Posted in: Games, GDC, Video Games | Tagged: AllMine, GDC, GDC 18, Jewelz, My Dream Interactive

My Dream Interactive Tried to Throw a GDC Party, But Everyone was More Interested in the Venue than AllMine

We don't often cover parties here on the games side of BleedingCool, but every now and again, a game developer hosts a party at a game conference we just can't not talk about. Unfortunately, we aren't talking about this one for good reasons.

My Dream Interactive, along with co-host ClickUp, hosted a party at GDC this year which was supposed to get people interested in their cryptocurrency mining video game AllMine, but instead partiers were much more interested in the venue's VR experience Black Badge Outpost. Which is great for a networking party at a game developer's conference. VR Arcade games like Black Badge are basically adult laser tag.

However, that was far from the intention. Instead of raising awareness about what ended up being a fascinating cryptocurrency mining venture that limits users to one CPU core per miner (by patenting a serial proof of work system), the decently bored developers were having fun with a completely different game. It didn't help that the "ClickUp Loft" was a pretty small shoebox venue that was made even smaller by having a VR shooter placed in the middle of the main room. The back was taken up entirely with tables of Indian catering, which was actually pretty good.

Now, no party about blockchain and gaming was going to be a lively party no matter how you framed it, but this was more of a hot mess than even I was expecting. And I specifically made plans for later in the evening to give myself an excuse to duck out early. Things only got stranger when CEO Allison Hyunh started trying to soft-pitch the attendees as backers of the project. In part this came down to the difficulty of making blockchain make sense to the average person. It just sounds like a whole bunch of nonsense whenever you try to wrap your head around it. Hyunh was earnest almost to a fault, and so very dedicated to her version of how the night would go that it just felt like she was in a very different party than the rest of us.

That other members of the team working on the project mentioned that they threw the whole party together in just an hour, well.

It was a perfect storm of conflicting ideals. Someone involved, likely someone on the PR side, wanted the My Dream Interactive party to be a proper party with entertainment, good food, and an open bar (serving wine and beer only, but at least it was good wine). Hyunh wanted it to be a networking event and way to grab investors, and the poor AllMine team were quietly trying to explain their game and mining client amidst it all.

I ended up finding AllMine to be a pretty interesting prospect after talking with COO Andrew Leker at GDC the next day, but that required a pretty detailed description of serial proof of work versus regular proof of work and just what My Dream Interactive intends to do with AllMine. And that's just not something you can do in a five minute speech at a party.

But at least Black Badge Outpost looks fun?

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