be separated pretty quickly from any semblance of financialization. My example of this would be soccer. I play soccer with my fi my four year old. Okay. It's literally the same soccer as messy. There's no difference. It's the same. The difference would be sometimes we use a beach ball and obviously I'm the list. He's very much less good than messy. I am less good, but it's the same sport. It's not like I paid money to pay it and play it in my yard.
Brooks Brown: I don't get pinged with social pressures to purchase this or that. Even if I was, if you watch the world cup, you watch these things. Watch the Olympics, watch any of these major sports where people competitively play, which is what sports are. There are excessive rules around uniforms and shoes and outfits and inches of this and materials of that and size of that and color style of this. You're not going to see anyone wearing high tops in a soccer match. As an example, you could in very, if they didn't have the rules, but they do now, why do they have those rules? It is not because FIFA is like a hyper ethical master of morals. They don't give a s**t if they could make money. Like they're awful. The reason they don't do that is because it perverts the game. And they're aware of this.
Brooks Brown: If people at home noticed that you could spend a few extra bucks and have slightly better shoes, then suddenly they're not able to tell what's happening in the game. They're not able to Cognose as an example. Who's the better runner. Who's the better passer. Who's the better kicker because now there's things that edge that, oh, well, he's got better shoes. I can't tell if he has better shoes. So is he really good? Immediately? It starts clouding all of this. It becomes difficult to gauge where skill is at now. Imagine taking that and putting it in a game, but putting it in the game and actually going, Hey, they can't tell how good they are. What we can do with that. We can make a lot of money. Why don't we take these people who have a ton of money? We give them things that make it seem like they're better at the game, right?
Brooks Brown: We take people who don't have money, but play a lot and therefore have high skill and we make it more difficult for them. On both sides, either side, we'll never really know if they're getting better or not. What we can do is we can add little tricks. Zynga was grade this, a lot of casino noises, a lot of dopamine based rewards, a lot of various simplistic things that trick us, the teach us, oh, I'm getting better. Oh, I have improved today. Oh my God. I did all the things I was supposed to do. I checked off all four of those achievements and I got my three extra crystals that enabled me to get my free, stupid little item in the battle. Pass this month. These things, they seem as the way it goes, what they are is they're manipulations of our core desires are they're manipulations of us.
Brooks Brown: And they work both ways. This is not just a oh poor people get screwed, which normally is the case, but rich people, especially. Because they're putting tons of money into a game via manipulation, all of this, I find repugnant and I get that. This is the way people make money. It's like, I don't fault people for that, but I find the concept Republic repugnant. If there's a way to get around it, that would be my question. To me, and to my team and to the investors that I've got, some of whom are, very long time games, people, the founder of the ESL, for example, Ralph, who's wonderful. At the same time, we've got like Delphi, digital and some extraordinary crypto people. They all agree with me that there is this trend that's happening in crypto. We've called it play to earn over the last year.
Brooks Brown: Really what it is it's just free to play with an open economy. That open economy, they like to say, it gives people the chance to monetize their gameplay, that lying, because that's what they do. Everyone kind of doesn't really think of the actual implications of the s**t they do, which is fine. Welcome to the world. It's again, deeply frustrating because as we start looking at the hardening of free to play, which I consider to be repugnant, and I don't think people in video games, there's anyone who's like, thank God for that. I was really looking forward to buying 42 different skins and spending $30 on a can battle pass. Like no one wants this developers. Don't like it's a content farm epic games. Once upon a time used to put out occasionally more than one game. Now they are putting out costumes and things fortnite because that's the manpower that's required.
Brooks Brown: It's an excessive amount of manpower that is required for these games. No one likes it, except for like in theory, the market, but even financier's, don't like it because the profit margins are razor thin. If you go back king.com candy crush, go look at the years, they were making the billion dollars and then see how much of that revenue was already eaten up in advertising and user acquisition. You're talking about, 1% margins, which is an excessively tiny margin for a huge amount of money. It starts getting in this very silly place of who actually likes this. My answer is nobody yet. Here comes crypto and crypto goes, what? This free to play thing. I love this. Let's make NFTs items and let's make it. Not only are they end game, but players can sell their own. And they think that's great. Because what that means is that players can own their idol.
