Matthew Lobel is a results-driven executive with an extensive and diverse background in application development, gaming, and training and development as an entrepreneur over the last 30 years. Matthew started his career as the founder and principal of Sparrow InterActive, a development company focused on eLearning. Now, with the development of the PLAYN ecosystem, Matt is on a mission to bring blockchain gaming to the masses by dropping barriers to entry, creating fun games, and providing real value to its token holders.
What was your journey like to get where you are?
I’ve been an entrepreneur for the past 30 years and my journey has taken me from the early days of multimedia development and web development through e-learning, and into game development. I started my first company at 18, while I was in college. I maxed out my credit card at the time and bought a PA system so I could run sound for bands at my college. There were others doing the same thing at the time but they were awful, so I came up with the slogan “get feedback from your audience, not your sound system”. Pretty soon I was booked solid. I’ve always loved creative endeavors and that shows in the types of work that businesses I’ve created have done; live sound production, interactive multimedia production, eLearning production, stock photos for eLearning, audio narration for eLearning, and games. If it has to do with creativity, count me in! No matter what I’ve done, I’ve always tried to innovate and be on the leading edge of technology. I’m also super type-A. I can literally look at a UI on a monitor and tell you if it is just a couple of pixels off-center. Truthfully that may be more of a curse than a blessing sometimes, but that attention to detail is also a reason I have done well.
In a simpler phrase, what is your company exactly doing?
The PLAYN gaming ecosystem is a blockchain-powered multi-game ecosystem that provides a consistent, secure, and transparent environment to monetize gameplay. It is a perfect merge of blockchain finance and gaming that offers players opportunities to earn tokens in a variety of games and investors token price appreciation through a gradual, organic, tightening of token supply.
What about Metaverse are you most excited for in the future?
I would say the most exciting thing about the metaverse when it comes to gaming is the possibility of blending the real world and a fantasy world through augmented reality, which enables people in the AR space to interact with those that are in the completely virtual space and also with others that are in their shared AR space. With the proper visualization technology, this can eventually translate to us having elements of fantasy interwoven into our daily life, bringing entertainment literally to life in the real world. Literally a perfect blend of technology with reality.
Why should we be paying attention to the Metaverse?
Really the question should be ‘why wouldn’t we be paying attention to the metaverse?’. There are so many different applications that have real use cases, that over time the metaverse is going to permeate every aspect of our lives. It’s one of the most exciting technologies that has come into being in the last decade. Anybody who has ever read a science-fiction novel has seen elements of metaverses woven throughout, but now that science fiction is a science fact.
