Not long ago, I walked into a hulking warehouse—technically, three warehouses conjoined into a gleaming, concrete-floored corporate campus, complete with a 20-foot Astroturf staircase—in Los Angeles. Though now the headquarters of the gaming-and–esports conglomerate FaZe Clan, the building was once home to a Hollywood prop warehouse, and traces of its former tenant were still visible: 30-foot bow-trussed ceilings, immense doorways, an open-air elevator equipped with an enormous metal hook. But to FaZe Clan cofounder Richard Bengtson, the compound reminded him of something else: “It looks like a Call of Duty map, bro!”
This was fitting: Bengtson, under the gamer tag FaZe Banks, made a name for himself in the early 2010s producing videos of his exploits inside the first-person shooter Call of Duty. When he started, the idea of playing video games for work seemed far-fetched. “It was like me telling you that I can make a living professionally chugging water,” Bengtson said. “That doesn’t make sense. How the fuck are you going to do that?”
We sank into an enormous couch in the company’s luxurious new office. Two employees idly skateboarded in circles across the polished floor; a few weeks later, a 20-foot mini ramp in FaZe colors would be built in one corner. Bengtson, along with his friend and FaZe cofounder Thomas Oliveira (better known as FaZe Temperrr), explained to me how a group of video game streamers, YouTube creators, and social media personalities had grown, seemingly overnight, into a multimedia enterprise with 130 or so employees, many of them recruited from CAA and the NFL and the music industry, heading for a billion-dollar debut on the stock market.
Bengtson and Oliveira started at the beginning. After meeting online, they joined a nascent collective of Call of Duty gamers called FaZe Clan. FaZe had gained traction producing a video series called Illcams—“KillCams without the K,” Oliveira explained, attitude-heavy montages of violent deaths captured by the game’s “KillCam.” This wasn’t competitive gaming, exactly; it was a sort of punk-inspired way of operating within the Call of Duty universe. Oliveira likened it to different sports entirely. “It’s got the skateboarding dynamic of the tricks and the complication,” he said, along with “the humiliation aspect of dunking on someone,” all tidily wrapped up into skate-inspired videos. By 2012, the group had a million subscribers on YouTube.
For FaZe members, success was less about technical excellence inside Call of Duty than entertainment value on YouTube: They had to be exceptional at their chosen games but also charming and compelling in the videos they produced, some of which didn’t even include gameplay. The group had come of age online and grew up on social media. Showing their faces outside gaming videos came naturally. Viewers couldn’t get enough of it.
In 2017, by which point the FaZe collective of gamers and content creators had grown to include professional esports teams, the group moved into a series of mansions in Los Angeles that they repurposed as “content houses.” They fit right in in Hollywood: These days, Bengtson is more likely to post an Instagram video from a nightclub than from his gaming setup. He attributed FaZe’s initial popularity and staggering growth in part to the fact that they didn’t look like stereotypical gamers. “It’s that hunched-over, super–antisocial, overweight kid—the nerd, right?” he said. “Obviously, me and Tommy are both six-five, tattooed, fuck girls and party, all that shit. The kids we lived with were way less cool than us—but they were still cool, though.”
Over the past few years, FaZe Clan has matured into a category-busting business more or less unprecedented in the history of entertainment. “They are definitely among those groups of emerging media companies that you have to pay attention to, because they are a sign of a trend,” explained Matthew Belloni, a founding partner at Puck who writes a newsletter about the entertainment business. “And the trend is towards esports, and the creator-driven digital economy of content.” Most of the company’s output exists online, in a web of loosely interconnected content nodes. There’s FaZe’s own YouTube channel, which keeps its more than 8 million subscribers up to date with clips of the group’s exploits. Some members still make gaming videos for their own YouTube channels. Others, like FaZe Rug and FaZe Adapt, have moved into producing viral videos, like prank clips. Then there are the individual Twitch streams of popular gamers like FaZe Nickmercs and FaZe Swagg. The company’s 11 esports teams (groups of gamers who excel at Fortnite or Counter-Strike or Rocket League) compete in tournaments broadcast on digital platforms (and sometimes on cable). And then there are the Instagram accounts of members, like Oliveira and Bengtson, who have parlayed their years of grinding out Call of Duty clips into audiences large enough to turn them into relatively traditional social media influencers.