Brooks Brown: Justin founder of Twitch, for example, was on Twitter. Yes, players are going to be able to take their items to other games and they can truly own their own value. There's two problems with that. There's a lot of problems. The first is no game designers ever going to allow that to be the case. I'm never going to let you take whatever item you want from any game into my game. That's just not design worthy. That's not how things work from a design perspective and a crafted experience. It's silly to think of if I did, why wouldn't you just make a game where every weapon instantly kills everyone in the server, then you win every game you go into. It's just this, these things don't get thought through. The, the second problem is that it fundamentally misunderstands how NFTs work. The, the base understanding for NFT art is people think, oh, they're buying an NFT.
Brooks Brown: And then they look at the photo. What they don't get is it NFTs are just a database entry. The same way that if you go to a website, that image is yes, stored on a server somewhere, but you need an Apache database to reference it. People, so the website knows to display what image to you and how it gets called. You don't own the image. You own. The reference. That reference is not the image as such with games. It's no different. You don't own the item in your game. If I'm playing and I'm holding an ax in my character's hands, the NFT isn't doing anything. It's not even aware that I have it in my hands. It's interacting with a backend database, that's checking the license and then telling the machine to display the specific model to me. That's inside of my engine. That's like really abstracted from the NFT at that point so much so that any game developer can just change whatever the NFTE is.
Brooks Brown: There's no, there's nothing stopping them from doing that because at the NFT doesn't have a 3d model. It doesn't have in game data. They can't have any of these things because game engines don't work that way. For a lot of reasons, so these are like some fundamental misunderstanding. What it actually is happening is when people sit there with their NFTs and they're trading them, what they've actually done is created a way for people to be deeply exploited in how they play. Because now when I play it's I find this so frustrating Diablo three's auction house, by the way, Kevin, at any time, feel free to, no, this is good. Diablo three is auction. House came out and a lot of people reference it. When they talk about items and video games being sold in a larger scale market. If you remember a Diablo and a handful of designers and producers, there were really excited because people in Diablo had a problem.
Brooks Brown: They had a whole bunch of garbage. If you've ever played, Diablo, you end up with the game is basically go out, kill things, collect stuff, identify it, sell 99% of it. Pray to God. One of them is at least for your class, let alone interesting for the skills and abilities you've chosen. This is like the loop of Diablo. You end up in this weird place where 99% of the s**t you grab is not even for your character or for you. You end up just selling it back for gold. This is the loop for all the games, but what if you could sell that on a larger art, big auction house like they have in world of Warcraft and what if you could do it for real world money? Everyone got excited about this who was mentally deficient because they didn't realize that this would change.
Brooks Brown: Fundamentally how people play the game, everyone mistakes. This, when they look back, they think that people were upset that it was Peter. When no one cares about pay-to-win and Diablo, it's not competitive in that sense, what the problem was is now when I played Diablo, I wasn't playing for the items my character needed. Where would I get this drop? The areas I like to play? Where did my friends need to go? All of that because I had a new thing in there. Where can I go to efficiently pay my rent? Because now we're not talking about fun. We're not talking about possibility. We're talking about something very hard, which is cash. If I can make money in this game and doing one thing is good for my character, as I would like to artistically play with them, which is the case with the Allah very often, or I can go kill these rats in this consumer 10 million times, because there's a 0.00, zero 1% chance that they're going to drop an item.
Brooks Brown: That's worth $400. People do that. And this is what happened. Everyone started playing for the cash and for the meta of the marketplace and streamers quit in mass players, quit in mass. They wouldn't even touch the auction house because suddenly I could make money. Why wouldn't I, the rest of the world broke in two Diablo. This is what that open marketplace does. It destroys the beautiful magic circle of play. That games have gotten very good at figuring out how to manipulate, but in if Jesus effectively shatter it, a real-world ownership, shatters that if, and I, as an example, to go back to soccer again, if at any point the way that soccer could be played, as if I said, Hey, if you pass it to this guy, it's 40 bucks. Pass it to this guy. It's 20 this guy at 60. If you get a goal, it's 200.
