Creating Meaningful Video Games, Post Gollem-Class AIs / Paul Gadi

Transcript

hello welcome to the Institute of crypto Anarchy I am your host Camille and I am emotionally invested in ethereum you are my community I love you this is one of our OG game game developers in this space Please welcome Paul Gotti thank you come to you all right thank you hello everyone ascable said I'm I'm a game developer and I went into ethereum I guess earlier than most game developers like back then I don't know if you guys remember a game called

crypto kitties which was kind of the I guess it's one of the core moments when webrtick gaming started to happen so back then I was making games with some of the people with crypto crypto kitties team and we know some of the folks in the sandbox team and it was very different uh comparing what it was then to now so I would say what I would want to discuss during my talk is a little bit of a story on that um I feel that as a game developer there are things that I can share around how we should build the the space especially now that things are going to change again I feel like AI is something that some of you may be keeping track of but

I think not enough of us are and I think it's an opportunity for us now to do to do something more with games and even though this is a topic for video games I think this will be relevant to all of us because I feel like like video games it's just how I work on it as a medium but games happens like in everything that we're building so I'll talk about calling class AIS I think there's that there's we need to explain what that is but I'll yeah I'll just go through it as we do the top um okay so I already talked a little bit about myself but I think one thing that I want to start to tell everyone about is that game design is broken already and I think AI will be the camel that

break will be the straw that breaks the camels back rather um and it's a story that has been happening for quite a while I would say uh so what I will do is I'll talk a little bit about what it means to make meaningful games talk about Golden class AIS what they are and then a little bit of call to action afterwards what can we do as people Building Systems in the space to make more meaningful games in our products um all right and so we I mentioned Golem class AIS and I think the best way to kind of know what that is is to watch this talk by Tristan Harris and ASA Raskin and I guess a broad overview of

what Golem plus AIS are is that they are generative large language models and that's why it's Golem g-o-l-l-e-m and what is a and Tristan says in their talk is that this is actually the second time that we're facing the Golden class AIS the first one was during the time of social media and what what happened there was we lost like it wasn't really uh a win-win situation when that AI uh that a encounter happened and what happened was we kind of optimized towards the the race to maximize engagement and you see that in social networks you see that with

Outreach being the main thing that uh that social networks are optimized for so they say that it started with um it started with the positive messages like give everyone a voice connect with your friends uh have smbs reach your customers but it was just the surface of it and what was really happening was there was this algorithm that was maximizing engagement and so we really we didn't really increase I guess the meaningfulness of transactions with AI or with social networks rather but they kind of just optimized for engagement and I'm sorry like it's it's not really readable but as a game developer I saw

how that changed games as they were being made so I've been making games for 20 years the language around games has definitely changed because of social media and the optimization for engagement like before I would say when people talked about games it was about the narrative the mechanics then I saw a change to become more marketing like like it was about the funnel the pyramid it was about call Loops how they get people just going around the loop like the design is really optimized towards having them just go through the loop and you extract extract a resource from them afterwards um the language became daily active users friends for example became a resource

like you need to add your friends to be able to get a resource back and and the core Mantra of a game developer during that time was that retention leads to monetization the more they play your game the higher the chances are that they'll pay so that was kind of the main metric that was everything we cared about like how many people to play the game and how long it takes for them to convert or to pay and and yeah so you can kind of see what will happen if we optimize for that system towards AI when it comes during the next wave uh but I want to take a little step back to 2012 so my my talk is about how do we create more meaningful games in this world of uh Golem class AIS and I would say like

my journey into what a meaningful game is is has been largely influenced by a few talks and this is one of them uh has anyone seen the stock by Brett Victor inventing on principle but if you haven't I suggest you check it out like um like it gave me a glimpse of creating something that's so it I guess the Talk itself says what what uh what the Talk's all about it's inventing on principle it's a as a technologist we can do something bigger than what we are doing or or have a principle rather for what we are building so yes I won't spoil the talk but Brett Victor starts with saying that that he has a principal is finding a grounding principle for your work it's

something you believe is important and necessary and right so so yeah so I it opened my mind around even as just uh someone who is a technologist you can find a deeper meaning into what you're building and I guess fast forward to web2 I mentioned that the language was changing everyone was talking about funnels around friends being resources and I wasn't the only one feeling that way there were a lot of game developers who felt that this wasn't really the way that we should be making our games and one good example for that is in 2019 a group of game developers gathered around a ranch in Texas and they they did they