When we met, Oliveira was deep in training for a boxing match in London against another YouTuber (following the blueprint established by Jake and Logan Paul), while Bengtson had thrown himself headlong into Web3. Their inordinate success has afforded them a rare privilege: After years of gaming and streaming and gaming some more, they no longer have to play video games for a living. Chugging water, Bengtson explained, had somehow become a very lucrative career. “Obviously, we’re rich now; we got bread. I’ve been living in mansions since I lived in L.A. Crazy, disgusting houses. Fucking 20–bedroom houses with lakes in the backyard. Everybody’s driving sports cars and wearing Richard Milles and shit.”
But as I waded deeper into FaZe waters, I struggled more, not less, to understand what sort of company FaZe Clan was. It was tangly, complicated, simultaneously frivolous and disarmingly prescient. Some days it resembled an old-school talent-driven content play; others, a paradigm-shifting future-builder. The answer seemed to change depending on who I was talking to, and when and where we had the conversation. For most businesses, this sort of existential uncertainty—or rather, the inability of most people on the outside to say what it is exactly you do here—would be a very bad thing. But FaZe Clan is betting that this indeterminacy, along with its reach and ambition, will allow it to be nothing less than a prime shaper of the future of entertainment.
Cards on the table: I’m not much of a gamer. I own a PlayStation but pull it out of the closet only for emergencies. I prefer a game of FIFA against a friend to Fortnite against a stranger. I know plenty of people who play video games, but I know fewer people who proudly identify as gamers—or, more pressingly, seem likely to spend money on goods meant for gamers. I hadn’t heard of FaZe Clan until a couple of years ago, when I read about its plans to put the YouTuber FaZe Rug into a full-length feature film.
Kai Henry, who joined the company as chief strategy officer at the end of 2020, explained that the group’s sometimes confounding appeal actually had more in common with traditional stardom narratives than I’d realized. “It started with the most aspirational thing that could happen,” he said. “A bunch of regular kids meet on the internet, playing games, and then they become fucking rock stars. That’s a 2,000-year-old fucking story.” More than that, he continued, the way they came to prominence ensured their stickiness. Whereas an older generation of movie fans had managed to form a relationship with Tom Cruise despite his only showing up in their lives at specific intervals (once or twice a year, for two hours at a time, and in magazines and on late-night shows) and under very specific conditions (inside a dark, cold, sticky-floored and popcorn-smelling room, or in print or on TV), FaZe fans saw their favorite creators multiple times a week, and saw them doing the same things they did themselves: playing video games and joking with their friends. “A whole generation of people got to watch that happen,” Henry said, keying in on FaZe Clan’s initial advantage in the marketplace. “That’s cemented in a certain way, and it’s different than raising $200 million from some V.C. firm and starting an esports group.”
There’s a reason that venture capitalists are eager to get into gaming. FaZe’s investor deck cites a report that pegs the number of gamers worldwide at 3 billion people, while in a 2021 Deloitte survey, Gen Z participants ranked video games as their preferred form of entertainment. (Watching TV and movies came in at fifth.) Earlier this year, Microsoft announced plans to acquire the game developer and publisher Activision Blizzard for more than $68 billion. And the number of Americans playing video games, along with the amount of time they spent playing them, boomed during the pandemic (though those numbers seemed to slow down as restrictions eased). While FaZe hasn’t always been the biggest or most successful gaming organization (in 2020, Forbes ranked it the fourth most valuable in the esports space), it is perhaps the most popular among the cool kids. Musicians like Snoop Dogg and Lil Yachty are members, as are athletes like Arizona Cardinals quarterback Kyler Murray. “If I’m not on the field, and I’m not working out, I’m probably playing video games,” Murray told me. “So being able to join FaZe, which is to me the Nike of gaming organizations, fits my personality, my brand.”
Lee Trink was deep into a long career in the music business when he read a story about the near–Super Bowl–size audience garnered by an esports event. He thought he might start taking on gaming clients, starting with FaZe. What he found was what you’d get if a bunch of 20-somethings had started making an enormous amount of money basically by accident. “There was some merch going on, and then we had a few esports teams,” he explained one night in the living room of his home in the Hollywood Hills. “But it was hard to call it a business.” In 2018, Trink joined as CEO. The goal was clear: to build a business on top of the unprecedented connection FaZe members had forged with their audience.
That meant growing, and quickly. Trink estimates that some 60 percent of the company’s employees have joined in the past two years; many of them, like Trink and Henry, come from the music business. FaZe has erected a unique vertically integrated entertainment business around its talent: Talent managers help its members build their own brands, secure deals and partnerships, and then spin those partnerships into further content. The design team maintains a thriving merch business in the corporeal realm and is working on building the same inside the digital world, one of a number of Web3-related dreams.