Brooks Brown: If you get a goal after four minutes, it's only 100, how fun. And then I walked away. Would you just play soccer? Or would you be thinking about all of those things constantly? Like it completely makes up why people play and how people play, which is intended to be an eminent, simple experience. Crypto has come in and hardened that and made it. Everyone is jumping on board, everyone who is happy to s**t all over, whatever the video games, corpse may have been part of it. Peter Molyneux, for example, who hasn't cared about play. In 20 years they just absolutely hasn't cared about it in the last decade for certain is suddenly, running along. I think a handful of people made the comment. I think it shows a lot about the crypto group. That was announced, Peter Molyneux is working with gala and a lot of people on Twitter.
Brooks Brown: So, well, he's the perfect spokesperson for NFTs and a lot of crypto bros underneath those comments are going, hell yeah, he is. He's amazing. I think people who don't know video games, don't realize everyone's being like deeply sarcastic. He's perfect because he's always full of s**t. That is where we start getting into this really brutal, broken place that crypto gaming has taken us. We ended up in a place where we have, because it's a full circle economy. There's now entire games. Let's take a AXI infinity. As an example, actually infinity is a massive game and the team behind it basically built a AFK, simple battler, where you have three little creatures. They, you choose a few moves like Pokemon. They fight another person, someone wins. Yay. The result of that winning is you get this thing called love potion. Every ACCE is an NFT to get more NFT is more axes.
Brooks Brown: You breed them by using love potion. Those you can sell on the marketplace, which you can then buy to use, to play, to get more SLP, to breed more to blah, blah, essentially not to be too crude about it. Factory we've built a digital factory. By having this work the way it does, it worked very nicely in the Philippines for very long time, because in the Philippines, people didn't have a lot of money, especially during COVID. With this, they could actually make a good living playing this game. It was kind of incredible actually. At some point, people with money started taking notice and they started buying axes rather than people owning their own axes people in the west, mostly, but wealthy people began renting axes to poor people. You can borrow my ACCE and I will get the majority of love potion. And I'll pay you for your time.
Brooks Brown: Essentially. Like went from, I make the joke often. Not everyone reads marks everyone should, but I just can't help. Think that mark would just be walking along, going right here, guys, this, this is like, this is my book. Like my book was about this. It's like three volumes. This is the thing. Because now we have this moment where people who've done, nothing have bought these items and essentially are assuming the need of a deeply impoverished slave class who are there just because they have no option. For me, there's a lot of things we could do in the digital world. This is not it to do that thing. Games are not meant for this because games are meant for play the last thing. And then I'll, I'll let you speak. Sorry. Isn't the way I look at all of it is when you're building entertainment, especially games.
Brooks Brown: If tomorrow I gave everyone in the world, take Dota and take any of these play to earn or free to play games or whatever. If Tamara gave everyone a hundred thousand dollars, would anyone be playing the play to earn games tomorrow? The answer is no, because they're not fun. They're not interesting. Every player in Dota, including the people who do it professionally, they'd play more. It's a, it's a golf and we want and want to use nor to cross that. Go ahead. I'll finally get into what Nora is. Sorry for the long ramble.
Kevin Horek: No, no, it's cool. Yeah, that was going to be my next question to you is really like, how does nor solve this and what is the economics behind it and how is your new model sustainable? Yeah.
Brooks Brown: Yeah. It's one of the big things for us. I'm going to have to be opaque about a handful of things, because there's a, there's enough, that's still in design that I'm trying not to speak too heavily about. Okay. As I've said, our games are entirely free for us. The player is the NFT. I am a big fan of things, not being scarce in the digital world. There's, there's a reality to the fact that digital can be, I can have a million guns in halo or one gun in halo, and it literally doesn't change anything in terms of resources for the world. I think anything in games that wants to undo that is missing a beautiful chance for some amazing design, but there is one thing we will never be able to duplicate in the digital world and that's you or me or any of us.
