Introducing Consensus Games to Alien Worlds 👽

Vladislav Hramtsov
7 min readJun 19, 2023

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EOS Ship hosting the Consensus Games — art by Midjourney

Origins of Consensus Games

The concepts behind Consensus Games trace back to governance experimentations conducted over the past two years in three communities: Eden, Fractally, and Eden Fractal. Consensus Games are a fusion of traditional democratic principles and the emerging trends in decentralized governance.

Purpose of the Consensus Games

Consensus Games serve a threefold purpose.

First, they introduce the concept of fractal democracy to the AW community, encouraging experimentation and adaptation of this innovative governance model.

Second, the games are designed to build strong relationships among participants, thereby fostering collaboration and a sense of community.

Finally, the games serve as a mechanism to elect leaders, ensuring that leadership is driven by merit and broad-based consensus.

Aliens collaborating — art by Midjourney

Description of the Games

There are two primary games: the Respect Game and the Propaganda Game.

Respect Game

The Respect game is all about connecting and building relationships with your fellow community members. As an intentional consequence the Respect game fosters collaboration and enables to determine who are the most respected members of Alien Worlds community. The most respected members can be viewed as a leaders of Alien Worlds. What makes this game unique is that the winners of the game become owners of the game and also owners of Consortium. Each week the ownership of the smart contract is transferred to six most respected members.

Aliens gathered to play the Respect Game — art by Midjourney

All the players are rewarded in two different tokens RESPECT and POLL.

How to play the Respect Game?

The Respect game is played live once a week during a Zoom meeting.

Game lasts 45 minutes.

To play the game you have to join a Main Room of the Zoom meeting. Game starts 15:00 UTC each Monday. Link for the meeting can be found here.

All the players from the Main Room are divided into small groups of maximum 6 people who are sent into Break-Out rooms.

In the Break-Out room the game begins.

There is one question that each player in the Break-Out room has to answer.

Question is: What was your contribution to the Alien Worlds during the last week?

Each player has maximum 4 minutes to answer the question.

The last player to join the Break-Out room kicks-off the game by being the first one to answer the question, also that player is responsible for moderating in Fractalgram. If it is your first time playing, let others know, so that more experienced players could do the moderation.

The player who finished answering the question, nominates next one to answer.

Once everyone has answered the question, the game continues in Fractalgram, link for a telegram group is provided in the Zoom chat.

In the Telegram group the players decide who during the past week has contributed to Alien Worlds the most.

The decisions are made via polls that the moderator creates.

Level 6 is assigned to the person who contributed the most, similarly all the other Levels (1–5) are assigned.

In order to assign a Level to a player, 66.66% of the players have to reach consensus.

The Fractalgram generates a link that enables to submit the results on-chain.

The link will take you to a web-app, where you need to connect Anchor wallet and push the result on-chain.

There’s time limit of two hours, starting when the Break-Out rooms end, to submit the result on-chain.

Note that submitting results on-chain is critical to distribute RESPECT and POLL tokens. Also it is necessary for the smart contract to change ownership.

Respect Game ends once you submit the consensus result on-chain.

Propaganda Game

The Propaganda game is played throughout the week, with culmination during the weekly Zoom meeting right after the Break-Out rooms of the Respect Game. Propaganda game is all about shaping the culture of the AW community. One individual is given the opportunity to give a presentation to all the meeting participants.

Propaganda game gameplay — art by Midjourney

How to play the Propaganda Game?

In Propaganda game you can either be a presenter or a listener. Game lasts for up to 40 minutes.

Presenter

If you’d like to give a presentation, you have to submit a topic to AW fractal community on Consortium.

Topics can be submitted anytime during the week prior to the meeting.

Topic includes a title of your presentation and a brief description.

Listener

Individuals who have participated in the Respect game have earned RESPECT token.

The listeners can use RESPECT token as a voting power to determine which topic they would like to listen to.

Votes can be submitted throughout the week on Consortium.

Who gets to present?

The individual who submitted the topic that received most RESPECT voting power during the week is given an opportunity to present.

Presenter is given up to 20 minutes to give a presentation.

The listeners have to excersize their judgement by trying to answer the following question: How does the presentation benefit AW community?

There is 20 minutes for discussion after the presentation, during which listeners have an option to share their answers and ask clarifying questions.

If a listener would like to speak, he can use the raise hand emoji in Zoom, that way the moderator of the game can pass the mic.

Consortium integration

Consortium is a dApp on WAX that enables communities to use their tokens to create polls and vote in them. All the functions to facilitate the Consensus Games are merged with Consortium’s smart contracts (deployed to pollpollpoll account). Such integration enables to transfer the ownership of both the game and Consortium to the winners of the Respect Game, more on that in the Tokenomics section below.

Weekly ceremony of the ownership transfer — art by Midjourney

Tokenomics

All the players of the Respect Game earn RESPECT and POLL token.

RESPECT token

RESPECT is a non-transferable token.

RESPECT is distributed weekly based on the consensus results submitted on-chain during the Respect Game.

RESPECT is distributed based on Fibonacci sequence.

In total 136 RESPECT tokens are distributed per group.

e.g.

Level 6 = 55 RESPECT

Level 5 = 34 RESPECT

Level 4 = 21 RESPECT

Level 3 = 13 RESPECT

Level 2 = 8 RESPECT

Level 1 = 5 RESPECT

RESPECT holdings determine who owns the game. More precisely the six top earners of RESPECT during the last 12 weeks become the owners of the contract. Taking the average of RESPECT earned over the last 12 weeks ensures that only recently active members are included in the permission of the contract.

POLL token

POLL is a transferable utility token of Consortium. More on the utility of POLL token can be found here. There is a POLL/TLM pool on Alcor exchange.

100 USD worth of POLL is distributed each week amongst the participants of the Respect Game.

POLL token is also distributed based on Fibonacci sequence from Level 6 to Level 1.

Participant of the Respect Game inspecting his RESPECT — art by Midjourney

Role of the Most Respected Members

By default, six most respected members (moving forward referred as councilors) have the full custody of the contracts. Meaning they have full decision-making power of how to use treasury of Consortium (250k TLM at this point) and full rights to change the contracts the way they see fit.

In order for the automatic transfer of the ownership of the contract to occur, once a week councilors have to sign a msig confirming the results of the Respect Game.

From the lens of corporate governance, council resembles the most board of directors.

Councilors are responsible for:

a) electing a lead link (CEO) for the main circle of AW fractal.

b) approving the budget for the lead link to spend during his term.

Role of the lead link

Lead link is responsible for:

a) setting the strategy, mission and a vision for the AW fractal.

b) creating roles and finding/approving people to fill those roles.

c) creating circles (departments) and finding lead links (department leaders) for the circles.

d) allocating resources to roles and circles.

There is misconception among common folk that leaders need long terms to reign in order for the organization to receive max. value. In the proposed system lead link has to be re-elected by councilors every 2 months. Similarly lead link has to approve all the existing roles every 2 months.

AW fractal lead link having fun — art by Midjourney

Conclusion

In conclusion, Consensus Games represent a fascinating evolution in the field of democratic governance. By combining traditional democratic principles with the power of decentralized tech, these games provide a platform for community-building, leadership selection, and decision-making that is resilient, efficient and representative of the interests of the whole community.

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