GameFi vs GamePlay: Complementary Incentive Models
ETHCC 6 · July 2023 · 18:47
Andy Boyan compares financial token incentives with the participation generated by compelling gameplay. The speaker considers how web3 projects might combine both approaches to build more resilient communities.
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From ETHCC 6, hosted by Ethereum France.
Transcript
[Music] foreign my name is Andy boyan with infinity Keys thank you for coming my talk is on GameFly and game play uh uh well we'll go through it well hopefully we'll have some fun so I'm not shelving any products I have a product I have a project I encourage you to look at it but I'm not going to try you to get you to use it because there's some things from social science research that I think we need to think about um in uh crypto in particular this is based on a blog post that we've done there is a QR code if you want to go check it out it's a little bit longer form so taken from there with my co-author Elizabeth Barnes It's about token incentive models versus other
types of incentive models that we can use together so hopefully you got that if not we'll post the slides it'll be all available later game five bribes players with money this is like a core idea of game fight that we don't talk about um but really that's what it is the past couple years we've said it you know what we need to do in game five we need to make better games um which really means we need to make games that people will play without having to bribe them with money to play them I think that's a pretty good idea and we've actually got a really cool example we've got all this crypto stuff where we've been bribing people with money to do things incentives that's what token incentives are they're really good at aligning communities but then we've got games that have done this
incentivize people to use them and not only do they not need to be bribed but they pay money to play games so we're kind of these two industries next to each other and crypto I think we need to start looking at games and saying what are they doing how is this so engaging why will people play spend their time on these games and not need to be bribed uh so I found a study there's an interesting study on uh money because because money does some interesting things to people there's consequences of using money and using bribes over financialization Nation one of the things we see when people are reminded of money this is a meta-analysis so this study uh was was an analysis of effect sizes for um a few dozen almost 100 effects of money priming you tell people to think about money and then we've got some
effects uh on them and we we people who are reminded of money are less interpersonally attuned they're not thinking about others they're not pro-social caring or warm they're less pro-social caring and warm and they issue interdependence they become more independent money makes people become um uh a kind of loner a little more competitive not wanting to be social and they see this what's cool about this is it's across locations North America Europe and Asia if you have cross-cultural effects that's really powerful that's really really cool and if you think about this we've got cross-cultural effects of people issuing a social and like really thinking about money that actually sounds quite a lot like crypto Twitter to me so all right
here I gotta get my little inverse bra here hold on gotta do a selfie so I can get credit I'm presenting all right sounds a little like crypto Twitter um and we can do better than that as an industry uh I like inverse but I actually think uh he's he's got some good stuff um so so here's a couple of terms and how I'm using them a way that we need to think about them as an industry good games incentivize players by satisfying intrinsic motivations through gameplay I play Tears of the Kingdom because it is satisfying to play it lets you do things that you wouldn't normally be
able to do and it it like makes you feel some way inside satisfies those motivations and there are many different types of motivation motivations besides Financial we're going to talk about what those are in gaming in particular and that's sort of the thesis here gamification is a term that's been thrown around for many years in my former work in Academia in publishing I examined gamification um a lot of time people think gamification is you know feedback progress bars leveling up experience points those are elements those are ux elements of gamification but really what what we want we want the effects of gameplay in non-game activities that's what gamification is so we need systems that require game play and actual play
interaction to satisfy these intrinsic motivations so intrinsic motivations this is really key and this is a hard a piece of the puzzle this is why game design is really hard when you look at what people are doing what game studios do to design they really hone in on what are those satisfying elements of gameplay um so here's a meme we need to balance in-game and Community sinks and faucets to achieve maximum economic homeostasis to generate a sustainable long-term economy but really you need that fun you need that satisfaction of internal motivations I promised memes memes been delivered I have more um uh oh the formatting's bad web3 gamification sucks it does it's really
bad um it's good ux and it feels right and as a builder now I'm a Founder I want that gamification I want progress bars and I want level UPS because I need some way to attract my community but it doesn't result in long-term uh Community Building because it sucks it's just bells and whistles very few people and this isn't just web three Duolingo very few people stick with Duolingo the gamification sucks it gives you presence to open and confetti and it feels good for three days and then you're like all right I'm not gonna learn French sorry I tried I really tried but like it just doesn't uh work that well staking banking is not a game that's not
gamification okay that's it's banking it's good it's useful but it's not a game in itself lotteries uh that's not a it's a terrible game when you rely on Randomness a many games non-web three games find this roll the dice you have to have constraints and really specific constraints around dice rolls and randomization or else especially when it comes to financialized products or else there's loss and when there's loss there's emotional connection as well we'll talk about in a minute progress bars that's user experience it's not gamification they're useful they're really good but that's not gameplay it doesn't satisfy intrinsic motivation and poapps I love poapps but they're not achievements achievements fulfill they're a marker there are badge
