MGP (Nov 2021): MetaGame

Moloch Rises
#1

Project Title

MetaGame

Description

A massive online coordination game.
A mashup of a learning/freelancing/social network & an MMO-RPG.

Manifesto/Vision

The general idea is that Ethereum should be used for building a new kind of socioeconomic system & this is our vision of it - a decentralized community building a platform for decentralized societies focused on solving problems & helping people coordinate at scale.

Tl;dr of the actual manifesto
In a game of chasing profits, we forgot what the economic system was supposed to achieve; prosperity. Instead, the game is optimized for maximum value extraction at the expense of the planet & all life on it.

MetaWorldview
The Earth is our spaceship, keeping us alive. We need to start acting like it’s crew and not competitors in a game of who’s-best-at-exploiting-it. Bitcoin halving is cool but wildlife halving isn’t.

A Decentralized Society
A place where people come together & build the future we want to live in. From knowledge and teammates to investors and users; anything you’ll need to build decentralized applications & organizations.

Be Autonomous
MetaGame is about taking things into our own hands & not waiting for others to solve our problems. People in the old world like to complain; we like building solutions. So find a problem you care about & solve it.

Why now?
We’re running out of time to steer humanity away from catastrophes. The technologies allowing us to coordinate at scale are at reach. We need to start a new game before it’s too late.

Full version here.

Problem

First things first, the problem we’re trying to solve is onboarding contributors to the Ethereum DAO ecosystem.
Its a problem I’ve encountered when joining MetaCartel & seeing its a general problem in the DAO space & the wider Ethereum ecosystem, thought it makes sense to make it a general platform rather than solve it just for MetaCartel (which it started as, a MetaCartel Blackpaper)

Definition: People joining the space have no idea what is it about & why it matters besides numba go up. It’s hard to find a path towards contribution & if you want to start a project, its even harder.

Solution

An Onboarding Machine & A Decentralized Factory.

Our main two memes; the first one is about teaching people why this technology matters & helping them find their way. The second one is about bringing into one place anything that people need for starting a dApp or a DAO; from links to educational resources & programs, to information on tools & frameworks, help finding teammates & connections to product or service-providing DAOs such as DAOHaus, Raid Guild or MetaCartel Ventures.

Product Features

In terms of actual things we’re doing…

  • We’ve pioneered a system for (bootstrapping if needed,) tracking & rewarding contributors in a DAO that is now starting to get widely used by DAOs such as Maker, 1Hive & Bankless among others. The first to fully adopt SourceCred besides the SourceCred community, the first to mint tokens based on cred (XP points in our case) & obviously the first to put up a market for it. We call this MetaSys.
  • The first thing we built ourselves are these MyMeta profiles based on Ceramic/IDX (ex. 3Box), which display things like skills, time availability, timezone, personality type, DAO memberships & NFTs.
  • Our second most important project are the Playbooks, a fairly new project where the idea is to write short guides on things such as “How to join the DAO space as a non-technical person” or “How to bootstrap a DAO”
  • Other than that, we do anything from meetups, workshops & podcasts over conferences & hackathons to random tools & knowledge for the DAO ecosystem. Over the past 2 years, we’ve done A LOT of that.
  • Over time, we’ve also built up a network of DAOs that build solutions or offer services for other DAOs.

In short: we’re building technical as well as educational solution. But more than that, we’re creating a place where people meet.

Validation

Not sure what kind of validation is required but we’ve done a bunch of cool shit & we’ve built up a great community.
We’re obviously doing something right because people are aggregating around our meme & generally love being a part of our community.
We’ve helped a bunch of people find their way to other projects & inspired many in our ways of operating. The first big validation goes back to May 2nd 2020, by one of the people that got their crypto career started in MetaGame.
Some of the most prominent Patrons of MetaGame are Griff Green, Michael Zargham, Kevin Owocki & Austin Griffith.

Progress

We’ve built an awesome community through 100+ community gatherings with 50+ guest speakers & projects, recorded 30+ podcast episodes, 20 member organizations, organized a conference with 60+ speakers, the first DAO hackathon, a month long virtual festival (a week of gaming & social events, a week of conferencing, a week of workshops & 3 weeks of hackathon), pioneered MetaSys, built the first version of MyMeta profiles & a bunch of other things.

Differentiation (from other projects)

We really still haven’t seen a project quite like ours.

Team

We don’t have any sort of “ex-Google” or “ex-ConsenSys” kind of people, probably mainly because we’ve only raised $15k of funding in 2 years & people with more expertise expect to be paid a lot. There are no rockstars active in MetaGame.
There are people with 15 years experience in what they’re doing, but they treat it as a passion project, none of them works full time - yet.
But MetaGame is not a team effort, MetaGame is a community effort.
There is no “core team” there are only “currently most active players”.

Grant Request $

$50k

What the Funds Are For

Slowly add as liquidity to our pool so that more of our contributors can get paid without crashing the price.

Help Requested

Technical project manager & a builder that would consider working full time after the fundraise.

Additional Resources, Links, Portfolio

MetaGame

#2

Hello Peth,

I really admire many aspects of what your community’s vision is with MetaGame and the many accomplishments that have been made.

I have a few problems though.

Problem 1: MetaGame is “trying to solve is onboarding contributors to the Ethereum DAO ecosystem” yet has a branding/style that is more catered towards onboarding more men into the ecosystem.

