Compiled by: MetaCat
Everyone complains that nothing real has been produced in the Crypto space.
But what if that’s the whole point?
Build fun, surreal online worlds for everyone to play in.
Blockchain as a New Entertainment Medium
Blockchain offers huge untapped potential for entertainment and fun.
This is a cultural phenomenon that has already unfolded naturally.
Ethereum is loved not just for its technology, but for the community that has been born around it, the culture that has come with it, the sense of purpose it has given people, the friends people have made in the process, and the opportunity to build businesses that serve others. It offers the ability to build an audience, the thrill of being able to role-play in a new world, and the thrill of danger, not to mention it’s been an endless source of drama, gossip, chaos, and joy. Some are eager to get in early for financial gain, others are driven by a vision of the world, and many are somewhere in between, but what all share in common is the currency that represents ownership of this world: Ether.
Ethereum offers people a game that is immersive, social, and meaningful.
While blockchains today are highly optimized to be general infrastructure that supports crypto use cases such as payments, trading, collectibles, and other passive consumption experiences, Ethereum’s greatest success is not as a backend for applications, but as an entire world for people to live, create, belong to, and cultivate.
The Ethereum experience is hard to define; it is both strange and new. We don’t yet have a name or strict label for the experience that belongs to it. In an effort to understand it, we may have over-rationalized it as a temporary state of Crypto that can be ignored and passed. This is a period of confusion, weirdness, and exploration, a collective attempt to understand blockchain as a new technology. However, as the momentum of most of the hype cycle in 2021 has passed, the true nature of Crypto may just be beginning to emerge: The experience of participating in blockchain is the product itself.
Blockchain is like a blank canvas that breaks all of our preconceptions about entertainment, finance, and computing systems. Crypto blurs all of the traditional boundaries of experience, providing an experience that is somewhere in between all three realms.
This also explains why any single property of blockchain, when isolated, has either been difficult to adopt or generally results in a system that is worse.
When using blockchain as a database, the quality of the game improves over time. Financial systems have no native consumer protections. Computers are expensive to use and difficult to build. While each dimension has its own tradeoffs, blockchain provides the opportunity to build deeply immersive online realities that have never been seen before.
Blockchain is a natural toy for games
People often joke that the experience of participating in cryptocurrency is like a game, and this statement is not wrong. While Ethereum was not originally designed as a game, people naturally view it as a toy and a canvas for their own goals.
For Ethereum, we can think of game points as Ether, which everyone intuitively recognizes as valuable ownership of Ethereum. Everyone plays the game differently, similar to the different categories of MMORPGs - the fun is in doing things your own way and choosing your own destiny. Some people care about creating positive externalities for the world, some want to do it creatively, and some want to do it entrepreneurially. From memecoin to MEV. Of course, some people only play the game by button mashing (airdrop farmers). While everyone chooses their own way of participating, they are all connected through a shared world that influences each other.
The physical limiting factor of Ethereum is the EVM, which requires Ether as gas to write to the shared block space. Ether acts as a shared canvas that anyone can write, use, and read without permission. Ethereum's economic model is designed to ensure the physical security and continued operation of the world: Ether faucets are staking rewards in exchange for economic security, and sinks are gas for writing to the shared block space.
The world of Ethereum is organically instantiated through collective meaning through the gradual realization that Ether accumulation is the goal of global players, and the constraints of the digital laws of physics of the EVM and other system properties (if absolute ownership and address-based agency are system properties), which generates fun and drama.
The Next Great World Is Coming
Today, Ethereum feels like a game that has run out of content. We can see a similar phenomenon with Solana. Despite Solana's success in creating a unique culture, the two application ecosystems are mostly derivatives of each other, and development is often only incremental due to the general virtual machine and similar economic models or "laws of physics".
As long as blockchains are not designed to achieve significant core differentiation in the physical laws of the underlying world and the economic incentives to participate in it, this pattern is likely to continue.
By treating blockchain as a new medium for content and treating it as an existing game, two white space areas are ripe for innovation:
Democratize Participation
Creating Immersion
Democratize Participation
Instead of relying solely on the EVM’s core constraints as the core state machine for how participants interact with each other, we can focus their interactions onto a more subjective but more participatory set of physical laws that incorporate an element of skill and luck.
These physical sets act as an extension of the EVM’s human-like operational state machine and have proven to be a powerful canvas for user-generated content.
These physical rules can be implemented as game-like smart contracts: including geolocation of players and resources, resource economies, the creation and disappearance of resources, simple mechanics for how users interact with the world, combat mechanics, health and inventory management, and more. While these are traditionally released as on-chain games and standalone products, in this case we can think of them as the physical laws of a broader experience, which is the blockchain as a whole. These “laws of physics” can also be understood as client-agnostic game mechanics that exist on the blockchain and can be modified permissionlessly, unlike the EVM.
Another way to implement physical laws is to modify the underlying architecture of the blockchain. For example, changing the absolute ownership model of the blockchain to allow other users to steal assets from someone’s wallet without permission, or limiting block space production to weekends.
Rather than providing economic security for the blockchain, the entire economic model of the blockchain can incentivize participation through the physics that define the world. As a byproduct of participation, players provide something far more critical: social proof and user-generated content.
Creating Immersion
Cryptocurrency feels like it’s “sold separately”.
Rather than selling the dream of blockchain or games separately, here’s a vision that brings all of the above together into a unified experience, the world itself. By doing this, we can unapologetically tell stories about a whole new fantasy world that is fun, weird, and chaotic.
By building a narrative and a “magic circle” for the world, we can temporarily interrupt reality and allow people to role-play and immerse themselves in it. Rather than relying on typical narrative tropes like mass adoption, this unlocks creative freedom that allows us to advertise the existence of this world in a purely lore-driven way.
Beyond the lore, there is an opportunity to redesign the entire user journey of participants across all touchpoints of the blockchain, from the wallet experience to bridge transactions and even block explorers.
In this way, you can craft different device narratives to influence and evolve each interface’s relationship with the user. One example is to think of the blockchain’s bridge experience as an experience in itself: a portal to a new world. These interfaces can continue to augment the temporary interruption of reality.
Only by creating an immersive, differentiated world can you create an environment that people feel compelled to build, create content, and participate in.
We can empower people with roles to play and goals to achieve.
The future is fun, playful, and weird
Ethereum is an innovation not only in worldbuilding, but also in technology.
We have run out of content and are all looking for the next great immersive world.
These worlds will be fun, playful, and weird, worlds that people wish existed.
Maybe you will be the one to create it.
Kikyo
Catherine
Alex
Miyuki
Joy
Weiliang
Weatherly
Anais