🤨 WTF is MetaGame?
👉 Intro
“Metagame, or game about the game, is any approach to a game that transcends or operates outside of the prescribed rules of the game, uses external factors to affect the game, or goes beyond the supposed limits or environment set by the game.”
What drew us together is the idea that Ethereum is a critical piece of technology for building better socioeconomic systems - a game-changing technology.
We’ve been using it to create better money and build decentralized financial systems, applications & organizations.
- Overall, for fairer, more decentralized & transparent societies
- Societies that make it hard to centralize power & take advantage of the masses
- Societies where individuals are empowered to act & make a difference rather than being told what to do as cogs in a machine that is beyond their understanding
- …
- It’s hard to overstate the potential of this technology.
Unfortunately, this technology is also hard to understand & the space is full of people ready to take advantage of the fact.
We’re not doing a great job at showing the potential beyond numba-go-up and people have a hard time joining the space as active contributors & builders rather than just speculators. 😬
- We can use it to change the game of life,
- But we won’t, unless we make it easier & more fun. 🤷♂️
🏭 A Decentralized Factory
We need a place to coordinate around putting knowledge & motivation to good use. A place to build & compose all of these pieces of the “new world” lego set into the bigger picture that inspires & enables others.
We’re building a decentralized factory. A network of project & service DAOs, maps of knowledge & resources as well as a community that makes it as easy as possible for people to join the space & start contributing or start their own DAO.
Interested in joining as a DAO or contributing some knowledge? 🙃
- Our sweet spot is the intersection of DAOs & ReFi
🌍 A Web of Life
Yet more than a factory, we need to nurture a web of life or we’ll be recreating the very same kinds of economies we’re trying to overcome.
Sure, we need to build all this cool new technology that will enable us to navigate and coordinate more effectively, but the goal isn’t the technology itself.
- It’s the empowerment of people that want to do good - and doing good.
Rather than having an economic system revolving around profit maximization, we need to build an economy around well-being, self-actualization & regeneration of the biological systems we fucked up.
🤨 Why?
Society has for long been narrowly focused on profit & GDP as the main metrics of micro & macro success. This has severe adverse effects on… Pretty much everything.
This mindless optimization for profit leads industrial economies to cut corners, minimize quality and pay-out to workers, save on customers and externalize any cost possible to wider communities & ecosystems.
We disagree with the notion that simply making the markets freer would somehow make the world a better place, but do agree with the conclusion that giving more power to governments is hardly an option at all. 🤷♂️
However, when a community owns a factory - the factory tends to not pollute the town, they don’t plan obsolescence, the workers aren’t underpaid, and all of that.
In short:
- Directors of corporations have a duty to put the interest of the corporation (ahem, profit) above everything else.
- Governmental services grow inefficient because they are given a monopoly & aren't required to be transparent.
- Community-owned enterprises have to be financially efficient but tend to keep in mind that it's not about extracting as much profit as possible but about solving a problem as effectively as possible.
Well, MetaGame is community-owned & governed and so are pretty much all the guilds that are members of the MetaAlliance (the network of projects).
⌛ Why Now?
We call them DAOs around here, but these kinds of organizations are nothing new. They’ve been running in parallel with centralized industrial economies since forever, they just weren’t effectively scalable above the Dunbar's number.
Well, it will be possible right about now.
This should allow us to perfectly align incentives between the people that build things, the people that own things, and the people that want things.
- Making all three into more or less a single group of stakeholders.
Most of what we need is already enabled by Ethereum with various mechanisms built on top, allowing Game Warping
“…defined as using transparent, triggerable, unstoppable burns and payments to move game-theoretic equilibria or to create new player actions.
Game Warping stacks as a new layer atop an uncooperative game to make cooperation the Rational choice.” - Virgil Griffith
We’re living in times of unprecedented leverage given to us by information technologies. It has never been easier to affect the world. Rather than sacrificing ourselves in bloody revolutions, we’re able to revolutionize the world from the comfort of our living rooms.
🤬 So, WHAT THE FUCK IS IT THEN?
MetaGame is an idea we can build a new world, a layer atop of the old one. A more collaborative, transparent & caring world. A world in which self-interest is better aligned with the common good.
We define it as a “massive online coordination game”. You can think of it as a mash-up of a learning platform, a social platform, a freelancing network & an MMO-RPG.
- The current goal of MetaGame is to build MetaGame and help solve the onboarding & navigation problem that the wider ecosystem is facing.
With time, we hope enough people will step up and either integrate existing or help build the rest of the tools & services we need for running socioeconomic systems that don’t centralize power and destroy us in the long run.
An alternative socioeconomic system for those who aren’t vibing with the mainstream one, along with physical locations & anything one might need to live a fulfilling life & thrive. A networked society or a network state, if you will.
- Oh, and an open source framework for others to do the same 👀
In the long run, we aim at helping human societies evolve from a world run by inefficient bureaucracies & too-efficient corporations into a world governed by decentralized organizations that take care of their ecosystems.
🌟 The Ultimate Goal
The ultimate goal of MetaGame is finding the most optimal ways to play life, individually as well collectively. This means helping people become the best versions of themselves & build organizations that change the world for the better.
- If you require further clarity of why & what we are building, do note that MetaGame is heavily inspired by the ideas from the Game B space as well as Metamodernism. Those are rabbit holes worth digging into.
Besides checking out Game B & Metamodernism, maybe also watch this:
Overall…
It is clear the economic system built around entities simply maximizing self-interest is sub-optimal for the planet & the beings that inhabit it. Luckily, it’s also clear that human beings are motivated by much more than just profit. 🤷♂️
It’s been a long time since we were last brave enough to try & rethink modern society from the ground up. The current set of technologies give us the ability to do this without ending up in a dystopia - if we are careful enough.
- On the left is a human of Neoliberalism, whose thinking dominated the modern world until now.
- On the right is a human of MetaGame, whose era is only about to begin.
Consider yourself as one?
Still unsure?
- Watch this 👇