laurel papworth talking Australian golf NFTs and virtual worlds for Metaverse news Australia
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Play Today and Golf in virtual worlds – Australia Metaverse News Australia

ByLaurel Papworth

Golf is entering the Metaverse with Blockchain scoring, NFT Marketplace and soon to launch virtual world in Australia. Metaverse News

Another Sport in the Metaverse – Golf Australia supported by Play Today have an app that is connected to blockchain (Blocto/Flow) and are about to launch into virtual worlds.

LECTURE: Laurel Papworth Metaverse Marketing of Golf NFTs

Transcript of Lecture on Play Today, Golf and the Metaverse

Hello. My name is Laurel Papworth. I’m Metaverse consultant and I thought what we would do today is explore Play Today and Metaverse golf. And I don’t know much about it, so I thought if I shared it with you, we could find out together what’s going on. So when I go to PlayToday.cc this is an Australian company. The CEO is Clive Mayhew from Fishburners, he’s been around for a long time. There is a lightpaper in the top right hand corner PDF, which I’ve downloaded, and you can also join their socials. There’s an app and an NFT marketplace. [00:00:00.250]

So a quick look at the app. You can download it from Google or from the (Apple) App Store, a flagship digital scoring app that integrates blockchain technology to offer a web three golf experience, given how contentious scoring is going to be interesting. Caveat I do not play golf. My father played golf and I have sat reading a book while he plays golf. I’ve also sat reading a book while he played soccer and I’ve sat reading a book while he was interested in all these other sports and other things. So my knowledge of the sports is actually more around the books that I would read while he was playing and watching those games. So it’s a scoring app and there’s your course preview. I often think that the 40,000 courses worldwide is something that apps do for golfing. Apps as aspirational it’s like “I’ll never be able to go to Scotland and play, but I can look at the GPS and course on the app”, something like that. Leaderboards. So obviously a game has gamification built in. Well, we already knew that, but leaderboards are important for gamification, whether it is a game or not. Create a digital wallet in seconds. Question which wallet is it connected to? Ethereum? Like a sort of MetaMask or polygon Matic, something like that? Or is it a bespoke one? I hope it’s a standard one. We’re getting too many of these. The Play Today metaverse (world) is coming soon. So this is the virtual world. So what I’m starting to see, and probably rightly so, is that virtual worlds are Metaverse and the other web3 stuff, the currencies and the NFTs and blockchain. That sort of thing underpins the metaverse worlds because at the end of the day, crypto is just a currency as a medium of exchange within the world itself, or NFTs or the virtual goods. [00:00:46.450]

So unlock The Play Today metaverse to take your game off the course and experience a new dimension in golf. Relive your best rounds and achievements. Connect with golfers from around the world. Get tips from the best access, exclusive product launches and more. “When the game ends, the story begins.” This is something that I’ve always pushed with community based endeavours, whether it’s the 2D social media or 3D virtual worlds. Whether it’s 2D or 3D, 2D social media or 3D metaverse worlds, virtual worlds. Is that it’s “for the time between”. So when I’ve worked on building large communities around TV shows, we really focused on the fact that the show bookended the rest of the week and it was our job as community managers to keep everybody entertained between those big leaps or those big jumps. [00:03:18.810]

So there’s a NextGen NFT collection, lots of collectibles and things like that. An ambassador programme. I want to have a quick look at the marketplace. If you set up your own marketplace, it’s often a good idea to have a twin on the main marketplaces, the SuperRare or Sweet.io or OpenSea or one of those. Otherwise, it’s a little bit like everybody has to come to your website. It’s like you have to travel to an exclusive shop in an exclusive suburb if it’s a bespoke marketplace, whereas it’s just as easy to pick something up in the main marketplace while you’re already there. So somebody might be on OpenSea picking up an NFT for something or the other, and then notice that Australian Golf has an NFT. So why don’t we go there and buy that? So it’s about investing your time and resources where your customers are already investing theirs at the moment. I’m not too hardcore on this because there just isn’t the foot traffic. Nike. Yes, I agree. Foot traffic, that’s a pun. Nike would definitely disagree with me, and I understand that. I mean, they did $186,000,000 in NFTs. But for games like Golf, where the audiences are a little… It’s so critical with Metaverse marketing to look at the audiences, the core audiences and the psychographics and understand how to invest your time and resources where that psychographic, that audience, that target audience is investing their time and resources. [00:04:16.670]

