SELL YOUR CARDS TO WHO: NON-FUNGIBLE TOKENS AND DIGITAL TRADING CARD GAMES

The remediation of analog trading card games into digital platforms troubles notions of ownership and highlights the flows of capital through the ecologies of TCGs that previously relied on material artifacts. $2 is a digital trading card game that utilizes Non-Fungible Tokens to address concerns over ownership. However, in the wake of the sale of a $69 Million dollar NFT at Christie's art auction, crypto-art has been embroiled in discourse with respect to artist exploitation, environmental, and other concerns endemic to blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies. This paper examines the implications of NFTs in digital card games via the material histories of trading card games and the way digital TCGs accelerate the extraction of capital from player communities by bypassing traditional secondary markets. $2 proposes to solve these issues of ownership and assure players their cards will retain their value. However, the game relies on the continued existence of the publisher's platform, blockchain infrastructure, and player interest. The game also ignores how cards become valuable. Despite mimicking the artificial scarcity associated with TCGs, it does not take into account the impact metagame trends have on the value of cards. By looking at NFT implementations in games such as $2 we can identify several issues with the technology that might otherwise be overlooked in favor of more common critiques. This also highlights several implications remediation and adaptation herald for digital versions of analog games.

Interactions with fallacious robots

The role of social robots as advisors for decision making is investigated. We examined how robot advisors, one with logical reasoning and one with cognitive fallacies, affected participants' decision making under different contexts. The participants were asked to make multiple decisions, while advice from both robots interleaved the decision making process. Participants had to choose which robot they agreed with, and in the end of the scenario, rank the possible options presented to them. After the interaction, participants were asked to assign roles to the robots, e.g. detective, bartender. Our results show that the robots had an effect on the participants' responses, wherein participants changed their decisions based on the robot they agreed with more. Moreover, the context, presented as two different scenarios, also had an effect on preferred robots, wherein an art auction scenario resulted in significantly increased agreement with the fallacious robot, whereas a detective scenario did not. Finally, personality traits, e.g. agreeableness and neuroticism, and attitudes towards robots, had an impact on which robot was assigned to these roles. Taken together, the results presented here shows that social robot's effects on participants' decision making are a complex interaction between context, robots' cognitive fallacies and participants' attitudes and personalities, and could not be considered as a single psychological construct.

Materialising Markets: The Agency of Auctions in Emergent Art Genres in the Global South

For the last two decades, the international auction houses Sotheby’s and Christie’s have been at the forefront of global art market expansion. Their world-wide footprints have enabled auction house specialists to engage with emerging artists and aspiring collectors, most notably in the developing economies of the Global South. By establishing their sales infrastructure in new locales ahead of the traditional mechanisms of primary market commercial galleries, the international auction houses have played a foundational role in the notional construction of new genres of art. However, branding alone is not sufficient to establish these new markets; the auction houses require a network of willing supporters to facilitate and drive marketplace supply and demand, be that trans-locational art market intermediaries, local governments, and/or regional auction businesses. This paper examines emerging art auction markets in three Global South case studies. It elucidates the strategic mechanisms and networks of international and regional art auction houses in the development of specific genres of contemporary art: Hong Kong and ‘Chinese contemporary art’, Singapore and ‘Southeast Asian art’, and Australia and ‘Aboriginal art’. Through examination and comparison of these three markets, this paper draws on research conducted over the past decade to reveal an integral role played by art auctions in the expansion of broader contemporary art world infrastructure in the Global South.