Killing dragons and discovering new metas
The importance of collaboration and competition
Rallying strangers
I, like many of my peers, fought the boredom of lockdown in early 2020 by diving headfirst into video games. Specifically, my vice of choice was World of Warcraft Classic, which had launched 6 months prior and was peaking in terms of activity.
Being the obsessive control freak that I am, what started out as a game quickly became a proxy job that took up most of my free time. Partly because there is just so much to do in the game, but mainly because I became fascinated by the organisational challenge of herding cats on the internet. Within a few months the “guild” that I was part of had gone through a hostile community fork and I ultimately found myself in charge of a band of about 60 people.
I know it sounds a bit silly, but I learned so much from that period in terms of how to motivate a disparate party of anons; there’s so much in common between a group of gamers that have decided to play together and contributors that are forming up within a decentralised organisation. I guess it really just boils down to the same thing, strangers on the internet rallying towards a shared goal.
The community switching costs within a game like WoW are pretty low. Sure there is the reputation that you will need to build within your new team, and too much moving around will get you blacklisted within the wider community as someone that is unreliable. But the core value that you bring to a raiding group, i.e. your experience and items that you have collected along the way only makes you more valuable over time. There’s an interesting power shift that happens where a player needs a guild to a point, and then it flips and the guild needs the player. Honestly, the option to “rage quit” is the great equalizer on the internet, it keeps everyone honest with themselves and each other.
This low switching cost and competition around the best players create a fairly intense environment for the attention of your community and the wider community at large. To this end, there are a few tools that you need to utilise effectively.
As with any market that has minimal moats, your narrative is the number one marketing tool that you have. You need to set a reason for what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, both internally and externally. Building a culture where everyone involved is bought into the goals that you’re setting as a group is essential to support the communication of decisions. It’s your mandate.
Trust is everything, if you don’t have the trust of the players that you’re managing then you’re already finished. In WoW, like in DAOs and the wider open-source ecosystem, players can go and play with anyone they want. When this is done well, everybody wins. When it fails the arrangement becomes irreparable. I have a friend that recently got into polyamory and when he described the basis on which he successfully holds relationships there were clear parallels in which the future of work will be run. There are clearly understood rules of engagement with the instant threat of separation if they are broken.
It’s really important that you provide opportunities for members of the community to step up and take on additional responsibility. If you find yourself leading a distributed group of contributors then there is no chance that you can effectively do everything by yourself. However, you also don’t want to be putting additional burden on people that don’t want it. Remember, they can rage quit at any point. And so, building a framework where people can move up and down to positions of responsibility is the key to a successful long term community. It’s hard to do though, intuitively humans don’t want to be demoted, and even more so are unlikely to demote themselves. But if you can get that right then it will make a healthier environment for everyone. I guess we can look towards democratic systems where this is on the whole executed in an effective manner.
Ultimately, with all of these elements, strong communication and perceived fairness are the critical elements that hold it all together. It’s not by chance that the gaming community has led the charge on platforms for discussion online, be it from the early days of forums and Ventrilo to recent use of discord as an all-in-one solution. Similarly, the decisions around how to reward players that contribute towards group efforts provide examples of how DAOs are thinking about how to incentivise their communities, such as DKP or Loot Council.
Fresh content patch
Online games tend to fall into one or a combination of two categories, “PvE” (Player vs. Environment) where you work together to defeat bosses as a group, or “PvP” (Player vs. Player) where you compete against other players in a deathmatch type scenario. I think this provides a useful framing to think through the current and future state of the emerging Crypto Music industry.
The natural position to take when starting out something new is to look across the ecosystem that you are hoping to build within and compare yourself against the potential of others. Winner takes all mechanics of platform economies and the intensity of expectation that venture capital brings lends itself toward a mentality that building a startup is a zero-sum game. It’s not just enough for you to grow, you need to do so at the cost (usually in attention) of others that are building in a similar vein. It is PvP.
As a strategist working at larger, established, companies this is also the default position to take. The vast majority of my time was spent creating SWOTs, competition maps, and generally researching and distilling information about what everyone else was doing. It’s understandable that when you have a position in the market then you need to be aware of any potential disruption, but it does create a defensive mentality that ultimately leads toward a less interesting market overall.
A PvE market, by contrast, is one where there is an overall objective, an end-boss, that players need to collaborate with each other to defeat. Often time-tested tactics are the best strategy when the content is old and the opportunity for success by deviating from the “meta” is limited. However, when new content is released, or the underlying power balance in a game changes, it’s likely that new metas will emerge through trial and error testing by the community.
Crypto is analogous to a new patch being released for the music industry, bringing with it fresh content and a realignment of mechanics. With this comes a race to find the new meta, a collaborative effort across interested parties to experiment with what works and what doesn’t. And so, the notion of competition changes slightly, in that there is still a contest to see who can discover it first and gain the reputation that this will bring. But when it is discovered, it will benefit the wider community as everyone shifts to this new model of operation.
Many years ago there was a boss encounter released within WoW called “Yogg-Saron” that had a particularly hard version called “Alone in the Darkness”. A unique mechanic within this fight was that players lost “sanity” periodically when they faced the boss leading them to become “insane” and attack each other. The hard mode included a tricky damage output requirement to beat it and almost all attacks require your character to be facing the boss; for a long time, it was deemed impossible by the community. But then all of a sudden a relatively unknown Chinese guild called Stars uploaded a video to YouTube where they emerged victorious by overloading their raid composition with Affliction Warlocks (link here for the 2009 potato-quality retro gaming video vibes). Warlocks had an ability where they can turn to face the boss to channel an attack and then quickly turn away from it again. This one iteration unlocked the boss for the entire community.
The new patch period is an exciting time where there is the potential for significant pay-off for trying something new. There is competition between teams, but the output of that competition is positive-sum in that it progresses the overall market.
Open information
I mentioned that the key to beating the Alone in the Darkness version of Yogg-Saron was a video posted on YouTube. This is an example of how the internet has increased the speed that communities can discover and build on each others’ work, however, it is predicated on a. that information being made available, and b. there being channels in which the information can be disseminated.
Tactics and strategies get passed around gaming communities very quickly in large part because of the understanding that the relative benefit of holding on to information is outweighed by the reputation reward of making it available. There is a common infrastructure underpinning each team’s efforts, and an open market for talent, and so the differentiator that sets one team above others is the ability to constantly and publicly remain at the top of the game as it evolves.
The big shift from Web2 and the potential of Web3 lies in this point around common infrastructure. Blockchains enable composable and open services to be created and built upon, which is why this extended analogy towards PvE meta discovery feels appropriate. While moats could be built around service stacks in Web2, this is far harder to do in one version of the future, and so the constant march of progression is the thing that everyone will compete around. Which is an exciting, albeit daunting, prospect, albeit requiring a concerted effort to safeguard open source as a priority.
Furthermore, if we consider the development of semi-open working relationships, we stand an even greater chance of moving towards a future music industry where innovation comes to the fore and is the aspect that entities are vying to take the lead on and gain the reputation for. Less innovation-washing of the current status quo and more genuine development of the industry.
But to get there we need to evolve how we think about building teams and interacting with each other. For now, we are in a PvE environment disorientated by the seemingly limitless potential of a new world. As this liminal space enters its endgame it’s likely that things will turn PvP again, but until then let’s enjoy this journey of shared discovery.