EDUTAINMENT, Technology Adoption, and the current Revolution
Anyone who makes a distinction between entertainment and education doesn't know the first thing about either.
— Marshall McLuhan
“EDUTAINMENT”
Something Luca (my cofounder for those that might be new to the newsletter) and I talk about a lot is the concept of Edutainment. Informed by both the McLuhan quote, and our personal histories, edutainment is the recognition that everything is shaping us over. That both education and entertainment are rooted in experience, meant to have a transformative effect on the receiver.
What does this mean more practically? Let’s look at a game example.
One of my favorite games growing up was SimCity. Manipulating different cost centers and layouts to see how fast I could grow my city. It wasn’t until later as I started working on Eternal that I learned something curious. In the original SimCity, the only way you could lower crime, is if you funded the police. It was a direct relationship, with nothing else influencing it. Better schools in your city? Didn’t matter. Strong hospital system? Didn’t matter. This creates a value reinforcement within play, where you set this in your mental model of the simulation.
I don’t want that to come off political, it’s just a really rich example from the first SimCity game. And demonstrates how a piece of entertainment creates mental models of how the world works, that we then go out and apply — both actively and subconsciously.
A modern darling of edutainment that is a big public success would be Duolingo. Their focus on gamification is deeply studied and widely appreciated. In an interview the founder was asked about the conflict between gamification/engagement and education. To which Luis (founder and ceo of Duolingo) responded they always pick gamification/engagement in that conflict → “It doesn’t matter how effective you are. You can’t teach somebody who’s not there.”
And here’s the thing, that I’m sure he knows, you are still teaching them.
Why is edutainment so interesting? Well at Eternal we believe it’s the best path to introduce new technologies to skeptical audiences. We saw this play out with crypto and, although less, with AI as well.
TECHNOLOGY ADOPTION
Eternal is close to launching a new game title (starting abroad first) — but when we ran the public beta in the US we saw something very curious. We launched an AI native mobile title, and out of the 11k beta players 40% of them self-reported that it was their first time using AI.
Similar to crypto, I believe there’s a cohort of folks that have an almost political stance against emergent technologies. Unlike some technologists, I don’t believe we should just leave these people behind. There’s other ways to introduce them to these technologies without saying “have fun being poor” or “AI is replacing you anyway” — we have to be better than that.
Games and game systems are many of our first touch points with electronics/computers and software. The amount of hardware friends that still talk about the Sony PSP is madness — it simply embeds itself in a different and meaningful part of the brain. Similarly, many friends got into designing or coding because they wanted to mod video games! Your future 10x cracked engineer is probably making their entire college tuition on Roblox as we speak.
But back to adoption…
There’s a certain immediate usefulness to the average American that AI has. Crypto, doesn’t have this benefit… and it’s something I’ve been thinking about with the early signs of success with our AI title and how many young people were introduced to AI through it. I believe the same can be true for crypto.
Crypto still has a little scar-tissue when it comes to gaming. Too many NFT projects made millions and then promised “a game” which never came (because games are really fckng hard to make). But that doesn’t negate the entire category. It should be encouraging to see super brilliant veterans like the Eve Online folks get ready to launch their crypto title.
I would love love love to chat with folks launching / looking to scale L1’s and L2’s and hear about their goals and opinions on crypto gaming. Please hit my line @hipcityreg.
THE CURRENT REVOLUTION - NUCLEAR COMPUTE
There has been plenty written about at this point, the resurgence of nuclear energy as a function of big tech’s AI ambition.
Google has partnered with Kairos Power, Microsoft is reviving Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania (my home state), and Amazon (like Google) is focusing on small modular reactors with startup X-Energy. All reported by the New York Times here.
And before people bemoan using electricity for generate cat photos, that isn’t what this is about. That’s a small slice of what intelligence is actually being used for. If we believe that intelligence is going to be a primary driver of economic expansion over the next few decades, we need to be producing as much energy we can.
Why? Well now I get to pull up my favorite graph.
Energy production and consumption is what improves quality of life. Period. You want to save babies in the global south, well we need to make sure their electricity flow is stable enough for the incubators we put them in to run uninterrupted.
My heretical opinion, as it applies to the decently energy rich West → we should be chasing high energy use technologies as a forcing function, driving stronger energy production technologies.
But back to my point on Nuclear Compute as the revolution of our time.
In a talk Steve Jobs gives in Sweden in 1985, he discusses how they are still living in the wake of the Petrochemical revolution. And that we are entering a new kind of revolution, an intelligence revolution. At the time it was crude, but that it was getting refined. That we could only capture the underlying sentiment of “Aristotle” but that in the future we could really refine the resemblance of Aristotle and it could respond to us.
In short Steve would have loved ChatGPT.
The same is true for crypto. PayPal allowed us to access what we were already familiar with, and simply put it on new rails (the internet). And since then we’ve been discovering new ways in which compute can not only distribute capital, but generate it as well. Giving it, like intelligence, completely new properties. It’s own sort of physics if you will.
Like I’ve written before, I believe AI/Crypto/Spatial/Hardware will be the internet and post-internet technologies that truly define these next decades.
And they will all take up energy, creating a virtuous cycle of production and distribution. Optimism for an abundant future!
I don’t do edits really, so excuse typos and things that don’t make sense.
Thanks so much for giving me your attention. I hope it was worth it, if not… unsubscribing will not hurt my feelings, and will give you back time you literally cannot have back.
Much love.
Live in the light