Immy Williamson
When you hear the word “pixel”, what comes to your mind? Perhaps you think of classical arcade games such as Space Invaders (1978) and Pac-Man (1980), and 8-bit consoles such as the Nintendo Entertainment System (1983) and Sega Master System (1985). Computer games were totally different from the likes of what we see today, and those who developed the games were mainly programmers, not graphic designers.
Each bit of code was edited pixel by pixel which took up time, and an already small budget. The games a lot of people grew up with were about substance over style, and many of the gaming community look fondly back on them.
Fast forward to today and there has been a shift in the popularity of gaming sub-genres. For example, ‘roguelikes’:
“[Roguelikes] are role-playing video games characterised by a dungeon crawl through procedurally generated levels, turn-based gameplay, grid-based movement, and permanent death of the player character.”
Although this subgenre’s origins start in the early 1980s, they have been increasing in popularity over the last decade. With this style of gaming, came a new opportunity for pixelated gameplay seen in the likes of ‘Dead Cells’ and ‘Enter the Gungeon’. Without distracting graphics a gamer can get to the heart of what the game is trying to express.
The gaming community created a resurgence of the love of pixels, but with this came the predicted capitalist response, “there is money here”.
An art movement (according to Eden Gallery) is a style of art with a particularly specified objective and philosophy that is adopted and followed by a group of artists during a specific period. My educational background in art and curation means that I will have to reign myself in at this part of the article… don’t worry, I’m not going to go through the whole history of western art; there is a point. Trust me.
What I want to talk about (at this point) is Cubism, stay with me now…
Do these attributes remind you of anything?
While ‘pixel art’ may not be the next big thing in the art movement sphere, you can’t really deny that the possibilities of the pixel form could influence artists across the world. It is a form of digital art, created using software, where images are edited at pixel level.
April saw a community-driven viral phenomenon on “front page of the internet”, Reddit – a popular site which is (at a very basic level) a collection of forums.
The feed used was ‘r/Place’, which functioned as an open canvas, where each user could post a single, tiny, colored pixel every five minutes. Although 2022 wasn’t the first instance of this unique collective, it certainly was the most popular, with nearly 72 million tiles being placed by over 6 million users.
Because each user could only place a single, tiny tile every five minutes, it was evident that it would be impossible to build alone. Users were instead forced to work together and build coordinated communities to produce collective works of pixel art.
While I hate to bring up CVOID-19 and the lockdowns created through the pandemic, r/Place says a lot about the psyche of users who may not have felt a sense of community for a long time. Finally, in March/ April 2022, these users have been a part of the rising power of communities online.
Eugene Wei, a tech entrepreneur in San Francisco, saw Place as the perfect metaphor for the modern Internet, where individuals’ power to shape discourse or exert influence online is only as strong as the collective they’re part of.
However…
Unsurprisingly, a few greedy internet users soon saw that there was [crypto] money to be made. Soon, reports were made online about people taking advantage of r/Place and stealing artworks on the virtual canvas to sell as NFTs.
Each NFT is “tokenized” which means it has a digital certificate of ownership that makes it unique. That ownership token is stored in a digital ledger, called the blockchain.
It is debatable whether NFTs have really taken the world by storm, or are just a new, unpredictable trend – maybe both are true. However, their future seems murky as the fraudulent activities within this confusing realm are seen to be increasing with questions being raised around authenticity and ownership, as well as the true value of the NFT.
According to a couple of sources, medium.com being one of them, the three-dimensional NFT category is included in the list of the most popular types of NFTs available today. This is possibly due to the effort to keep up with demand with games in the Metaverse.
You’ll have read about the Metaverse previously in this edition of our magazine, it’s impossible to avoid, no matter how hard one may try.
The use of 3D NFTs within the Metaverse will help create a space in a decentralised economy, where users can connect, interact and participate (this list is not exhaustive).
What wider societal implications are there?
The elephant in the room is the climate change controversy surrounding NFTs. There have been some initial estimates of how much power an NFT uses up and, consequently, how much pollution that generates.
NFTs are largely bought (and sold) in marketplaces that use cryptocurrency ‘Ethereum’, which is (like other major cryptocurrencies) built on a system called ‘proof of work’ which is energy hungry. Making a transaction on Ethereum comes at a price – a fee that is ironically called “gas”.
Where does Marketing come into play?
Similarly to any marketing practice, your message is the foundation of a great strategy. If your message isn’t right, people won’t be interested in buying.
“A marketer’s job is to tell people what a business does, who they do it for, and the benefit those people get.”
The only limit is your imagination and this may seem like something that could work really well. However if you don’t pride yourself on having a unique thought process to come up with imaginative ideas the level of quality within our NFTs will be low.
In December 2021, popular fashion retailer BoohooMAN launched their own NFT collection. It consisted of 8 three-dimensional clothing NFTs which were part of a competition to give the pieces away to 8 randomly selected customers.
BoohooMAN quotes on their website:
“We’re used to starting trends, and this is no different. For the first time, an affordable fashion brand is launching an unforgettable line of NFTs”
We’re still at the beginning of finding out the potential of these NFTs within marketing practices. Start by researching in order to understand how NFTs work so you can be on the lookout for opportunities.
The future of NFTs is adapting to the ever changing marketing landscape.
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