Loot Begins a Renaissance in Mechanism Design
Someone once asked David Lynch where his stories came from. Lynch said that he started by creating a grid of empty 3x5 index cards and writing a name on each one. As he looked at the cards, he imagined the relationships between the characters. Some of them were friends. Others were acquaintances, or enemies, or family members. He began to imagine the places and circumstances surrounding their relationship.
Observing the cards without judgment, he realized what drove the characters and what (who) stood in the way of their desires. At this point, the story manifested all on its own. Lynch only had to stare at the names long enough for the story to present itself.
Loot’s approach is the same as Lynch’s. The contents of the game create the game rather than the other way around. Loot allows builders to create game features without having to explain their utility.
This approach to mechanism design will usher in a new Renaissance. A bazaar will form where strange ideas and mechanisms are displayed to curious builders, who imagine what to build based on these tools.
The types of problems solved by crypto will expand in number. The value crypto brings to the world will be measured not only in profit but qualitative metrics like creative expression and knowledge for the sake of knowledge. In other words, a new Renaissance.
What is Loot, really?
A lot of Loot’s critics do not seem to understand what Loot actually is. A common lament I’ve heard in the last week is that such and such element is unnecessary and should only be created after the game is built. “After we see what the game is, then we can revisit whether to build out this feature.”
This makes as much sense as an author deciding on the setting or main character after completing the storyboard. How can you know what happens without knowing where it happens or to whom it happens?
Most badly-written stories are conceived by authors who are overly focused on how the story will be received rather than how it reads. Games are no different.
It does not matter to the story whether it has a purpose. A story needs only time, space, and characters to manifest. A story is just a sequence of events, involving characters strewn across the chronotype of time and space. Any significance to the story is established later by the reader.
Loot functions like a story. It does not need a purpose or context to manifest, only a curious inventor.
Another critique I keep hearing is that so-and-so composable material is “better” than another one. For example, some people said that the n project is superior to Loot because it involves numbers, not fantasy.
Loot items are just building materials. A building material is not objectively good or useful.
Like an author overly judgmental of his or her imagination, Loot’s critics would unwittingly kill off the most vital in-game (or out-of-game) mechanism based on a very superficial assessment. We will not really know whether or not these building blocks have utility until the game scaffolding begins to settle. The scaffolding will not even begin to form until enough building blocks are created!
Loot is interesting because as an imagined world, we decide the order in which to build its elements. We can introduce elements that came much later in civilization and then later construct their intellectual precursors. I am personally working on a project called Treasure that distributes a random set of monies to game players without any explanation of their value or relationship. Money was an invention that occurred after humans learned to conceptualize relative value. First there were individual resources. Then there was bartering by which relative value of resources was established. This allowed for the creation of money, the universal sign by the value of all commodities was benchmarked, floating above the economy like a satellite above the Earth… What happens if we skip the bartering phase and go straight to money? Can an economy form if we are trying to establish the relative value of monies at the same time as commodities?
I think so. I was surprised to see community members band around specific Treasures, but in a fantasy game world, money doesn’t have to be this cold, sterile thing. It can be the source of communal identity. I imagine if this model works, these communities will transport their preferred money into specific games/in-game DeFi products. Later, as the game expands, Loot will have multiple trade zones and its own mini-Forex.
“What is the point of this?” Well, it’s fun.
Beyond that, the beauty of Loot is that creative people can package their creativity into Legos for other builders. Together, we spin up the universe of Loot. Personally I am optimistic that Loot has a bigger impact than game-building. It offers an approach to mechanism design that could yield extremely interesting experiments in DeFi as well.
Larger Function
The biggest mistake that Loot’s critics are making is narrowly characterizing it as a “game.” Loot’s application to crypto goes far beyond game-building. Most builders in crypto (especially DeFi) evaluate everything in terms of utility. There is a problem to be solved. There is a profit to be made.
DeFi mechanism design works like industrial tool manufacturing, fashioning a specific instrument for a particular screw or bolt. I can think of two key exceptions, where the idea is so strange and imaginative it was likely invented by a mind engaged in playful discovery rather than utility maximization. These exceptions are rebasing and Ethereum itself.
I think Loot will lead to an unprecedented amount of creative discovery in mechanism design. Builders will be free to imagine instruments of any kind, devoid of externally-prescribed purpose, that other builders can study and imagine potential use cases.
Loot is a social experience. Loot introduces values beyond efficiency and utility into the equation. These values include joy, community, creativity, and building without fear of judgment. These goals have mostly been pushed to the margins in DeFi. Loot completely inverts the existing approach to mechanism design. Imagination becomes the guiding principle. Applications come later. I am hopeful that we arrive at a much fairer, inclusive version of DeFi through this approach to building.
There is really no way of knowing what outcomes can emerge from this experiment, but the future of Loot is threatened by narrow thinkers condemning the playful mind.