they did this Think Tank called project horseshoe and one one good report that came out out of that was the pro-social economics for game design so I shared this with all my webp friends it's it's it gives a glimpse of how you can create better I guess better systems because a lot of it also deals with tokenomics as well like how do we create communities how do we build systems where people are more win-win rather than more extractive and and there's a great code that starts off this stock by Kurt Vonnegut an American writer he says what should young people do with their lives today many things obviously but the most daring thing is to create stable

communities with which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured and I think that's what's nice around web3 also like my journey in web3 is a bit also sideways I would say like I didn't want to go into web3 I wanted to be a game developer but then I started reaching out to these communities so I felt we're doing the right things like git coin uh doing open source the platform Cooperative folks who was analyzing the gig economies and seeing how we can do it better meta governance uh kernel which I am part of and and yeah and I really like how ethereum also settled on the messaging around

infinite games and as a game developer that's a book that I read also James Scott's book on finite in infinite games where a finite game is played for the purpose of winning in an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play so that guides me that's my I would say that's part of how I find meaning and what I'm making and I guess that's what I would engage everyone is as you're building in this space we're lucky that we are with the group of people who who have that Collective voice of solar Punk of decentralization of crypto anarchism and and uh this is one show I would say that uh I suggest people watch if you haven't it's called arrival and it's

based on a book by Ted Chang and I really like uh what that Chang sees his his medium of Science Fiction he says that science fiction is about using speculative scenarios as a lens to examine the Human Condition and and it's more meaningful right we're just not writing science fiction as a fantasy to explore but he feels like there's something deeper there and in my case I feel that games especially on web3 can be playgrounds where communities can experiment and improve The Human Condition so we've seen some very very cool examples of that in web free like the Constitution though I feel was was very fun right you haven't seen something like that before in its

systems in coordinating systems so if you can do that more and explore more on what we can do as societies I think games can really uplift can be more meaningful yeah so coming back to to Golem class AI so so now we're going to face round two of our not combat I guess our interaction with AI and now it's it's much more different right like if you look at what AI can do nowadays if you use chat GPT if you look you look if you see what stable diffusion or Runway ml all these generative tools can do it's it's it's really scary like there's a reason why people are having some high tuberism right like people are afraid

and and if you watch uh the talk by Tristan and ASA one thing that they say is that the the previous encounter with AI was the race to attention and now it's going to be the race to intimacy so if you've watched her it's a perfect example of optimizing towards making meaningful or rather making intimate connections between humans and machines and I feel like there's there's a very very clear parallel around uh coordination failure um so for I guess for some of you you may you may uh if I recognize the the molok imagery like molok is a I would say one of the

villains in web3 right it's like the failure to coordination and I I see that there's going to be a lot of parallels and the the main thing is there is to intimacy and the coordination the coordination failure is mostly grounded on our loss of human connection like it's the loss of trust with other humans and this is a game that I also tell everyone to play it's the it's a game by Nicki case around the evolution of trust and I think it's a perfect game to talk about web3 because for one it's a game and number two it really discusses um coordination and how we can kind of see how coordination can coordination and Trust can evolve in different kinds of spaces

all right and so I'm going to be closing out my talk with I guess a few thought exercises on how it can create more meaningful games um but I just want to start with saying that like all of us are game developers I feel especially in webtree we think of how to design the systems we think of whether we're winning we're losing like all interactions can be game like and the first thing I say is of course to find your voice and your definition of meaning so this is uh an exhibit around through me in Toronto where I live and my my I would say my journey into meeting is still kind of going on um and one thing I suggest people to do

is one find their ikigai which is find what is like the intersection of what you can do what you're paid for and what you love and what you can share with other people and that can be a source of meaning and another is meaning via negative or Find the meaning of something by finding what it's not for example a meeting is different for all of us like as a person what is being equal to me may not be meaningful to you but if you think of what is meaningless right like maybe it's something that this doesn't need to exist in this world for example then you can kind of build on that to find your own meaning the second exercise is to appreciate the technology of what we're building a lot

of the games that I see on web3 are I would say meaningless like they're not really at least there's no reason for them to exist um but if you make something that's rooted in the technology then that's something that's more meaningful so this is a very great uh tweet by Alex vandesan around what is a great blockchain game or what he wants from blockchain games and and yeah I think just these seven points already gives a a good uh a good summary on what kind of game to make and there's this group called The autonomous worlds group in ethereum so it's the ox Park folks who are building games that are all Unchained so that's something that you