The company is not yet profitable—it reported a net loss of nearly $37 million in 2021 on about $53 million in revenue, the “lion’s share” of it coming from sponsorship, Trink tells me—but it plans to go public, at an implied valuation of $1 billion, by merging with a publicly traded special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC), in the first half of 2022. Daniel Shribman, who runs the SPAC FaZe is set to merge with, put it this way: “I view FaZe as almost like a holding company. It’s an I.P. company. And then the verticals underneath that, you’ve got merchandise, you’ve got esports, you’ve got sponsorships, you’ve got wholly owned I.P. and content creation.” To his mind, that FaZe can be difficult to define is what makes it powerfully appealing. “When we think about it from a financial perspective, esports are insignificant here,” he explained. “Now, from a brand perspective and a company perspective, it is extremely important—but what FaZe has done differently is built out a holistic media entertainment company, which is in the early innings but is a true business nonetheless.”
But FaZe fans, while legion, have specific ideas about what FaZe should do and be. Scaling the company—by doing deals with megabrands like McDonald’s, say, or tiptoeing out of gaming and into traditional entertainment—requires a certain amount of finesse. As Henry explained it to me, businesses across the corporate spectrum are now learning that “you should have underrepresented people at the tippy top of your organization, sniff-testing things. You need that cultural lens so that you are doing the right thing.” A company like FaZe, which operates in the uniquely hard-to-parse realm of “youth culture,” requires that too—but also, he said, something else: “An engine in your company that’s comprised of people that have innate knowledge of the culture.” Which is to say, very young employees who must be empowered to propose the right Instagram-sourced artist to design a fire collab, or to suggest that a prospective deal is wack.
I mean that literally. One day I met with a few of what FaZe calls its “ideators,” 20-something creatives who are tasked with making sure the company’s financial interests don’t get out too far ahead of its audience. One ideator had pink hair; another, green. All wore lots of Vetements, the post-irony luxury fashion label that catapulted Balenciaga designer Demna Gvasalia onto the scene. Brandon Dalton, very tall and very skinny and wearing raver boots, described his role as “an internal consultant, pretty much, for executives.” The pitch, he explained, goes like this: “ ‘You worked at Capitol [Records] for 20 years, but I’ve been in gaming for 10 years. I can help.’ In this industry, you need to have a two-headed monster, pretty much. I have business acumen to an extent—I got a bachelor’s degree in business—but it’s nice to have a CEO of a company do the business stuff and then me do the creative stuff.”
Dalton’s fellow ideator Kani Ashford felt the same way. “I’ve worked at cool companies,” he said. “It’s the same as any other company, where they’ve got these people who have been there for 10 years; they can do no wrong. They have the final say on everything. Yeah, maybe they’ll entertain you for a second, but really, it’s what they want to do. And we were actually given a platform at FaZe to make a change and to have our expertise and our viewpoints really heard by executives. Really heard by people who understand, Hey, this is about culture and always has been about culture.”
Perhaps the most tangible way FaZe has of exporting that culture is merchandise. It sells a constantly updating selection of T-shirts and hats, as well as limited collections like lace-up hoodies released in collaboration with the Los Angeles Kings and mouse pads adorned with the designs of Pop artist Takashi Murakami. The traditional rules of fashion don’t quite apply here. As Derek Chestnut, the company’s vice president of consumer products, explained, “A kid cares as much about having a cool brand on his mouse pad as his T-shirt now, because that’s where he spends time with his friends and that’s part of his outfit. They don’t even see the shoes he’s wearing, right? And they don’t even see the pants he’s wearing either.” Not incidentally, he noted, FaZe doesn’t do a great business in bottoms.
Still, I wondered why—for all its supposed success and penetration of hard-to-reach markets—I hadn’t seen the company’s goods anywhere outside its offices. An esports championship might occasionally outdraw a World Series game, but Yankees caps, at least in my corner of the corporeal realm, still outnumbered FaZe ones.
Chestnut gently suggested that I might be thinking about this the wrong way. FaZe Clan doesn’t want to sell hats. Or, more accurately: It does, but not as badly as it wants to sell keyboard accessories, mouse pads, and all the other peripherals likely to appear in the background of a FaZe fan’s stream. The FaZe hat, he explained, isn’t actually a hat. Gear like a mouse pad is “the hat you wear inside,” Chestnut said. “Bro, these kids don’t go outside. You need pants to go outside.”