I feel like the branding of MetaGame seems to be slightly contradictory with it’s mission:

The general idea is that Ethereum should be used for building a new kind of socioeconomic system & this is our vision of it - a decentralized community building a platform for decentralized societies focused on solving problems & helping people coordinate at scale

If we want to build new societies, truly, I think it’s important to figure out how to welcome/invite more women into the process of building these new societies. I don’t think the MetaGame branding/game-like strategy really jives well with me as something that many women will be inspired to be a part of (I am not saying there will be 0 women, just saying that the branding is not really optimized for bringing both more men and women into the space at the same time).

I feel like from what I have heard, the intentions of the MetaGame community have seemed pure, and I love the idealism. I don’t think you have been intentionally trying to exclude women. But I think sometimes there are blindspots though and it’s hard to see how one might be creating an environment that’s building more of a “boys club”.

It would be cool if we can build a culture within Ethereum that thinks about these problems early on, as opposed to needing to rely on initiatives like Meta Gamma Delta alone to increase diversity in the space.

Problem 2: This proposal does not have any clear deliverables listed.

It doesn’t seem like this proposal has any deliverables for what MetaGame plans to build or create with the money, instead it is expecting Moloch DAO to add to MetaGames liquidity pool. We do not have that much precedence for funding proposals like this.

I would love to hear more details on specific deliverables you’d like to execute on with funding from Moloch!

Conclusion:

I think your community may already be deep with the MetaGame branding and how things work and this is probably a super hard thing for some random person like myself to convince you to change at this point. I will not vote no because of Problem 1, but I hope that you may take this feedback into consideration and and look into how the brand may be able to transform over time to be more inviting for women to join.

Problem 2 is more where I am leaning towards voting no. I prefer there be more clear deliverables, timeline, scope of work for what you plan to create with funding from Moloch DAO. If you can provide those, I will lean towards voting Yes if the numbers/plan look good to me.

Best,

Stellar Magnet

#3

Thinking about this more, and this is a common blanket response I am providing to other DAO proposals, my new take on this one:

Voting No on this proposal. I think that Moloch DAO should consider DAO-to-DAO relationships but should not rush in forming so many of them at once. Right now I think the relationships with Metacartel and MGD are more important for both Moloch & Ethereum, I think those relationships should be considered and solidified first before we rush into more, especially as our membership base as it is is very inactive and we need some better standards in place for how these relationships should work. I think we get to those standards by making 1-2 relationships with other DAOs work well and proving that to the membership base as something valid to fund before rushing into forming more relationships with DAOs all at once.

#4

Sounds kind of cool, but I also feel that this is on the fringe of what Moloch should consider in scope

#5

Would love to hear in more detail what do you think makes the branding biased to men?
We use some gaming lingo but its really more so about the concept of “metagaming” & building a “game-b” than “gamification” or turning real life into a game.

We’ve actually been trying pretty hard to bring in more women. We focused on bringing in more women into leadership position - so far we have 3 - as well as having as many female speakers come to our calls as possible. Both with the goal of attracting more women to step up in general.

Also, regardless of what you think about MetaGame as a community/brand, what we’re really doing is enabling others to build their own metagames.
Everything we’re doing, starting from pioneering MetaSys & MyMeta to Playbooks & onboarding systems is open source & meant to be used by other projects that are on a similar mission.
The goal is not for MetaGame to be THE new socioeconomic system but more so 1/1000s different flavors running on ours or similar software on Ethereum or elsewhere.

I’ve set adding to the liquidity pool as what the funds are for because that’s how MetaGame contributors get paid. They get Seed tokens which they either hold on to or cash out through the pool.
It kind of highlights the capital efficiency of the system we’ve pioneered. With a strong belief in the projects, most of the contributors hold on to their tokens & so we’re able to create something like 3x more value than the capital that is put in.
I considered this as more of a retroactive funding proposal for all of the things that we’ve done in the past 2 years, listed above. The proposal template didn’t require specifying deliverables but I’m happy to expand on what we plan on doing in the next few months if that would make you reconsider.

No, I think its perfectly fair & I’d love to hear more of your thoughts on it.
But either way, I think it should mostly be solved through our evolution into an interoperable whitelabel solution for other communities.
To repeat the above, its not our intention to be “the ultimate community” or anything like that - we should be one of many building this UI for interacting with decentralized building blocks, protocols & dapps. As time goes on, there should be many different localizations, without the gaming lingo, no “dark mode only”, people reskinning or designing their own UIs etc.

Why so? Isn’t the scope of Moloch DAO expanding eth2 r&d to anything that is supporting the Ethereum ecosystem?

#6

hello @peth.eth:

I have been thinking about this more and reflecting on my original comments about the branding not being very open to women, I would like to take those comments back. Just because I may not be drawn into the branding doesn’t mean that other women don’t feel the same way, and a good percentage of the world population of gamers are women.

But either way, I think it should mostly be solved through our evolution into an interoperable whitelabel solution for other communities. To repeat the above, its not our intention to be “the ultimate community” or anything like that - we should be one of many building this UI for interacting with decentralized building blocks, protocols & dapps. As time goes on, there should be many different localizations, without the gaming lingo, no “dark mode only”, people reskinning or designing their own UIs etc.

Great to hear! I really would love to see how MetaGame can go towards the interoperable white label solution for other communities and think that would also be quite worthy of a Moloch grant. I would definitely be more inclined to use the tooling for my community projects if I was able to have my own front-end on the domain of my choice, with custom branding, etc.

Either way, I think with a new proposal with more clear deliverables and details on where capital will go towards will be much better as far as our community’s historic expectation for how Moloch grant proposals work.