Rethinking “gamification” for DAOs

Even if members’ paths to engagement within a DAO may be more emergent or unpredictable in nature, DAO designers and operators still have important top-down roles to play as arbiters of the possibility spaces within their respective communities.

building interesting and effective bounty programs is really difficult. In fact, the questions that game designers ask themselves about skill trees are quite similar to those that DAO operators might ask themselves about bounties: How do we make sure community members feel like they are actively and intentionally working towards some higher-level g... See more

In the context of DAOs, skill trees are most relevant in the context of onboarding “players” or community members thoughtfully through complex organizational systems. For Water & Music, our member onboarding journey as a DAO will necessarily be much more complex than when we were previously a Web2 newsletter. In the latter scenario, people simply s... See more

Yes, skill trees do assume some level of linear, top-down progression as opposed to completely open-world exploration. But from a game-design perspective, one of the main benefits of skill trees is that they distribute complexity more incrementally over the course of a game, instead of dumping all possible abilities or powers onto a player’s charac... See more

how can we expand our understanding of “gamification” in tokenomics and DAO design to include not merely pushing overly quantifiable, financialized objectives, but rather incentivizing more emergent, non-objective processes of search and creativity, especially in culture- and knowledge-based communities?

most gamified fan engagement apps usually end up tethering fan behaviors to a granular, homogenous points and leveling system — such that, say you can only become a “true fan” of an artist on a certain app if you like 10 of their tweets or stream their song 100 times on Spotify. It’s a top-down approach to an inherently bottom-up, emergent behavior... See more

many of those examples copied-and-pasted a rather narrow, quantifiable feature set from games onto a non-game environment, instead of starting from the desired emotional outcome of the “game” and designing a specific, bespoke feature set around that goal. In other words, many gamification efforts miss a critical human-centered design perspective — ... See more

The music industry’s motivations to embrace gamification are arguably more financial than cultural: Newzoo estimates that the gaming industry generated over $175 billion in revenue in 2020, whereas official figures for the music recording and publishing sectors sum up to only around $27 billion in the same time period.

I wanted to dedicate the first Water & Music DAO update to exploring the role of emergence in DAO onboarding design — specifically rethinking the term “gamification” to support more open-world, self-directed narrative- and skill-building paths for DAO community members.