It turns out that building the future of entertainment requires occasionally putting on a pair of pants and going outside. And so, on an unseasonably hot Sunday earlier this year, the air veined with high-performance octane fuel, 10 or so members of the FaZe roster clustered on a small red carpet just inside the gates of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. They had gathered to attend, of all things, the Busch Light Clash at the Coliseum, NASCAR’s preseason exhibition race inside the 100-year-old stadium.
The group seemed practiced in the moves and poses of fame. FaZe Santana kept his shearling jacket on for the photos before removing it in the heat. FaZe Swagg’s diamond chain glinted in the sunlight. The petite Montoya Twinz—Mya and Myka, who share a YouTube account with more than half a million followers and currently belong to the preparatory FaZe Academy—arranged their thumb, index, and middle fingers into an F, for FaZe. Event photographers, picture takers employed by FaZe Clan, and a few videographers kept on retainer by individual FaZe members all jockeyed for photos, which would promptly be blasted out to many of the more than half a billion followers the organization and its members claim across platforms. One preteen attendee took in the scene, slack-jawed, and tried to help his confused father understand what we were seeing: “It’s FaZe! It’s FaZe! It’s FaZe!”
If it seemed incongruous that approximately 40 members, publicists, talent managers, executives, and assorted functionaries of a video game concern had gathered in L.A. to hype a NASCAR race, this was precisely the point: The group’s attendance was part of a wide-reaching, years-in-the-making collaboration between FaZe and the racing organization. From NASCAR’s perspective, the appeal was obvious. The Clash at the Coliseum—from its high-intensity main event held on a shrunken track to the Pitbull concert that opened the proceedings—was engineered, yes, to energize longtime fans, but also to grow new ones.
Tim Clark, NASCAR’s senior vice president and chief digital officer, told me on race day that FaZe Clan was “on our radar because of the way that they were representing the brand, the audience that they were reaching, the content they were creating, the uniqueness of what they were doing.” Initially, he wasn’t sure what, exactly, the two companies would do together. But he knew this: “They’re engaged with an audience that we really want,” meaning the under-25 crowd who’ve demonstrated they’re plenty willing to sit in one place and watch their favorite FaZe member stream Fortnite for hours, just as they hopefully one day would their favorite NASCAR driver. Clark shared a story that he’d heard, about a family that had driven six hours to the Coliseum the previous day—not for the race itself but for the prerace meet-and-greet with FaZe members. “There’s a part of us, in our history, where we would’ve been uncomfortable with that,” Clark said. “Like, we want you to drive six hours to see the NASCAR race. But I think we’re much more comfortable now having this broader halo set of relationships, that if you drive here six hours to see the FaZe guys, and then, oh, by the way, you stick around for a NASCAR race, great. We have to go where the fans are, and we can’t dictate that it’s going to be on our terms.”
As the race got under way, the FaZe contingent took their seats. Someone passed out FaZe-red foam earplugs, which, in addition to the extraordinary din of the race, made conversation difficult. A few FaZe members posed for selfies. Staffers headed to the concourse and returned with armfuls of warm beers. Everybody looked at their phones. The race broke for a brief Ice Cube concert and, with all promotional duties done for the day, members were free to come and go as they pleased. One gamer headed for the exit, citing a need to get home and stream for his fans.
For FaZe, partnerships like these are useful in different ways. “NASCAR is a perfect example of an audience that probably underindexes on their understanding of FaZe Clan,” Trink, the CEO, told me. “When NASCAR does something with FaZe Clan, it says to all of the NASCAR fans, plus the business world at large, how important FaZe Clan is. That’s a big part of how we have built our reputation and our place in the world: by sitting alongside.”
He’d put it to me this way previously: “How do we build a bridge from gaming, which has been bastardized in this corner? How do we build a bridge to the real world? Because that’s where all the money is.” The deal with NASCAR was a bridge-building exercise.
And though I’d long understood gaming to be an incomprehensible universe—an island, off on its own, with an audience Fortune 500 CEOs were desperate to access—it was becoming clear that the industry was less a walled-off garden than a sort of substrate of lots of other industries. Gaming, FaZe’s strategy head Kai Henry told me, is less a culture in and of itself than “the glue between 1,000 cultures.” This was what FaZe employees meant when they told me their company was rooted in “gaming culture,” even as I struggled to understand what they meant by that, or how that statement was still true, given all the non-gaming layers to their business. The closest analogue, Henry suggested, was the culture surrounding cannabis. It made a certain sort of hyper-stoned sense: The guy who smokes a joint after work and the one who does so at Bonnaroo while wearing a Bob Marley T-shirt both, technically, participate in the same culture, just with different degrees of intensity. Companies interested in building bridges between those two communities had turned cannabis into a multibillion–dollar industry.