Brooks Brown: Our platform is based on that concept, we basically utilize NFTs as the player sole it's you. You sign in, you're using it, but there is no purchase pathway to it. It's a zero cost moment you play and you can play for free as much as you want that set up in that move for us is kind of a big deal because we want to play games more like sports, the same way that chess is intended to operate. I can practice chess by tearing out pieces of paper and drawing on them and organizing them on another drawing. I can play chess and practice as much as I could if I had a $10,000 chess set. Let's let people practice over and over. For us, we enable and we promote the big win for us. I have a lot of friends in e-sports. I've been fortunate to be able to attend a lot of championships and see how, things from Dota to league work at that level, how their financialization works.
Brooks Brown: It's one of the things that I'm always surprised hasn't been embraced more deeply or at least thought through is how does money circulate once you get at that point, is there enough capital inside of championships and tournaments? And I believe the answers an emphatic. Yes. If you build an economy around it, and this is kind of the second part to be a more opaque, I'd like to talk about the allegory that we're going for to go back to soccer. As I said, soccer doesn't have money in it. That's not how it functions. The there's no moment where a soccer player can buy anything on the field. Now, the moment they step off the field, there is an extraordinary economy around them. There is contracts between them and their agent, them and their team them. The league FIFA for itself is actually a non-profit. Every one of those singular stadiums and every one of those teams globally, absolutely is a completely for-profit thing that makes just a stupid amount of money.
Brooks Brown: I think sports 20 broke half a trillion dollars. That's before we even get into the secondhand or tertiary markets, like just the primary market of sports and that was without any games in person. The money around it is where I started to focus a few years ago. How does sports actually work? Because they don't have micro-transactions, they don't have weird vanity items. They don't monetize the player at all. Actually. How, how do they make their money? At every level from, I, I locally live just outside of Portland and there is a significant Peewee baseball thing. There's like a Bush league baseball thing out here too. I just talking to a few people there back in Colorado, we had that big time. The Zephyrs back when I was younger was the AA team before you headed up into the Rockies. At some point before we even had the Rockies and the way that they financialize is not by charging the players.
Brooks Brown: In fact, very rarely. It the case that you charge the players? Mostly you have outside sponsors, mostly you have already preset fields and people simply schedule. You have contracts with agents who are willing to put up the capital for the player to be taken care of. Also the lead to start that the team owners are at no point considered to be whales. No, one's tricking them into saying you're a very good football players, sir. Instead, it's just the guy who owns the Bengals or just the guy who owns the Ravens or the Broncos and or the people who do and the amount of money they put into all of this. The amount of money they extract is exceptional. They have a vibrant economy crypto specifically, the thing that crypto does, it is not a currency. It is actually the other half of that. It is capital.
Brooks Brown: It plays like capital plays, not money, but capital. It allows us to combine things and play in a meta space where suddenly we're talking only about speculation, but it's a complicated speculation. It's one that requires a lot of place in and of itself. This is the case with trading players, between teams. What, how much do you pay any person which staff do you have, which restaurants do you allow in your stadium? Where do you build the stadium? What can be built around it? All of these things are part of that larger economy in sports that people don't really consider, but that enable this vibrancy and this extraordinary growth beyond something as simple as even fantasy football. It's a, it's an excessively complicated economy. Crypto enables us to abstract all of that. If we spend our time, which my team is building an entire chain, that's built around this and abstracting these elements, creating the rules that are public include crisp and clear and secure and allow people to see how it sits around, but keeps that magic circle around the game, completely intact.
Brooks Brown: It completely changes how we can monetize games in general, across the board specifically how we're doing it to go with all of that back to the player. One of the through threads through much of what I've done has been my way of trying to get people to feel things when they play games, right? That's, from everything I've done from when I was little, how much they moved me and how much I remember all the way through to my peace hero, that the thing for me is emotion and games making play matter. The experiment that started this off, and the thing that is actually at the core of nor is that you are the NFT and when you decide you're good enough, and when you decide you're ready, you get to put your hat in, but it's not just a practice round. It's a game. It's a game that matters when someone sees messy play.
