Will Robinson: AllianceDAO. dfdao. How Web3 Game - Dark Forest - Works. Forming a Gaming Guild That Ships | #56

Will Robinson runs the Alliance web3 accelerator program and is the founder of dfda0, one of the top gaming guilds playing the Web3 game, Dark Forest. Prior to this, Will was a Forensic Crypto Auditor and obtained a PHD in Game Studies and Game Design.

In this episode, we discuss the Dark Forest game, dark forest DAO, web3 games, incentives, the Alliance incubator program and what it offers, and the future of web3.

Will Robinson, dfda0, Alliance links:

• Will Robinson’s Twitter: @DangerWillRobin
• Will's writing on Web3 games: https://mirror.xyz/wbarobinson.eth
• Alliance’s DAO’s twitter: @AllianceDAO
• Alliance DAO’s accelerator: https://alliance.xyz
• Defi Alliance jobs: https://jobs.lever.co/defialliance
• dfda0’s Twitter: @d_fdao
• dfda0’s Medium: https://medium.com/dfdao
• dfda0’s Github: http://github.com/dfdao
• dfda0’s Discord: http://discord.gg/aaHada53mQ

Episode notes and links:

• How Will ended up getting a PhD in game studies
• How will decided to parlay where he spent the most time into a job
• How games are different from cinema
• Playbour: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playbour
• How Will found a job at Catallaxy: https://catallaxy.rcgt.com/
• One of Will’s favorite games: The Passage by Jason Rora - https://passage.en.softonic.com/mac
• bitcoin.com
• The difference between Guilds that Shill vs. Guilds that Show vs. Guilds that Ship
  • Guilds that Shill: Create value via a large community
  • Guilds that Show: Creating a spectacle on top of a game. For example YouTube personalities and pros create value when they play games.
    • Miko Matsumura - https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikomatsumura
    • Dota 2 - https://www.dota2.com/home
  • Guilds that ship: Guilds which add to game shelf life by contributing code and new worlds. Ex. People creating new worlds with the WarCraft III editor: https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/warcraft3/23395649/revisiting-the-warcraft-iii-editor
• How tokenized games can re-distribute value to players when they build.
• How Will found the Dark Forest game
  • Dark Forest game: https://zkga.me
  • Dark Forest twitter: https://twitter.com/darkforest_eth
  • An intro to how to play Dark Forest: https://medium.com/coinmonks/how-to-play-dark-forest-the-zksnark-powered-mmo-game-part-1-7222e2c3ab4
• How Will recruited an entire guild, dfda0, to compete at it.
  • Omar Bohsali - @omarish
  • Manan19 - @manan19
  • Zha Yitong - @zhayitong
  • Tony - @cha0sg0d_
  • Lindsay - @llpresswell
• How the Dark Forest game works - https://zkga.me/
• Spoiler Alert: The story behind The Dark Forest which is book 2 of The Three-Body Problem trilogy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three-Body_Problem_(novel)
• Dan Robinson (Head of research at Paradigm)
  • Twitter: @danrobinson
  • Paradigm investment firm: https://www.paradigm.xyz
  • Ethereum is a Dark Forest - https://www.paradigm.xyz/2020/08/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest
• Gaming trends that Will is seeing: “Web3 are not going to be not like normal games and likely much worse.”
• The one real utility with blockchain is censorship resistance
  • Makes perfect sense for finance
  • Putting games on chain, doesn’t always benefit from this utility
• Web3’s value to games
  • Makes it provably fair that you can only be rewarded by playing and winning the game.
  • Composability and open standards (assuming builders are on the same protocol and utilizing the same engines).
• Key(s) to interoperability: aligned incentives
• How the 800 person dfda0 organizes itself
• What the Alliance accelerator is
  • Premise: Bring in lecturers from the DAO and support the top founders. When founder succeed, they come back and teach, to create a virtuous cycle.
  • Purpose: DAO of builder illuminati
  • Everyone is holding each other’s bags and incentivized to build up the DAO
  • Most common investment type(s):
    • Capital investment representing for 1% of the company’s current valuation
• Alliance incubator’s schedule:
  • First 7 weeks:
    • Lecture every day
    • Thursday meeting with other founders
    • Always able to schedule an unlimited amount of time with the Alliance mentors and founders
  • Last weeks:
    • Multiple reps to come away with strong product demos
• The differences Will sees between web3 and web2
  • Tokens
  • Token incentives
  • Secrets are gone, it’s about relationships, brand, being first, and getting enough liquidity to be sticky
  • Must raise large rounds to hire web3 engineers
  • Must be comfortable with regulatory uncertainty
• Do’s and Dont’s when applying and participating in the Alliance incubator
  • Apply to Alliance.xyz first - do a great job on the founder’s section - “Good vibes”
  • Come with a referral please
  • Note: “You can’t pivot who you are, you can pivot what you do.”
• What companies are the future of web3?
  • In the beginning, most projects were low level protocol and primitives. Today, companies are much fluffier: DAO’s, games, much more common retail purposes, much higher founder quality
• Why Will see with Web3: Scalability
• Future problems Will is hoping founders will focus on solving:
  • Entertaining “objects” into new industries
  • Defi protocols
  • DAO’s and DAO tooling on the legal side
    • Building a token warrant (standardizing deals in Silicon valley
  • DAOs - Decentralized alignment and incentives

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