Original author: rileybeans
Original translation: TechFlow
On-chain tasks have always bothered me. They are unfinished and underexplored, yet extremely popular with a certain demographic. It’s time to re-examine the inner meaning behind on-chain tasks, rather than just the phenomenon of click farms.
Since Joseph Pine and James Gilmore coined the term in 1998, the experience economy has only accelerated. With the rapid development of the Internet, and the rise of social algorithms, artificial intelligence, prediction markets, and cryptocurrencies, the new experience economy is full of low-quality content, but it is still possible to fix it. In the context of collapsed late capitalism, outside of experience products like AirBnB, Top Golf, and spacious Apple Stores, this new experience economy is being built on-chain for a new generation.
Building new tasks by incorporating fun and more connected experiences may indeed lead to cheaper, more caring solutions to the autism epidemic and point to a path to achieving that purpose.
This post explores how principles of game design and event planning can transform on-chain tasks into more meaningful, engaging, interactive experiences that connect our physical selves to new digital worlds.
However, as a community builder and lifelong gamer, I think we seem to be stuck in making quests meaningful. As more emerging technologies become more ubiquitous, we now have the opportunity to build more integrated and interoperable creative experiences that combine the in-person journey with the digital self.
As Daisy Alioto aptly described at this year’s FWB FEST, the emerging flavor economy offers the opportunity to unfold design patterns that are more adventurous and collaborative. In my opinion, no design pattern is more ripe for redefinition than tasks.
But designing a community for this new internet requires a combination of emerging skills that go far beyond creating an attractive app with cool backend technology or your average social club. It takes a combination of expertise in event design and interface, game design, narrative, and human psychology to create the right ingredients to make the task both fun and less annoying.
Before we begin, it is important to understand that a mission platform listing NFTs as bait for airdrop hunters to swoop in like vultures is by no means a complete and meaningful mission. Mission platforms are well aware of this reality, so the creative work of completing this cycle needs to be done by individual communities.
Now, this isn’t necessarily the marketplace’s or the builder’s fault. This kind of thing takes time to get right, especially when dealing with a new interface.
Game Design for Activities
For non-gamers, most non-first-person shooter (FPS) games today fall into two categories: open world and linear games. In an open world, players are free to explore a vast land, a city, or some virtual setting, just like exploring a new town on vacation. In a linear game, players need to complete a series of steps in sequence—go here, do this, talk to this person, all in order.
Both types work well in in-person events.
However, for these game designs to perform well, a team of good storytellers must be committed to building a coherent, interesting, and well-crafted narrative. The four steps of game storytelling can guide their decisions:
Introduction: Going to a new area (including travel time and acclimatization), talking to new people
Extensions: Click or complete goals, collect power-ups, learn mechanics, and introduce themes
Progression: crafting items, using items, interacting with the world
Finale: Skill Test, Boss Battle (or in our case, Hackathon Review)
Event designers can leverage these building blocks (and the corresponding blockchain infrastructure) to create more lively, seamless, interoperable experiences that allow communities to thrive. This type of gamification goes beyond leveling up in a noisy Discord server by adding noise. Instead, it takes us outside of algorithmic echo chambers and creates rich opportunities for connection, similar to those made in classic online games like World of Warcraft, but can take place in person or on the blockchain.
For example, at the next event with 30,000 members, you could have a Raid (a treasure hunt that eventually leads to a harder puzzle) where participants must collaborate. Or use technology that reads your phone's distance from a resource (goods) and automatically opens a chest when you've collected enough items. Through a balance of positive and negative feedback loops, players of all skill levels can find their place. This kind of collaborative play is empowering, not exploitative, in its care for the community.
Now, let’s look at how the quests actually perform in an event when combined with these game elements.
Task design for activities
Each of the game's narrative steps is also replicated in the quest design, making it very simple to easily translate to a variety of quest types. For a full list of nonviolent game design patterns, check out Patrick Littell's invaluable free book on the subject.
The four basic quest game elements are:
Exploration: New areas, new characters
Expansion: Discovery panel, crafting, new skills
Exploit: Get rewards, merchandise, and items
Mastery: Enter the next event or level up
Now, as we know, up to now, cryptocurrency has been mostly confined to one part of the quest model: expansion. I would say that the process of collecting items is the most boring part of any quest. If our imagination only stays on the most monetizable part of the quest, this will clearly illustrate our purpose. However, we can integrate other steps in the model. A campaign that includes all the elements of a quest is able to leave a lasting impression. After all, the primary goal of a campaign should be to create an experience worth telling again and again.
This year, FWB Fest ’ 24 was the only event to get this concept right, hosting a scavenger hunt where nearly all of the IYK tags to collect were located in walkable locations where people would naturally run into friends. Notably, they designed the scavenger hunt without requiring attendees to pay a fee or download a new mobile app. This extended experience added a social nature to the quest, distributing rewards to successful content creators, players, and additional activity stations for their hard work.
Another emerging project that lends itself to task design is Soulmates by Amelia Guertin. Soulmates is a matchmaking questionnaire designed to bring people together at crypto events. Despite the growing problem of loneliness, Amelia shows how meeting new people and going on dates can be awkward, but can still be fun by incorporating forward and backward feedback loops.
Event Designers Need Game Design Skills
The event space for emerging tech continues to surprise me, and is often not very positive. From inviting too many speakers to side events being spread out across large cities, events can often become a point of contention. So before we get into the issues that our mission addresses, we need to make sure we’re not adding extra distractions to an already crowded city, making the event less than satisfying.
Imagine running around Brussels trying to attend all the important events!!