Brooks Brown: The reason that matters is because he's not going to play 14 more games after that one. That's it for the day. That's it for a couple of days for a lot of these guys, right? There's a finite amount of time and a finite amount of games and a finite amount of times, the specific combination of teams will come together. How many times can you watch Michael Jordan play against anybody while you can't anymore? I was fortunate, but you can't anymore. The avalanche was my hockey team. You don't get the same team in the night. Late nineties. That team was like, God sent is extraordinary to watch the, this is all the realities of, because people are unique and I believe they are. And I believe you should be. You play in our final rounds and our championships, it's not just that you're playing for some amount of money, because if you die, we burn.
Brooks Brown: You're in Ft. Wow. And you're dead. You're gone. You're putting everything up. You're putting yourself on the line, the same way that sports players do. Do you think a quarterback staring down the line of 300 pound refrigerators coming at him? Isn't slightly worried. Doesn't feel something in that moment. You, you watch people as they play video games, the most popular modes in all of these games, all of them are these ultra hardcore permadeath modes. And it's because it makes everything. We do matter just more. Imagine if it was just absolute permadeath imagine if this was it and you knew this was it you'd watch me play Minecraft. If you knew it was the last time I'd ever get a chance to play in Minecraft, because the moment changes the meaning changes. You've assigned new meaning to it. So have I, and there's power there. And that's the power of nor.
Kevin Horek: Interesting. How, so you announced nor what can people, like, how do people either game designers or developers or game companies, can they start using nor today, or where's the platform app?
Brooks Brown: We have a, we have a select group of partners. The intention is that it is a platform we're doing our own first game on it because it's kind of been a dream of mine to make a very particular game that uses permadeath and have it matter, right. For like 15 years, it's a very long story. It running. Man's my favorite movie growing up. I don't care what anyone says. I love that movie. I'll watch it a million times, but it's not a game that works as a game because you don't run it. It was a funny thing. I'd make early prototypes. When I was even like early days of unreal, all the way through to like the last couple of years, it's one of the things that spurred this. When you load in, like you run, but it's more like how people run, how I run from my son, who's four who I could totally beat up.
Brooks Brown: Like, I'm pretend like I'm scared when he's chasing me. It's like that it's doesn't matter. Like I'm not like actually scared. For me, the ability to add that layer in and give a person a reason to run, which is the impetus behind my diving down this path. Like, how do I give that meaning? How do I give that drive? And this is my solution for that. We're building our own that game, when we've got two others in pipe, we're fortunate to be funded. We're looking for other partners pretty regularly. It's one of the great challenges in the crypto gaming space is it's filled with a lot of evil stuff. It's very difficult when I have a conversation with someone and I say, people I've cared about for years and people I know respect me and like me and we get along and I say, Hey, I remember you mentioned in this game, I'd love to do it.
Brooks Brown: And they go, oh, that's amazing. Oh yeah. So here's what we're doing. I mentioned the word crypto and they're like, yeah, I can't do that. That's ethically, I have problems. And I'm like, I get it. I get it. I get it. So it's a challenge. If there's anyone who is interested or has an idea, or has a team consortium, nine.co is the website drop a note, say, hi, we are always looking for partners. The goal is to have a very vibrant, massive number of games on it. They're all intended to be simple. They're all intended to be skill-based with zero purchase pathways. There's not a lot of the midmaxing, we're not right now aiming at the Warhammer types, but much more. The counterstrikes much more the lethal leagues of simple, repetitive, fun skill-based games that people can really learn to master that are really fun to watch.
Kevin Horek: Interesting. That's that's actually really quite fascinating. When you said that the, I remember playing like, and you probably remember this too, like golden eye or perfect dark on and 64. Like how much time we played that game is like, it was like the whole chat really.