don't see in any other space so I think do check them out as well and then so the last two points this this one is to focus on what you want your players to feel I feel like like games have kind of lost that initial I would say Focus around having your your players feel something and we've seen that happen in in recent days like there's this trend in games called cozy games wherein uh gamers are more concerned over with Comfort versus competition because I don't know if you guys have played some of these games recently A lot of them can be very toxic like you don't really want to spend time with these random people in the internet

when they're just there to to get something from you right so so these cozy games and I think there's also a cozy web movement that kind of focus on this feeling of comfort I think uh I think that's a good way to kind of change our mindset around creating their games oops and and yeah and lastly it's um is to unlearn what the game is and to instead learn why humans play and this is a this there's a great report by the Raider Dao which is also from from this QR code discussing what play is and this first screenshot on the left is uh it's Grand Theft Auto and I put that there because there's this subset of people who are playing Grand Theft Auto but they're not

playing by the rules of the game what they do is they just spend time in the space and they role play for example the people there all of them are players and they're acting out the scene of someone uh I guess someone falling on the road and they're all acting as uh as policemen and as ambulance operators so it's like improv it's not like I'm here to earn money I'm here to buy the next house in GTA but they're there to play together and to spend time and app together in a space so so and and yeah so I learned what the game is and learn why humans play because I myself I feel like as a game developer sometimes I feel like it's a crutch like my my

language that I had going to the space kind of informs how I look at games and what I do feel is as I mentioned games are everywhere like the protocols we're designing the tokens we're designing are all games what we can learn from game developers and how they've built these systems are definitely applicable to what you're doing and if you can find meaning in what you're Building and find the true voice I guess that comes from what you want to make and what you want other people to feel then you can create a meaningful game and you can perhaps create the new next thing that would allow us to get us out of disrupt in crypto right and make something that people really want to to play with the experience

and yeah and I guess I have time for questions but that's the presentation thank you thanks Paul thank you Camille thank you Paul I was I think it was a great presentation thank you and I actually don't see many people who do GTA role play as part of their presentation because I I think that's kind of like under the radar for like many people even though like I also built one server just to like you know really test out like how players behave in like certain environments and those players actually shout at you if you like fall out of your role like if you're a police officer yeah they do and we did like we did like a robbery with my friends like not an actual like a GTR

page uh but yeah so uh and it was just like like we had you know uh we had like the police like surrounding the building and you know it was just like a crazy experience and that's when I actually think about when you speak about meaningful games uh my question here is what do you consider what's your favorite like your your most meaningful game like what's the most meaningful game for you in your experience in your life yeah yeah that's a hard question uh one game that I I think of also is by this game designer well maybe two I can can I imagine too yeah first the first one is a very recent game I suggest if you like card games or even if you don't it's a game called inscription inscription with a Y made by Dan Mohler

I think but yeah but it's it's very meta I don't want to spoil what it is but when I played it I was like oh so this is something that games can be the second one is a game called passage by Jason rohrer so it's a very low-fi game but I played it when I was pretty young and the message there is around the passage of time and how what I mean and what time means to someone so when I play that game I was like oh so so it kind of I don't know it made you feel things I think so as I said like but I think games that are meaningful at the ones where where the players feel something afterwards or or are focused on making people feel that so so yeah so passage by Jason rohrer in inscription

thank you for the question yeah so you have a question regarding do you actually feel that The Narrative of web3 gaming economy is actually ruining games because it actually feels that they're actually pushing The Narrative of of economy first and that's actually ruining the engagement and fun aspect yes yeah I do I do um but of course I'm open to being wrong I feel like there are a lot of smart people who are trying to find the connection with web3 the narrative and games right but I'm more old school I feel like yeah one thing about Finance is it kind of also dehumanizes things a little bit right so if it's more about transactions rather than talking to humans then the

narrative weakens a little bit I feel so so yes but I'm still open to changing my mind I feel like we with grad we need games to focus more on the non-financial aspect and maybe a story is the crypto kitties game right that it wasn't really designed to be monetized it was like a beating game that you can share with people and that became bigger than what it was it became the standard for nfts so maybe we can be more playful start with something like that and then be mindful of what happened with nfts and just build something new right so yeah meow thank you Paul thank you thank you everyone

[Applause] [Music] foreign