PLAY TODAY and CLIVE MAYHEW
So the Play Today company was actually set up by Mark and Michael Dries, and they have a software and application design agency called Mirk and have been doing augmented and virtual reality projects for Cadbuy’s and Telco Oppo and for the NSW government. And Clive Mayhew got involved because that’s what Clive does as a techpreneur, Fishburners, and he threw in $1.2 million seed investment and he plays golf. So, I think if people invest in what they’re passionate about, they have a better understanding of what would work. I would also say, though, that as a psychographic, Clive Mayhew may not be the typical golfing psychographic. Just putting that out there. Although, having said that, golfing games are pretty popular, and I always think if there’s a digital game that’s popular, then the Metaverse, which will socialise the game and add in virtual goods and a marketplace, PeerToPeer marketplace and things like that, may very well work as well. All right, so that looks fairly interesting I’ll keep an eye on it. The Metaverse (golf) hasn’t actually launched yet, so I’m preemptive here. I do want to document the Metaverse and organisations and sectors that are coming into the Metaverse from now until it’s fully fledged. So there’s a lot of investment, a lot of things happening, and this is our opportunity to stay ahead of the game. [00:06:12.710]

SPIRITUAL PURPOSE OF GOLF
John Rice wrote an interesting article on the spiritual purpose behind golf. And initially I thought, oh, he’s pushing it a bit. But then, as I read through, I realised that in anything that we have commitment to maybe too extreme. Definitely there are some extreme golfers out there. There is a sense of purpose and a sense of learning something while we commit 100% to it. So whether it’s sport or art or languages or really anything, as long as you commit 100%, you will gain spiritual insight into your own life, I believe. And obviously John Day as well does, and he takes his sons out on Father’s Day and he lectures a “sermon” to them on the golfing green. I’ve put a link in. I’ll put it on the screen as well. His key points are we have to lose our old sense of self, our old ego, and learn to grip the new ego, which basically, I think, means refining your grip on a golf club or unlearning bad habits, which is something we have to do all the time, isn’t it? He points out, don’t look up to cheque where your ball has gone. You have to stay focused on following the swing through. And for me, that means something akin to follow the path that you’ve set without focusing too much on the outcome. Just focus on those steps, especially initially. Just get started. Worry about the end game when you get to the end game. I said it was a bit mad, but we’re going with it for the time being. Okay? That leads me to faith in following through on a swing shot, I think it’s called. And in the article, he points out that you have to follow through, and I think that’s a good metaphor for life. So if somebody plays golf and learns to follow through, and then they can take that into their business life, their relationship and their connections and other parts of their physical, spiritual, whatever life, then that’s a good thing to learn from golf. Also, importantly, there’s no cheating in golf. Apparently, you only cheat yourself. But there are mulligans. Maybe we should be looking for mulligans in our lives. Anyway, there’s more there, but probably the one that’s most useful for golfers is how to deal with frustrations. And I would say that’s a lesson not always well learned or retained by golfers, or indeed anyone who is consistently, week in, week out, trying to do something to improve their game, whatever that game is. [00:08:04.440]

You can contact me on my socials if you have or know of any other interesting projects in the metaverse web3, crypto, NFT, not crypto for crypto’s sake, NFTs blockchain, so on and so forth, and just draw my attention to it and I’ll see if I can put a little news video together for everybody to follow. Thank you for your time today, and I look forward to seeing you in the next video. [00:11:24.280]

I would just say, as a psychographic, Clive Mayhew may not be the typical current Web3 aficionado. I get to use that word again because I used it in the last video, but probably not appropriately. Now it is. [00:11:55.090]

Resources for Lecture on Play Today, Golf and the Metaverse