Brooks Brown: Well. No, it's exactly that because the, when you look back at those moments, there's two sides to golden Knight. There's two sides to, I mean, a ton of these games there for a long time, there was the multiplayer and the single-player sometimes there wasn't even two executable that you'd get with the game. A soldier of fortune, I think did that. If I remember right folder fortune two multiplayer was a blast, but you'd end up in this place where the single player is great. We're not doing or looking at really doing that. We're interested in and that kind of thing. I don't fault the idea of a premium purchase one-off game. I loved those concepts of a recent recommendation would be the new guardians of the galaxies. I, I passed it over because I assumed it was a dumpster, like the Avengers game. That was a giant pile of garbage, but gardens the galaxies exceptionally good.
Brooks Brown: I was blown away by it. I'm not even a comic book fan. So it was just, it's just great. That kind of stuff is wonderful. Golden. I had an amazing single-player campaign and then it had this multiplayer campaign that it took me forever to learn how to use a handful of those guns and get good at it as specifically golden gun mode and being able to be the one who's twitchy and nailing that SQL perfect dark and the rail gun through walls. Like there's a lot of high skill things that I know are the reasons that friends and I played these games for hours alone and then practicing and then bringing it together to try to wreck each other. I watch people who do this in fighting games and who are better than I will ever g*****n be at any of these. It's insane to watch.
Brooks Brown: I still play them. I still like playing them and I watch them play. And it's extraordinary. It's that kind of mentality we're aiming at, by doing a way with the stuff that is ultimately just exploitative and wrecks, the actual core gameplay of any of these experiences.
Kevin Horek: Yeah. Fascinating. You throw in the NFT side of things and if I'm the NFT and I have to say, I'm going to play this game. And my NFTs gone. If I lose that adds another layer of, well, I may, I better make sure I'm very confident in putting my hat in the ring. Right.
Brooks Brown: It puts you in a place where again, so it's one of the things, one of the other uses we're doing for the NFT. And it's one of the nice things. There's a handful of good things about crypto. I get really angry when people dismiss the entire thing because of the way it's configured. As I like to explain, there's an essential visitation with crypto. I'd mentioned earlier with NFTs. People think it's art. You watch things like folding ideas, extraordinary video line goes up, which is about crypto and NFTs and isn't wrong at all. There's nothing in it this wrong, but there's an edge that is, and that edge is that all of these things are not a single technology. It's not like it's a thing. It's disparate mass groupings of various pieces that were put in a very particular order by someone at some point. Instead of just dismissing it all outright, which is what most people are doing, who are angry about it.
Brooks Brown: Why don't you take a look and let's break it apart and try to redesign it and see if we can do better because there is stuff here that's cool. One of those is because of how this all works, players own their data on our setup. We, we go out of our way to store it in the vault behind the NFT effectively. That's what this is. You are that. We take it very seriously, but we don't use that. Now at some point in order to take part in the larger setup, if you decide you want to be in those leagues and start working your way up to being in those final ultra permanent death matches, you have to allow us because we need stats. Like we need to know how you play you. Can't Mr. Ghost. The over time as you start, oh, I'm going to do it.
Brooks Brown: Now, you make that switch. You allow us to see your data, which is great. The other half that I think is really fun is there's going to become a time where a lot of people are going to be seen by the community as being very good at the game. I think of someone like ninja, I think as someone like, oh God, I can't remember. His name starts with an S call of duty player. Who's absurd. There's a lot of them. There's a lot of great people who don't take part in tournaments. They don't, and they still pride themselves on being like the best. This kind of forces them to put their money where their mouth is, because it's such an easy onboarding towards that I kind of am ready for that social pressure of, when I was growing up, there was the guy who you'd run into and you'd be playing soccer in the field, near the, near your school and he'd come through and he'd act like he's hot s**t, but he'd be like, oh, I just couldn't try out.
Brooks Brown: I missed it this year. He'd always have some excuse this moment for that guy feels like a really fun, Hey, we actually, you're famous. Why don't you do it? Oh, I'm tired. Like, I just, I want to see what happens. It's going to be fun. We're like, we're really looking forward to playing with a lot of those tropey things in a really fun way. Again, with the player being the center, quite literally of everything we're doing interesting.