Similar riches seemed all but guaranteed for the figures able to pull off the same trick with video games. But how to connect them under one banner? How does the casual gamer and the hard-core fan of FaZe videos amount to not just a viable business but an unfathomable untapped market? Inevitably, one answer seemed to lie around the corporeal corner, in the metaverse.
Lots of companies are busy plotting ways to launch an NFT, or break into crypto, or embrace Web3. FaZe is bullish on what Web3 will mean for its business. At one point, Trink told me it would be “totally unsurprising” if, 10 years from now, 80-plus percent of FaZe’s revenue was “Web3-derived.” (Broadly speaking, Web3 refers to a “new” version of the internet that will operate according to the decentralized, ledger-based principles of the blockchain.)
Skeptics will tell you that Web3 tech doesn’t yet deliver on its utopian promises—and question whether it ever will. I will only say that I felt deeply, powerfully lost while listening to Trink, Henry, and many other FaZe members speak passionately of their hopes for Web3.
And then, sitting in on a meeting of FaZe’s creative and consumer-products teams to discuss a few Web3 initiatives, I met Mynt. Unlike the rest of his colleagues on the video call, his skin was seafoam green, and when he smiled, his brow wrinkled and flushed to a shade of blue-purple. He posed, stoic and unmoving, in three-quarter profile inside his Zoom window, and took up enough of it to suggest that, if he had a body, it would measure in at seven or eight feet tall.
Mynt turned out to be a digital avatar operated by Tarek Mustapha, FaZe’s head of creative tech Web3. Mustapha’s story, as he recounted it to me a few days later, is in many ways emblematic of the promise of FaZe—and of some of the stranger paths the company might yet take. He went to school for architecture and ran his own creative agency for close to a decade but eventually felt stymied by the way his work had come to feel standardized. On a lark, he put in an application for FaZe5, a recruitment challenge designed to enlist five new members—and while he fell out of the running when the field was culled to 20, he wound up with a slightly stranger prize: a job offer.
And so, last spring, Mustapha and Mynt established a beachhead within FaZe from which they imagine the future. That future looks like a very weird place to the uninitiated, but it’s plain as day to FaZe fans. “Our audience, the people who are natively ingrained in the FaZe ecosystem, see digital as priority,” he explained. “It’s more important than their physical life. Some of these kids, the skins that they have in Fortnite are more important to them than how many shirts they have in their closet. That is an inevitable fact.” His task is getting everyone else on board.
Mynt is one way of doing that. “A lot of the conversations that we schedule are about the digital frontier,” Mustapha said. “I would say Mynt has a really good ability to just absolutely demolish the door. As soon as there’s any hesitation, the door is just kicked wide open.” (Both parties were quick to clarify that the underlying I.P. for Mynt is owned by Mustapha, not FaZe; the company’s default stance toward employees’ side hustles can be characterized as very enthusiastic.)
If you struggle to imagine why you might need your own green-skinned avatar, consider this scenario: You used to work in an office, and you will again soon. But in the meantime, you’ve been meeting with your colleagues via videoconferencing software, which is laggy, and unflattering, and all around miserable to use, at least when you’ve been glued to it for the past 24 months. You’re not pulling on your V.R. goggles yet, Mustapha conceded. But shouldn’t there be a better option than showing your coworkers your tired, unshaven face? “Look, I’m staying up till three o’clock in the morning and then jumping on a Zoom meeting at eight o’clock a.m.,” he said. “You don’t want to see these bags under my eyes. Here’s a digital version of me.” The way he put it, using an avatar is somewhere between a more polite version of keeping your camera off and a savvy investment in the future. “If we’re going to interact in these metaverses, I would like to be pulling up in the Ferrari of avatars rather than some pixel art,” he said. “Why not have full hair dynamics and stuff simulated and figured out right now so that they’re ready later?” Later being, obviously, the point at which we’re all interacting in the metaverse.
This stance, like so many held by FaZe employees, requires a bone-deep certainty that the world will change, and in one very specific way: that we will begin to live ever-larger portions of our lives in the digital realm, and that doing so will be pleasurable enough that we won’t put up a fight. Or, rather: We might put up a fight. But FaZe fans, who’ve developed deep parasocial relationships with their favorite creators rooted entirely in the digital realm, won’t. The company is betting on it.