that you've accomplished something showing up somewhere and scanning a pod meeting Patricio that's not an accomplishment he gives them to everybody it's great it's cool it's useful but it's not a game and it doesn't satisfy gameplay hi tokens are not supposed to bribe players they're supposed to align communities and if you talk to the the uh you know go around and listen to optimism labs and the foundation and with optimism token and public goods are for they're to create alignment among the people uh Bitcoin it aligns the community to maintain a secure and consensus state of the Bitcoin Network it happens to also have Financial properties and that that's a piece of it but tokens are
meant to align those communities not bribe you to get you to do something it's an ecosystem ecosystems are how tokens work so the challenge is Builders we need to use gamification alongside tokens because we do want to align communities but we need to use gamification satisfy those intrinsic motivations to uh and add them together so that they are um combined with token incentive models and this ends up being a really hard challenge we've seen that in GameFly so many play to earn projects bribed players and we'll figure out the ecosystem and then the ecosystem didn't emerge or turns out it was all resultant on bribery and then when the markets crashed there's no more players anymore we can do better than that as game designers and web 3 designers I'm going
to skip forward on this it's a big opportunity because the next wave of people that come in are going to be more than the last time some of them are going to have guns and missiles because there will be governments um grifters and thieves will be back like we're not done this isn't over so we need to be really thoughtful about how we use tokens and how we use other incentives to get people to participate in our ecosystem I think it's really critical and really important I'm very passionate about this because the emotional power of loss is bigger than the emotional power of gain when you if you lost a fortune in the last Market cycle because of things out of your control those memories are really powerful and it's hard to get back in this next wave it's going to be way more people it's going to be this massive
section of the population of the planet including entities and we need to make sure we're not only bribing half the planet to play our game our Ponzi games with us but rather we give them valuable things to do alongside those financialization use cases uh here's the thing there's a very tweetable thing I could do thank you for picture give people better emotional experiences than we do with tokens alone what are gaming motivations okay so there's my thesis Financial motivations alone are not strong enough to maintain good communities they have some negative outcomes so we need to use some game motivations here are some these are from uh these are just a couple of citations but there's an extensive work in communication this is my background um uh in in media research social
science research why do people play video games so I've distilled some of those uh core kind of the two most powerful are challenge motivations and social motivations um competition is really a challenge motivation combined with social if you think about like competing with somebody it is a social experience so that's a blend of the other two that's another strong one when we think about a challenge and overcoming a challenge when you overcome a challenge you feel a sense of satisfaction or you've demonstrated some Mastery this is why like traditional video games are really powerful is they give you a challenge if it's done right it's just hard enough of a challenge than the last one you did you've got to solve the puzzle or or make your character strong enough or
whatever it is to overcome that and that feels good now not only do you level up there's the gamification but you have demonstrated the Mastery and you have that feeling that intrinsic feeling that's what we need that's what we need to figure out in crypto if we want to reward people with a level up with experience points from sending um he was just talking about we also need these systems in place when it comes to social we need to give people not just a social platform but we need to give them a reason to connect I'm involved in the lens community and one of the neat things about orb if you're using orb is it connects People based on common interest and so there's an FCC group so it's about this particular topic and that's a great
start right it's the sort of subreddit Niche model of internet and social communities but we need to continue to facilitate that revenge is another really interesting social one that's related to communication if you're like staking in defy and somebody else like beats you out for yield display that put that up on display as a builder who is your competition what are those leaderboards and ascending has leaderboards but those leaderboards are really powerful in building communities now I'm not just doing it for the yield I'm doing it for these other intrinsic motivations that I may have as a player uh something really important to note about gaming motivations as an aside different people play games for different reasons I'm a game scholar I like I was a games Professor for 10 years I'm not competitive in the
slightest I don't care I love games I play them for 40 years hey I give or take um and I'm not competitive I love to lose as much as I do to win to some people that is impossible you can't even think about like why would I not play to win like that is insane people play games for different reasons and that's something really important to keep in mind I love to talk to people interested in that later on here's some more memes there's a good one I don't have time for all these are you waiting son I genuinely don't know Dad I don't know anyways um so here's our challenge uh I talked about some of these how do you build competition give them leaderboards give them an opportunity for Revenge you can give out meaningless nfts