Take this list of just under 400 ETHCC ’24 side events that Michael Williams (Product Lead at Serotonin) helped put together, which were curated with the help of the Serotonin platform. That’s a lot of events, for around 5,000+ people, especially considering other big events like DragonCon host around 70,000 people per year, and there are only a handful of side events put on by major sponsors. Most of these events require a lot of travel, getting around, and time management skills.
Now, the good news is that by building tighter, more diverse on-chain event experiences, we can start to measure fun while integrating technology to help creators earn more revenue. Let’s dive into how event designers can build better quests and events.
How tasks promote better off-chain and on-chain economics
Although Internet users may be tired of various social applications and the constant requests for participation, the fun of the community does require some challenges. Unfortunately, all tasks require effort. We cannot escape this reality. The good news is that tasks are also a labor of love for both parties. As I said, "I don't invest money, but I invest love", and this love is mutual.
Whether you join a running club, a chess club, or a survival club, quests offer opportunities to introduce gamification elements through resources (virtual or real), narrative, and character development that translate well to both in-person and on-chain collaboration.
Still from the "How Video Game Economics Are Designed" series on the Game Makers Toolkit YouTube channel
These mechanisms allow for the collaborative control needed for the emerging experience economy:
Click: How can we turn the token distribution mechanism into a safe offline experience? Is this necessary? Can this be done in the introduction phase before the event?
Inventory: How can we build a better user experience with ERC 6551 token binding contracts for loyalty quests? How can we reward players with contracts that grant buffs once they collect enough items? Does this appropriately constrain players or does it create unnecessary offline friction?
Converters: How can we exchange one resource for another (usually via a consumption mechanic) to level up? Can we use a persuasion check to give players better access to offline goods? How does this affect the progression of an activity or game?
Drain: Can we remove resources from the economy, or adjust a difficulty meter that limits or slows down the player? Efficiency fanatics love this little trick!
Trading Systems: Can we create more interesting in-game and offline shop and merch booth experiences? I love those “shops in this part of the map are cheaper” arbitrage scenarios! This is often where crypto excels, but is often limited by the diversity of capital and sometimes, frankly, imagination. These are questions and mechanics that game designers, event planners, and TGEs (Token Generation Events) often think about. However, they have yet to apply on-chain technology at real scale through interoperability, chain abstraction, cheap L2 alternatives, smart wallets, payment agents, and extensive AI agents.
An in-game side quest might require you to collect 20 stars, while an in-person quest might require you to collect 20 people's social links. The way they are triggered looks completely different, as do other mechanics, but the feedback loop is often similar. Only this time, the community determines the meta rules of the game and governs changes to the game or algorithm to create a fairer, more consistent experience.
Quests, by the way, provide a unique opportunity to spread the word about a community, game, or event through content creators. It’s hard to estimate how many hours I’ve spent reading articles about Overwatch meta-rule changes or Elder Scrolls quest guides, but it’s definitely in the tens of thousands.
Fun as a KPI
Even if you’re not a gamer, if you watch enough Twitch streams or have kids, you’ll start to understand what makes modern video games fun. However, determining what behavior is fun in real life or on-chain is much more complicated.
That said, putting fun first to measure or construct is the hard part. Games, and tasks for that matter, “are fun because they’re the fun we experience through playing,” said author and video game designer Ian Bogost in a 2014 WIRED by Design talk. Thinking about the community aspect of games, he added: “Fun comes from the amount of attention and care you put into something that provides enough freedom—enough play fun—for that attention to matter.”
Events have long been an important part of Web3’s development. It’s also why we’re starting to see more brands experiment with measuring fun. In my opinion, this is much deeper than the previous periodic measurement of vibes. When we can measure on-chain how happy people are in real life, the leverage is endless. For developers like Winny, founder of Chipped Social, whose motto is “Fun as a KPI,” the tap of an NFC-chipped fingernail measures how often you meet up with new people. For many, this is seen as a luxury, like constantly attending events around the world. This is exactly why Chipped is successful; it provides unlimited interactions beyond crypto events.
Luckily, we have a lot of top event builders in our ecosystem. Everyone understands fun as a KPI and how to fit into the experience economy. Some of the communities I’ve seen doing well so far include Lens/AAVE, FWB, Boys Club, and Allships, which understand how to engage the senses, be authentic and consistent, and lead with wonder.
Summarize thoughts and find meaning
All of these words are to illustrate such a simple concept. What do I want?
Honestly, I really wish there were more puzzle games. I want to play mind games with my friends more often. I want to vote them off the island. Actually, I want more Crypto The Game. But seriously, take a page from their playbook and have a side quest campaign featuring friends and enemies.
It sounds ridiculous, whether true or not, that Ethereum was born out of dissatisfaction with a World of Warcraft update, and we have yet to do justice to the source material by creating genuinely interesting on-chain quests.
Layer 3 is not a mission platform; it is a tool that we should use with other similar tools to complete the feedback loop woven through narratives (both positive and negative, they are equal in importance) and enable interoperability across communities for maximum fun. Token incentives are just one layer of the complete mission experience.
Why are on-chain tasks better than a database that simply relies on XP and endless Google Sheets passed around in group chats? On-chain tasks provide a full marketing channel that doesn’t force users, players, or community members to pay to win; they help build an interchangeable, interoperable self-sovereign digital identity while also being a medium for fun. The key here is to shift the narrative to “complete this task in the hope of having fun” rather than “complete this task in the hope of getting an airdrop,” which, as we’ve seen, is not the focus of a highly financialized, currency-crazed industry to date.
You see, quests are fun, especially when done with friends. The question is not if, but when we start to see unique video game-like experiences that combine on-chain and off-chain technologies emerge in real life, beyond Pokémon GO.