6 Months of MetaGame
It’s been just over 6 months since I came home from ETHBerlin with a head full of memes, and started working on MetaGame. Thought I’d share the story of MetaGame so far.
Here’s what I came home with:
Now, MetaGame is of course nowhere close to built, but the progress is apparent.
As a non-technical person starting a complex technical project, my sole focus needed to be communicating the vision of MetaGame and building a community of believers willing to step up and start building it.
As a non-venture-backed person, I needed to build the meme of MetaGame so compelling as to have complete strangers from the internet work on it for free.
This was no easy task, but I have reasons to believe we have reached the tipping point.
It Begins
It started by infecting the minds of a handful of MetaCartel members & tens of Dappcon attendees. Grabbing their attention validated the concept in my head, and blew enough wind in my back for me to drop most of what I was doing & focus on MetaGame.
It existed now. It might not be more than an idea, but it now existed inside people’s minds. It was now expected of me to deliver it. I took the first stab by taking the player journey & value propositions described on the ETHBerlin illustration, and turned it into a (long-outdated) short paper.
I proceeded by writing the WTF is MetaGame (outdated) piece, then it’s prequel, The Coming of MetaGame, it’s prequel, In Search of Commons That Scale & on to explaining the importance of the gamification aspect, with the On Gamification piece.
Finally, I rounded up the narrative by writing the Decentralized Factory piece.
Of course, all the while shilling these pieces & engaging with people. This meant that by the time I wrote about the Decentralized Factory, people like Yalor were already by my side, ready to take on the next narrative piece - The Web of Opportuntiy.
To help put things into perspective, I went on writing The Way of Web3 Founding Freelancers & sealed the deal for aspiring newcomers with the How to Become a Founder of MetaGame piece.
By this time, the MetaGame Discord was getting lively. It was also about this time when the Gitcoin CLR funding round came around, so we started a campaign.
We bit it hard, shilling heavily and exceeding our expectations:
This is when things really started picking up steam. Although we did get a good chunk of those matching funds, the Gitcoin impact on MetaGame was bigger in terms of marketing than funding. Our Twitter & Discord numbers doubled.
More people, more validation & more building.
All these newcomers were made busy by the Quest #1 - made to on-board you to MetaGame by making you follow & subscribe to MetaGame, read all the important articles, introduce yourself & shill it.
We kept shilling it ourselves too. MetaGame was first presented on a blockchain meetup in Zagreb, followed by a presentation on a meetup during ETHDenver and most recently at ETHCC.
Meanwhile, the technical side also finally started picking up as Hammad built us the first version of the website at MetaGame.wtf, & Kay deployed us Interspace, while I did what I could 🤷♂️ - fired up the ChievMint Factory & started minting achievement NFTs as tokens of appreciation for our, and the wider ecosystem’ contributors.
Others, like burrrata, joined & started writing the contributors guide, shilling MetaGame to the Aragon & Sourcecred communities & getting Hammad to start implementing Sourcecred as a general contribution tracking solution for MetaGame.
One of then-newcomers, Jay, also stepped up & started upgrading the Interspace. First adding floating windows then proceeding by integrating loft.radio & rTrees. With those two, it should be clear the Interspace will be used for a lot more than the video calls - it will soon be populated will all kinds of useful “houses” 🙃
If you haven’t already, go check out Interspace. You may understand it as a sort of v0.1 of MetaGame itself.
What else have we done with it?
Organized the first virtual conference in the Ethereum space - InterCon. We had ~60 speakers talking on two parallel tracks, running for 14 hours. Judging by all the appraisals we’ve received in our Telegram channels, DMs as well as on Twitter, it seems everyone had a blast.
There are some presentations available here, and there’s a full blog post reflecting on the conference & what we learned, in case you missed it.
Next? We’re in the process of organizing a virtual hackathon, Dragon Quest and helping with another conference based on the same tech stack - NONCON.
Finally
Here are some numbers:
50+ people completed the first quest.
90+ people helped MetaGame with their time.
150+ people funded our campaign.
The mailing list went from 0 to 200+ subscribers.
Our Discord went from 0 to 400+ members.
The MetaGame twitter account went from not existing to 700+.
We raised a total of ~9500$.
We spent a total of ~500$.
Isn’t it weird that a bunch of strangers from the internet rather work for a token that has no monetary value, than dollars?
Thank you!
❤️ to everyone who came along and jumped aboard this crazy ride - perhaps the craziest around. You are the reason I wake up inspired & keep pushing MetaGame forward.