Kevin Horek: So what happens though? Okay. I been practicing for months or years or whatever it doesn't matter. I compete in one of these tournaments. What happens if I lose, like my NFTs gone? Like, how do I re like I wanna, ,
Brooks Brown: There's a lot, there's more, there's more to announce with that. You, you effectively are gone, but there is, there are other things there's just more things that I want to make sure that we get coded and confirmed the security on for a few things. I'm doing my best. One of the problems with crypto, and this is anyone who says, oh, this crypto networks going to be the best, just ask if they've done, how often they do security audits, because the answer is going to be, they don't. Then, very well, they're not going to survive. There's a lot of that. I'm doing my best to try to everything I'm saying so far, I'm very confident in, and I'm trying to say anything that I'm not totally confident. I'm trying to hold because it's, again, crypto is in a state right now where I don't think people are wrong.
Brooks Brown: When they say it's filled with scam artists and scumbags, I mean, it's filled with a lot of good people. I know it is. I'm working with them, but there are broad pools and there's garbage. There is people who don't understand what they're doing. And just charging ahead. It's a lot of that Facebook mentality of move, fast break things. And we know how that turned out. Now, if by the way, if you didn't know, Facebook has announced that employees are called meadow mates because genuinely we live in hell, I guess I don't even know, but it's like that mentality doesn't work and it gets us in bad places. I'm doing my best to kind of these things are I'm confident, but I, I genuinely believe we're going to have to show, not tell. Some things I want to hold off on until it's actually happening. No, I'm sorry.
Kevin Horek: Sorry about that. No, I appreciate that. I actually think that's a really good answer.
Brooks Brown: We have, we have some really cool answers. I just can't give them no,
Kevin Horek: That's fair. I I'm fascinated to see where you take this really, because it's a totally, I guess, concept that's been around forever, but hasn't ever been brought into the gaming space. Is that fair to say?
Brooks Brown: Well, yeah, it's and it's been brought in various ways. Some very clever ways. The, one of the versions of this, that I ended up making a mini prototype similar to, I made a very s****y quick chain on flow as a practice thing. Kind of did an integration with a Minecraft. Cause once upon a time I played this version of Minecraft that you could log into and it checked your Mac address. When you died, it blocked it really simple. What it did, because that's it, that's your, computer's never connecting to that conserver ever again. You log in, you'd see all the stuff that people had done, because there's no one else on the server, just you, but it's, you're like, I was like 4,000. I was, whatever P buildings and destruction and holes in walls and penises built out of sand. It was weird, but it's like this, everyone who did that knew they weren't going to be around.
Brooks Brown: There's an extraordinary eeriness to this one server where almost I was seeing the remanence of all these lives. Again, when we get back into how do we make games feel, how do we make people feel? The more we're able to add the complexities of those kinds of emotions. The more we're able to really play into the stuff that I think hits people in their real lives, the alienation, the separation, their own place in the universe, those kinds of things. I think we can help people resonate with those. We can play with those more.
Kevin Horek: No, that's really quite fascinating, but we're coming to the end of the show. How about we close with mentioning where people can get more information about nor and everything else you guys are building?
Brooks Brown: Yeah. It's welcome to nord.com. You can find us there. All of our social links are there. We have a discord, all that fun stuff over the next couple of weeks, there's a lot more announcements and we kind of aren't stopping for the next, at this 0.9 to 12 months is kind of our current, everything will be out there. It's kind of wild. It's extraordinary that I've been given the chance to do this honestly.
Kevin Horek: Oh, that's amazing, man. Well, Brooks again, I really appreciate you taking the time out of your day to be on the show and look forward to keeping in touch with you and have a good rest of your.
Brooks Brown: Day. Thanks so much glad to be here. It's always fun.
Kevin Horek: Okay, bye.
Gregg Oldring: Thank you for tuning in to the learner.co show. If you're looking to be a guest, try out our app, or want to get in touch, please visit learner with two L's at www.llearner.co. The music for the show is by electric mantra. Thanks for listening and keep on learning.