Web3 promises that what you create by playing will be yours, but the first attempt went off the rails. In this episode of Jugando en Serio (in Spanish), Manuel Moreno, a marketing, gaming and Web3 expert with more than 20 years of experience, explains what Web3 is, what brands trying to reach Gen Z can learn from it, and why gamification improves knowledge retention in training.
Web3 gaming: what it is and what it changes
Moreno, who has spent many years in the video game industry, describes Web3 as the natural evolution of the internet: after Web 1.0 and its first websites, and Web 2.0 and social media, comes a decentralized internet in which you own your digital content and control the information you share. Blockchain is the underlying technology that makes transactions, whether of information or money, secure.
Applied to video games, it makes it possible to create real economies in which players stop being extras and become the protagonists. Moreno illustrates it with his own experience: he played World of Warcraft from its launch in 2004 until last year. What if all that fun also created digital assets you owned and could trade or sell?
Play to earn vs. play to own
Web3's first model in gaming was play to earn: the more you play, the more you earn. According to Moreno, the mistake was putting more weight on the earning than on the playing: what emerged were almost pyramid schemes where people played to make money. Then came play-to-own models, focused on owning the value you create by playing.
There's still a long way to go, culturally too: Moreno puts the number of gamers worldwide at around 3.2 billion and estimates that perhaps only 5% know what a wallet is, have one and use it.
The big mistake in this first stage was giving more weight to the earn than to the play. You didn't play for fun or to build a community, you played to make money. That distorts what a video game is.
Brands and Gen Z: from advertising to conversation
Millennials and Gen Z, Moreno says, changed the rules of the game in how they relate to brands: they no longer accept one-way communication. He recalls the Cluetrain Manifesto, which argued that the internet turned markets into conversations. Deceive them and you pay dearly; connect with them honestly and they become ambassadors for your brand.
His example is Nikeland, the space Nike created on Roblox around 2021: instead of ads, an environment where the audience could socialize, attend shows, and buy and create digital assets. Later came virtual sneakers whose look could be customized and which could be sold.
Gamification in esports and in companies
In esports, gamification works both outwards and inwards. Outwards, the audience stops being passive: fans vote on who they think will win or interact with the streamer. Inwards, club coaches and psychologists use gamified dynamics to train hard skills, like aim or reflexes, and soft skills, like teamwork.
The same applies to companies. Moreno recalls a project with Correos, Spain's postal service, more than 15 years ago: dynamics with leaderboards, rewards and professional recognition after which, he says, delivery staff performance went up.
If you gamify that training, people's ability to retain knowledge increases, because they're more attentive, more focused, more involved; they're not as passive as they usually are.
Learning by playing: Imperium, Mapfre and storytelling
His favorite case is Imperium, a strategy game about the history of Rome whose campaign was built around learning by playing. The team hired history professors from the Autonomous University so the pre-production would be accurate, and the project made it to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, with students who connected what they had learned while playing to their syllabus. According to Moreno, the teachers themselves told them they had never seen their class so attentive.
He also worked with Mapfre, which found itself unknown among under-30s, on a gaming and esports strategy that included competitions for employees and the idea of gamifying training. His conclusion: the emotional side matters as much as skills. Between storytelling and rewards, he picks storytelling, because that's what wins people over; and between gamifying marketing or training, he picks training, because it has more long-term impact.
