Mitchell F. Chan is Back with ‘The Boys of Summer,’ a Baseball Analytics-Based NFT Game

Our world is completely obsessed with numbers. Think about it – how often do numbers enter your consciousness?

How many hours did I sleep? How many calories did I eat? How many pounds can I lift? How much money do I make? How much money do I spend? How long have we been dating? How long will I live?

Legendary crypto artist Mitchell F Chan takes our modern obsession with numbers, and rolls it up neatly into a dedicated art collection expressed through America’s favorite pastime: baseball.

Yes, we humans love numbers – and Chan expresses that notion eloquently in his latest art release. Meet ‘The Boys of Summer’ – a thought-provoking digital-collection meets interactive-game that leverages baseball statistics to explore the quantification of our identities, dreams, and experiences in the digital age.

In a first of its kind, ‘The Boys of Summer’ collectors will determine their destiny, receiving a unique metadata identifier upon completing the ~20 minute gaming experience during mint.

Mitchell is an artist based in Toronto, Canada. He is best known for being one of the first creators in tokenized digital art. He created “Digital Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility” in 2017, which was one of the first major NFT art projects to be minted on the Blockchain. In 2021, a Digital Zone sold for $1.2 million.

We covered that drop and iconic sale back in 2021.

His conceptual art often utilizes the guise of something simple to provoke thought about much more complex topics. “Digital Zones'', and the 33-page essay that accompanied it, tells a story about how different concepts of ownership are fundamental to the experience of an artwork.

Although his work spans many different themes and mediums, his subsequent projects follow the same pattern. ‘The Boys of Summer’ is no different. 

Mitchell’s work takes the form of a video game, a collection of tokenized profile picture artworks, and a social marketplace performance going live on experiential art platform Wild August 16th, 2023.

Once you own your PFP baseball character, you begin playing the game. In the game, one makes a series of choices that impact the avatar's stats and appearance. These choices lead your player through the game, earning a series of achievements and setbacks.

The choices you make in the game are then reflected in the metadata of the player's PFP token, which is stored on the blockchain.

The PFP tokens can be traded on a social marketplace, where their value is determined by a variety of factors, including the avatar's stats, rarity, and popularity.

In many ways, ‘The Boys of Summer’ is the anti-PFP PFP collection. It flips the overused PFP model on its head – offering collectors a way to, in part, determine their outcome. Rather than a random algorithm spitting out winners like a lottery, you get to navigate your way through the mint process and leverage your inherent potential with more open-ended answers.