for first place for a given season they don't have to be valued they don't have to lead to a special role or extra airdrops it's just at your first place thank you your first place and then next season you know who is first place and you can shoot for it we've integrated this in our community we have a very small community and it works really great people who haven't won multiple Seasons they're like okay I have time this month I'm going to dedicate to this you know little fun super stupid Discord game that we have for connection um that's where like Badges and display can get really valuable because now I share the same patch this is where I think we've seen the most gamification good gamification in crypto is we're sharing badges we're sharing commonalities we need to do better about
displaying those and letting people find those connections uh amongst each other uh challenge it's not just measurable skills and masteries but it can also be completing a story I want to know how something ends if you go to infinitykeys.io oops I Shield myself there's a game up called pet the dog it's really easy it's not hard but it's a story where there's a hand that wants to pet a dog and then you gotta you gotta pass the first step it's really easy just put in a passcode pet me it's called and the next picture hold the hands a little bit closer you got to finish it now you're gonna pet the dog right a couple more steps and you will have success you will pet the dog don't worry that beautiful dog will get pet there are tons of types of mini games um this is what we build at Infinity
Keys is infrastructure so that people can build these things but here's a list of some this is just a small list fetch go get something bring it back find something hidden in an image or a page join a group right that's actually a pretty cool minute how do you get in how do you find the password people take a picture of this one tweet me out at Andy Boy and I'm up there um fish oh the fishing mini games like fishing mini games are so classic but all you have to do is you have to like uh use something as bait and that could be anything and then nft a token uh you know an emoji and then like wait like you just program a clock ticking and then you retrieve something that's a fishing game you can put whatever animation you want on there but that
mechanic is really really useful and valuable for making people feel like they're doing something um there's all sorts of these other ones and um that we can integrate in a variety of ways here uh we made a mini game in fact that I'm going to give to you first before I tweet it out on mass and there's limited 300 mints well 299 now because the tester tested one at least uh um so I'll give that to you here at the end some action steps if you are in an organization or talking to people in organizations in web 3 and you want to do better for gamification here's what you do if you're in community and growth give you players or your users something deeper to connect with besides token value there's a bunch of games I just
listed social connection revenge is fun give them reasons to stick around in your community besides number go up um that's for Community people for products people um uh it's mini games you think about how many games can be part of your own Pro product and whether they fit into social or challenge intrinsic motivations not just like is this a little Doodle that we can do don't assume people will play it because it's a game think about what does it fulfill it's going to make people feel some kind of way how are they going to feel about that if you're in leadership my action item is to do it now before the next billion come to web 3 because we can give people much stronger reasons to stick around even if the market
fluctuates because this technology is incredible we can do amazing things with it we can't have people leave just because they didn't strike it rich this time around that's not a sustainable way to build technology or a society uh so we have built a a combined game it is a social combination game uh my project is infinity keys we're working with mentaport uh geolocation based uh web3 SDK and it is on now and it is live and I'm going to give you a link to it there are three regions in France or in Paris in central Paris there's one in the middle along the sen there's one North above the Sun and one South below the sun I'll give you I'll show them to you in a minute if you're in this region like here I got you
um you'll be in the South Region when you do the app it'll pop up an augmented reality display of a sculpture you will have the option to Mint a contribution to that sculpture once you've minted that contribution that's your contribution you meant uh as uh people contribute it will grow you'll actually see what that sculpture is it will take a shape and it will have the form that you helped make it to be there are three different sculptures around the city again North Central and South there are 100 mints each so there are three total nfts that you can do and the geographic areas are quite large so this whole that whole region on this end so you can be here you don't have to go all the way
down to the very south but for here you got the South but if you go up to the center if you're on the river pop it open check a mint see if you can do something and see the the shape that takes place and and then if you go north there's another one as well they are related to Parisian monuments and and history as well so if I can ask you to please do me a favor do it take some screenshots tag Us in the tweets as well people got phones up so all right I'll I'll post this on our Twitter like right after I'm done here too so this will go out other people will be able to do it uh Jordan don't tweet it out until like give these folks a chance all right because people will swarm you
um very quickly uh we build Infinity Keys it is universal gaming Quest building infrastructure um where you can set whatever tasks you want put them in an order there's a particular sequence that people can play and then you can make a reward of any kind we work with a variety of projects including avogachi and lens um to build some of these MVPs if you're interested in talking about gaming gamification memes augmented reality or any of these cool future topics I would be happy to talk to you my Twitter is at andyboyan you can find me up there hit me up and I will retweet everything you guys say um nice about me and thank you very much have a wonderful ECC questions
questions [Music]