Note that the fine print states that “MANA awards above 50,000 MANA are subject to an irrevocable 6-month vesting schedule” which essentially means that first, second, and third-place winners cannot immediately cash out their MANA, which is DCL’s in-world cryptocurrency.
Also, Decentraland is introducing and promoting a new feature: smart items, which you can find in the item catalogue of Decentraland’s Builder. These are interactive items which you can drag and drop into your scene, and do not require any knowledge of coding. You must use at least one smart item as part of your contest entry for the Decentraland Creator Contest.
Did you know that you can help support my blog (as well as the Metaverse Newscast show), and get great rewards in return? Here’s how.
Carnival (the ninth-place winner of the Decentraland Game Jam)
Yesterday, Decentraland announced the winners of their recent Game Jam contest. While there are still approximately 14,000 people waiting for their opportunity to enter the current closed beta of the blockchain-based virtual world Decentraland, the company has thoughtfully included links in their blogpost that will allow any readers to visit the winning scenes without having an account or an avatar set up!
There were a couple of bugs I did encounter yesterday, however. For some reason, the link to the first prize winning entry, The Farm, did not work for me, no matter how many times I tried to reload it. Eventually, someone gave me the in-world coordinates of the entry, so I just signed into Decentraland with my own avatar (which already has access to the closed beta), and I teleported to The Farm to be able to take a few pictures of it to show you here. (The coordinates are -3,-33 if you are interested and want to visit it yourself.)
The first place winner is The Farm (all links were taken from the original blogpost, so this one might not work for you, either):
Another bug that kept coming up is the pop-up message that you see at the top of my screenshot above: a message telling me “You received an exclusive wearable NFT (non-fungible token) mask! Check it out in the avatar editor.” I was told that this is a bug that DCL is aware of and is working to fix as soon as possible.
The Farm appears to be some sort of gathering and manufacturing game around food. If you click on a book in the farmhouse, a series of recipes pops up:
Second prize went to Enchanted Wood, which reminded me of a brain teaser from the venerable puzzle game Myst:
Third place winner Koko Jones had an Indiana Jones adventure theme:
Here’s a list of the remaining Game Jam winners, along with links to visit each one:
Apparently, they received over one hundred entries to the contest, and it looks like the judges are going to have a hard time selecting winners. I see lots of interactive games! And did I catch a glimpse of a three-dimensional virtual recreation of the Van Gogh painting Bedroom in Arles? (They have one similar to that in NeosVR, too.)
First place receives a $50 Threadless Gift Card, usable at the VRChat Merch Store
First through Fifth place will receive a Limited Edition VRChat ceramic mug, as seen on our Dev Streams:
Now, I can understand that contest prizes can be a somewhat artificial inducement to get people to use the platform. (High Fidelity very much learned this lesson the hard way; once the contests ended, and HiFi stopped paying out prize money, people stopped coming.)
It’s hardly a rousing reward for content creators, who may spend hours working on their contest submissions. Sure, you get bragging rights if you win, but couldn’t VRChat have upped their game just a little bit? I’m sorry, but to me this just feels…cheap. VRChat, you can do better than this.
