Press Start: The Game to Save Life on Earth — Part III: Valuing Knowledge
In the previous blog, I explained how QuestaGame is fundamentally different to Pokémon Go — it rewards players for observing lifeforms whose rarity is *yet* to be determined.
As I’d also explained, in order to ‘assign’ the right reward to the observation, we needed to know its name. Once its identity is known, it is simply a question of estimating the odds of observing it in that region, at that time of the year.
Figuring out the name of a life form sounds simple though in reality, it is quite complex. Why? There are at least one million species known to science. Few people are familiar with a majority of life forms and even fewer have studied them, if at all. In fact, some life forms are known only to 10 people on Earth!
So, ideally, in order to earn game rewards, every observation will have to be identified and a rarity score allocated. It goes without saying that no name=> no game!
Who identifies the observation? What is the incentive for the information provider? How does one trust that what they are saying is indeed correct? And, if multiple providers give conflicting information, which piece of information is to be trusted? What if the player would like this information to be delivered immediately? What if the player is willing to wait to hear from multiple information providers? What if the player prefers to receive information from a specific provider?
All these questions led us to think about the deeper nature of information: Is it a ‘good’?; How does one assess its ‘value’, secure its ‘ownership’, and of course, how does one ‘refund’ the information ‘good’? Over time, these and other questions formed the foundational building blocks of an identification and incentive system called the BioExpertise Engine (BEE).
The BEE is an Artificial Collective Super Intelligence (ACSI) system that allows the collective to propose and verify the identity of a life form via a blind review process. To explain the ideas underpinning this system, I will take a small detour to explain the nature of ‘information’ and the trading of this ‘good’.
The BEE is first and foremost, a marketplace for information/knowledge, in this case, objective knowledge (or as close to it as possible) in the field of biodiversity. In order to build and maintain a marketplace, it helps to thoroughly understand the nature of the goods traded in the marketplace — knowledge — and how and under what conditions it may be traded at positive prices.
Information is valuable when it is a) timely b) sourced from multiple viewpoints (quantity) c) obtained from a trusted source (trustworthiness) with credentials (quality) d) not universally available (scarce) thus affording the owner a distinct advantage.
So, some of the attributes of this ‘good’ include speed, quality, quantity, and its non-rivalrous nature that is partially excludable. We also know its value is a function of trust, scarcity, and privacy.
Taking these attributes and dependencies into consideration, the BEE enables a market for biodiversity knowledge where the verification of data needing the fastest, most in-depth and most wide-ranging knowledge are priced the highest. The BEE also enables a market where trust is ensured through a blind peer review — a ‘what-you-know’ rather than a ‘who-you-are’ model.
As mentioned in my first post, we started with a desire to build a simple game that incentivizes people to explore nature. However, it was clear that in order for the game to have real world outcomes, game rewards and feedback need to mirror the real world species distribution and rarity. It was also clear that in order to assign rarity scores, a system that enabled this information, trading was necessary. As our community grew, so too did the impact of the game in the real world. This made us think deeply about how to ramp up the reach, ramp up the rewards, and ramp up the positive impact. From such a simple beginning, we now find ourselves creating a much more complex Play-Earn-Protect web3 game and ecosystem designed to save life on Earth.
Can Guardians of Earth really save life on Earth? Can players be part of an ecosystem that can provide meaning and value to biodiversity? Those questions and more will be answered in the next blogs.
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We are Guardians of Earth — building the first ever Play-Earn-Protect game where your real world knowledge and in-game actions help protect life on Earth.
- Visit our website to learn more — https://www.guardiansofearth.io/
- Head over to our Whitepaper and read a summary of what we are up to.
- Follow us on Twitter and join the conversations — @GuardiansofE
- Join us on our Discord server for exclusive updates — https://discord.gg/3NEDbsgdSK
