Welcome to the Fun Haus
A conversation about game design in DAOhaus, the power of community ownership via DAO, and something we call "time to immersion."
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about World Building, The Metaverse, Discord, DAOs and how the interesting stuff here is being built by "gamers.” This week, inspired by this convo on the Acquired Podcast with Rahul Vohra, CEO of Superhuman, I’m back to talk about how we think about “game design” in DAOhaus, why it matters, and to give you a little taste of the renovations we have in store for the Haus!
But first… if you’ve been enjoying the Haus DAO content and you haven’t signed up yet, you should.
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Okay… let’s talk about Fun in the Haus! 🏰
Why it Matters
First off, it’s important to start from why this matters. It’s easy to look at a post about game design, etc. and dismiss it as your typical tech-bro nonsense. “Let’s game-ify the workforce! Yay!” Barf. 🤮
DAOs are different. DAOs are about community ownership and this is an unbelievable force multiplier that has the power to reshape almost everything we think we know. If you want to hear more about this, you should hang around in the Haus (sign up 👆). Community ownership is our true obsession. It’s also why the game design matters so much.
It matters because DAOs are not necessarily easy. They are incredibly powerful, but they also mean that the average user needs to understand and interact with the sorts of dynamics that are usually reserved for governments and company boards. Making this user friendly is certainly a step in the right direction. But. immersion wins. We get to immersion by thinking more like gamers and gamers understand fun.
Fun in The Haus
To kick off a look at where this gets fun, I want to start here: with a ten year old video from Hank Green. He and his brother John are the summoners of the Nerdfighters, an incredibly successful and inspiring community that never would have happened without YouTube and the last wave of web technology. Across projects like Crash Course, SciShow and VidCon they have maintained this ethos. I believe it is critical. (And this video still doesn’t have enough views.)
Thanks Hank. Keep it up.
Community First
Before we talk about games, we have to talk about why they are so compelling. Part of this is design, part is game dynamics, but throughout history, in wave after wave, from Poker to Fornite, the games that really blow up are the ones you play with others. Hell, the games that you play alone still blow up on Twitch these days, where you watch them with others. Either way, this community aspect is our focus as we build DAOhaus. It is important to hit this before we jump into design thinking because, to some extent, this is what makes us different from an app like Superhuman, and it means that we (get to) deploy game design thinking in a different way.
Game Design
In the podcast linked above, Vohra talks about designing an email client using principals learned from his experience in game design. He mentions how this doesn’t mean “gamification.” It’s not just about adding badges, or points or something in an effort to graft game things on top of your software.
Game design, Vohra says, is about using fun experiences to nurture intrinsic motivations. In the case of Superhuman this is about building a system to drive the desire to clear out an inbox. With a community first focus, DAOhaus is designing for human cooperation via DAO, which is a very different challenge. In part, this means we do get to use more points and badges and stuff (more on that later 😎.) But our task is ultimately to nurture coordination and make it fun.
The fact that game designers think about fun means we get to talk about my favorite metric of all: “time to fun.”
Time to Fun
“Time to fun” is the amount of time between when a new user starts using an app, and the first moment that fun takes over. And I’m not joking, it’s a thing game designers measure.
This might seem silly on the face, but it’s at the core of the difference between game design and other product design methodology. When designing a game the goal is to delight the user as quickly as possible. People sitting down to play a game are there to have fun, so the game that gets them there the fastest tends to be the one that catches on. But more importantly, and the reason for the video above, it means that fun matters! It’s actually really important to think about fun, even if the problem you are designing to solve isn’t a fun one.
Superhuman is bringing this thinking to email. DAOhaus is bringing it to DAOs. This means we think about “time to fun” but our goal is to use that fun to grow a different metric, what we call “time to immersion.”
Time to Immersion
“Time to immersion” is a measure of how fast a user goes from zero to immersed in the culture, content, values, etc. of a community. Whether a video game, or a real life roleplaying game, like Dungeons and Dragons, there is power in the extent to which games are able to immerse the user in a different world. That world has rules, and stories, and characters, and memes. If done well these immersive worlds are fun to explore, on screen, and in the imagination.
Fun may bring people in, but immersion is what keeps them around, and ultimately compounds as the fun turns to the joy of being part of a community. At DAOhaus this is the end goal on which we focus as we deploy game design. We are building software to allow users to join communities in which they are interested. We want them to feel immersed in the story of that community as effectively and delightfully as possible.
Some of this is about integrating with chat platforms, some of it is about how we’ve designed the Haus itself. For us it’s all about world building.
World Building in DAOhaus
A look at game design and gamification in The Haus.
Composability
In Web3 we’re obsessed with what we call composability. The idea that, across the Ethereum experience everything is modular. DAOhaus is no exception. And in DAOhaus this looks like max customization.
If you are the summoner of a DAO you can change all the stuff you’d imagine: colors, fonts, logos, and so on, but it also goes deeper. You can change what you call things. Don’t like the term “bank” to describe your DAO account? No prob, relabel it “inventory.” Don’t like the term proposal? Cool cool, change it to “quest.” We believe that this level of customization is the key to immersion. When a new potential community member encounters the term “quest” it tells a different story, and for the right person (ideally the people you want in your community) it will evoke exactly the right kind of delight.
And this is just a label in a menu and simple theming! We have updates in the pipeline for the next few months that will take things even deeper. That will let people change their own personal experience in unique ways, and that will let community members boost their DAO’s home on DAOhaus with other upgrades.
The short version, we believe DAOhaus should be a shell for the memes and stories that drive a community. Our software should get out of the way and let you build the world of your DAO.
Fun
Finally, the badges and stuff!
There is a distinction I mentioned before between gamification and game design. Well, we’re lucky in a sense, our version of game design calls for a certain measure of gamification. This shows up in DAOhaus within the context of composability, once again. Want to use badges? Awesome, turn them on. Don’t need them? No prob. Either way, they fit into the interface in a native way, not as if they were grafted on top of some productivity software. It’s probably also worth pointing out that in the world of DAO banks and DAO shares… we already live in a world of numbers and points. Whether we like it or not, we’re already a step closer to being a game than an email client will ever be.
There are other places where we are able to use game inspired design to drive engagement, immersion, and joy. Within games of any complexity there’s always an ability to quickly visualize where you are in your world. Not just in terms of space, but also in terms of actions. What can you do? What should you be doing? Especially during onboard these are important questions to answer.
In DAOhaus we believe games have the right way of thinking about this, so we always think about the “questline.” How can we make sure that no one within a DAO is sitting around wondering what they need to do next? How do we maintain this awareness in an immersive way?
Community Integration
We are integrating with services like Discord and Discourse because they are killer platforms for community conversation. In DAOhaus we are building a delightful platform for community ownership, but places like Discord have emerged as the place to hang out with your community in the metaverse. To us this is just another composability Lego. (Read more about it in my last piece.)
This is also a good place to wrap up because this post is getting long, but also because this is the true foundation of the Haus. We are building an open platform to facilitate community ownership, and to help those communities build their world in the metaverse.
This brings us back to Hank’s original point: fun is important and not everything that is important has to be serious. Fun communities are the best, and this is why communities thrive where game designers are going to work on “non-game” problems. This is also why we spend a lot of time at DAOhaus thinking about metrics like “time to fun” and “time to immersion” which are actually kind of hard to measure.
We’re doing important things over here, but the digital world has changed a lot of things, so now we get to ask:
if you’re not having fun, what’s the point?
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