I’ll admit to having felt a slight thrill as I listened to Mustapha pontificate about his post-human future between sips of his vape. (“As soon as I can upload my consciousness, I’m gone. You’ll never see this body ever again. It’s a waste of time. I have to maintain it. Not eat gluten or whatever. What? It doesn’t make any sense.”) Beyond that, spending a little bit of time in FaZe’s world made it hard to shake the feeling that we’re on the verge of seismic technological and cultural change. And while it seems more likely than not that this change will be affected largely by and for the benefit of very wealthy stakeholders, we’re still going…somewhere. And the people I met at FaZe seemed to have, if not a clearer sense of where that somewhere was, at least a confidence that they’ll be the people to get us there.
“We’re first-generation internet kids, pioneers,” Bengtson told me. “And it’s our job, again, to write the fucking script. We’ll do it first and it’ll be in the fabric of everyone’s life. You play video games, whether you know it or not. Everything’s a fucking video game. Life is a video game. Your whole life is gamified. Everybody’s life is gamified. We just built a business off the back of that.” All of the spoils—the massive audience, the cavernous office, the watches and sports cars and mansions, the whole content operation—were by-products, basically, of a life lived on the bleeding edge of digital culture.
Everyone I spoke with was enthusiastic about where FaZe is pointed. But I don’t know that I could call any of them optimistic, exactly. They seemed to understand, deeply, that change is inevitable. But they also seemed to intuit that, though opportunity for wealth and fame seems closer than ever, change doesn’t necessarily mean progress. (Mustapha, in making his case for the metaverse, outlined a scenario in which augmented reality might allow a family living in, say, a smog-choked metropolis to fill its windows with a view of the Maldives.) The way you feel about the future FaZe is imagining, I began to realize, depends an awful lot on how you see the present.
“Ready Player One, that shit’s happening and I think it’s super exciting,” Bengtson told me in the FaZe warehouse. Talk had turned to the metaverse. Bengtson suggested that Steven Spielberg’s 2018 film provided a helpful vision for our lives inside. If you haven’t seen Ready Player One, it’s about a young man living in a dystopian near-future Ohio where residents, seeking to escape grinding poverty, take refuge (and make money) in a virtual reality universe. This, as Bengtson saw it, was a good thing. “It’ll give people freedom, man,” he said.
I blanched. I’d seen the film; I didn’t understand it to be an endorsement of the metaverse so much as a half-baked critique of it. I said as much. Taav Cooperman, Bengtson and Oliveira’s manager and FaZe’s V.P. of marketing, assured me that I’d misunderstood the movie’s message. “If you think about it, the actual plot of the whole movie is, you can come from the gutter and play in that video game.” Chelsey Northern, the company’s head of communications, finished his thought: “And still influence the world for the better, because at the end he decides to shut it down for a couple of days so people aren’t that fucked up. The goal is to make it better.”
I’ve thought about this moment maybe once a day, every day, since it happened: three people roughly my age, by any accounting vastly better equipped for the economy of the future than I am, insisting that the evidently horrific world of a bottom-tier Spielberg movie was in fact a utopia.
With time, I began to see what I’d initially clocked as the cynicism of various FaZe figures as, instead, a kind of measured pragmatism. If you grew up playing video games, it was no great sacrifice to substitute in-person interaction for in-game socializing. If you’d spent hours collecting power-ups and skins while playing those games, then buying NFTs wouldn’t seem like much of a scam at all. If employment seemed increasingly hard to come by in the real world, life in the virtual creator economy beckoned. And if you’d been born into a world of rising seas and increasing temperatures, taking up residence in the metaverse might even begin to seem appealing. I don’t know if FaZe Clan will revolutionize entertainment, or if it’ll indeed merrily lead us all into our brave new future. But I think I know what I’m supposed to take away from Ready Player One. I’m not particularly excited to enter the metaverse, but I also know that it might not matter in the long run. The goal is to make it better.
I made my way down the large Astroturf staircase and headed out into the sleepy Los Angeles afternoon. I lingered on the sidewalk for a moment, the sun warming my skin, and then I went home.
Sam Schube is GQ’s deputy site editor.
A version of this story originally appeared in the June/July 2022 issue with the title “FaZe Clan’s Grand Plans.”
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Styling by Toreno Winn
Grooming by Marla Vazquez
Produced by Seduko Productions