By Matthew Quirk
We’ve talked significantly about Genesis Worlds, and honestly, it is both exciting and challenging to envision a Metaverse without actual game play already in place. But, for this to be community led, we also need the community to verify our decisions, and to do this we must also give them a chance to redirect it before we do it. A direction that matches the community expectations for a game those individuals might invest significant time and energy in. It can be even more difficult to foresee what the voting and steering of that community might look like, especially if you’ve never seen or been part of a DAO or community like this.
We are excited about our next round of Mining Claim sales, and have talked about Worlds and the themes of those Worlds, and what they might be like. In many ways, the Web3 Metaverse is already unfolding before our very eyes, just not in 3D. It’s using available Web2 social tools and deferring transactions to the best user experiences and most content like OpenSea. I’ll try to illustrate this story through a quest-like adventure we went through in a different community I’m a part of.
Recently I had the privilege of joining a vibrant community in the NFT arts and culture space. It was a story of generosity, with people’s time, spirit, and some well-spent ETH. As you read this story, I want you to imagine a 3D universe in parallel with the events that transpired. The story unfolded completely with Web2 social tools including Discord for internal organization and Twitter for external social interactions targeting the NFT Art community.
House of Medici.. An Origin Story
The journey began when a major player in the NFT art collector-space requested help to go on a friendly GM (Good Morning) campaign to help light the World with GM and kindness and help promote art and the decentralized community we all were members of. This would help the collector’s brand in a fun and non-shilly way. Promoting our community was to be masked in a grand Twitter ‘teatro’ (theater) where we role-played the part of a prominent Italian family from the Renaissance.
Simultaneous to this request, and our involvement, we were promised an NFT for our participation. Free NFT – I’m in, and as things began to take off we were quickly at 1200 Italian family members spreading gm goodness to NFT twitter. Furthermore, some of us were given ETH by the project’s major player to buy the floor on some lesser known NFT photography projects that showed some early promise. Many of their collections had barely sold pieces, yet had a quality about them that was unnoticed, drowned in the sea of new photo content being shared in NFT communities on Twitter. The results were beyond any of our expectations, and frankly blew us out of the water. Artists began to engage with each of us, they wanted to show us their work, and some to thank us for the purchase of their art.
For me personally, I made several connections with artists that reinvigorated my passion to create. We connected on a deeper, fellow-artist level, many of them around the globe, and even though they were telling me about their work, it didn’t feel like they were shilling; but rather it reminded me of art festivals in my home town where you visit and look at the works of each booth and engage with the artists on a more personal level. They proudly speak to you and share their hope with others – hoping people enjoy their piece, hoping it speaks to them, and ideally sell their art. So I couldn’t have been happier with this experience. Many artists were greatly impacted, others within our group were also stirred in their creativity, and many were brought into this arts and culture community that has been forming.
What’s been happening on Twitter and Discord with NFT’s is effectively the Metaverse in text-based form, a strange social adventure game that honestly feels like Alice in Wonderland going down the Rabbit Hole (which my wonderful wife happens to be reading to my kids at this exact moment). What an amazing week it was. So if you did what I asked at the beginning, and imagined as I told the story, a picture of this 3D World, with Italian art connoisseurs riding on horses to find artists around the ‘World’ and spread GM goodness, and buy their art, the picture begins to form of a fun and interactive role playing game like no other.
Web 2.0 Communities Are The Foundation of Web 3.0
Now we should examine this further – let’s layer on more Web3 interactions and a full 3D interactive World with the Web2 social dynamics. Interactions are not merely text, video and images, but a full fledged 3D social game, taking PFP’s to the next level with the Metaverse, and animating them in three dimensions with interactivity, rules, physics and lighting. This led me to reflect on this recent Italian meta-adventure in the light of our Genesis Worlds brainstorming sessions. This is exactly the kind of community-to-community interactions we hoped for.
In fact, for Genesis Worlds we designed each of the themed Worlds to help both separate interests and bring them together. Players may adventure together on quests both within a given World and from World-to-World; these quests could be as simple as meeting an artist in-World, and then buying an art NFT from them, earning rewards from quest completion. It’s genuine role-playing that is fun, interactive, whimsical, and for some, makes an impactful difference in their careers as artists. Quests can be more than this, including combat-based, sports tournaments, social interactions, explorations, puzzles among many other possibilities. Genesis Worlds become the 3D visualizations of the social interaction we have been doing in Twitter and Discord, along with the economic framework for trade and play-to-earn.
The tools of Discord and Twitter won’t go away in the short term, but will continue to remain communication hubs and organization tools to help information flow and graph relationships. I think the recent tweet from Punk 6529 (it’s really long) sums up the hopes of the future envisioned Metaverse and the dynamics. You can read it here on Twitter.
Community-Led and Decentralized Development
Furthermore, how will the ongoing development be centered in the community? Where can they determine WHAT gets done? What will it look like? This will be purely hypothetical, but I think it will be helpful to envision. Right now the https://hub.genesis.game is our source of truth and this is a vision of how that all might play out. But our community might decide differently. My assumption is that there will be multiple development threads happening concurrently. First, I think, there will be a global development effort where all $GENESIS holders can potentially vote and decide on priority high level tasks. These are things that have to get done according to our current vision (subject to no redirection). Keeping them high-level enough allows people to vote at their interest level, and not have to dive into infinite detail. While others might want this, more detail will come later as the advancement proposals are broken down into user stories. For this to start happening, we assume there will be certain tools needed to enable in-World development including map and environment generators, character generators, NPC and item modeling tools, and questing development tools. Additionally there will be a need for a PC and Mobile client. This application client will have a core focus on playability and simplicity while enabling the layering effect of massive amounts of diverse attributes and the necessary rules scripts to go with them.
As the tech advances, we will advance as the community deems necessary. The development of these sub components needs to be reviewed, prioritized, scoped, and funded. So imagine, we have 3 core tools we know are needed including the 3D creation tool, the environment creation tool, and the quest creation tool? What does the community want first? This must go to a vote, and communities decide. Additionally, tools like these would take significant time and effort, we would start to break that up into smaller feature sets, and these could go to vote as well. This is quite the challenge, as no one has ever really determined priority like this by the community – but we are essentially delegating the product manager priority call to the community, giving them control of what gets worked on. All of this effort will be funded and built by the foundation and members of the community.
In parallel I see communities rallying around given Worlds and writing proposals. Getting requirements correct saves time in development. It’s important these community-written proposals are edited and written in a way that clearly spells out the user stories, assumptions, non-functional requirements and architecture of the tools and Worlds being built. Communities in and around Genesis Worlds will likely be voting for the aspects of their World that they would like to customize, or create new content in the form of landscapes, buildings, creatures, and even NPC’s that will populate each World.
In both the Twitter and Discord communities, people are taking initiative to innovate, create, and join in. There is a freedom going on, and it’s very fast moving and dynamic. Much of this is driven by the financial opportunity, but not all of it. Others are highly motivated by the communities forming around a common interest. Some look to empower women. Some express a common attitude, while still more share their artistic vision. Our hope is to bring the 3D gaming experience alongside the social and fun aspects of Web3 that are already taking place.
Want to participate in the future of Genesis Worlds 100 year Metaverse? Simply join our Discord or Twitter, and become part of this burgeoning community where creators of all kinds are valued, and participants help steer the direction of our project in a real and tangible way.
