A Discourse game

This use-case is inspired by the Seed use-case. From my recent meeting with Ivar, they have an ongoing need to engage their Discord community of fans. I mentioned libraries like SourceCred / PolicyKit as well as experiments like Metagame, and mentioned that we might be able to help them build a “gamified experience” for their Discord that replicates / tests some possible governance game mechanics in Seed. I’ll continue to use Seed as the example here, because it would be cool if we could build this use-case ourselves and then export/sell it to Klang. In principle, this experiment could be replicated with any community, including our own.

Example User Flows

Flow 1

Trigger: a

Preconditions: Seed has an active Discourse; Metagov has been installed, along with SourceCred, Stanford PBP, Loomio, and a Seed “resource” collection.

Steps:

  1. A user, Shannon, wants to start a new Seed faction called the “Unseen University”.
  2. They make a request to Metagov to start a new organization called the “Unseen University”
  3. Metagov creates a Discourse subcategory, a Telegram conversation, or some other channel for Unseen University (e.g. via the PolicyKit driver).
  4. Shannon creates a manifesto + design for that subcategory, which she does inside the Metagov governance editor.
  5. She publishes a link to the design in a post on her game channel. She asks her friends to comment.
  6. Shannon sees her group on a leaderboard of other organizations.

Background
Our original proposal to Klang was a kind of “Spore Creature Creator” for governance; this was explored a bit in the Community Creator spec that Nathan and I worked on for a while last year, and is reflected in the mentions of “Governance Editor” in the slides and the wireframes.

This particular use-case places more emphasis on establishing feedback loops in governance, whether gamified or not.

Currently, Seed Pioneers (their “core experience product”) has about 50 players per instance, with a “hippy commune” governance regime: i.e. everyone owns everything. Communication happens over a chat utility that is basically a stripped-down version of Slack. In the chat (ca. Feb 2020, so this is a bit outdated), you can: (1) create, claim, and complete tasks, (2) create/invite/join channels, where are basically player groups, (3) there are tasks lists attached to channels, (4) mute other players. Banning is currently only reserved for developers / game-mods. Klang will not bang players based on how they play, only if they go against the terms of service. Note that there were some early attempts to build internal tools like voice chat, voice chat with hierarchy (imagine a “fleet commander”), but players just ended up using external tools like Discord.