The GreatestLARP: A Multi-level Coordination Game For Funding Public Goods

What’s the GreatestLARP?

It’s all coordination, always has been.

The biggest problems facing humanity all have one thing in common — they are coordination failures. It’s difficult to get large groups of people to work together towards one common goal. They may speak different languages, live in different time zones, and come from different cultures. But in order to solve worldwide problems, we have to figure out ways to bridge those differences, and coordinate together. The purpose of GitcoinDAO is to tackle one major coordination problem — how do we make sure public goods get proper funding?

The GreatestLARP is a worldwide coordination game with multiple levels, where through game play we raise awareness and funding for public goods.

Moloch is the god of coordination failures

In 2014, Scott Alexander wrote an interesting and lengthy paper titled meditations on Moloch which describes Moloch in vivid details, drawing from different works of fiction. If you read it closely, you’ll find that Moloch represents why we can’t come together to work on the things that distress us as humans.

Not only is Moloch the god of coordination failure and chaos, Moloch represents corruption, injustice, climate change, nuclear war, world hunger, and more. Think about all the problems humans complain about. Imagine if we all coordinated well enough to provide enough funding, support, and incentives to sustain scientists working on cleaner energy or a permanent cure for cancer?

What is LARPing?

LARPing or Live-action-role-playing is a common activity online for many. LARPing is the face we put on on social media. It’s the avatar we wear in the metaverse. LARPing is posting instagram photos of your life’s highlight reel. We’re already LARPing for much of our days.

The GreatestLARP is an alternate reality game (ARG), which is an interactive networked narrative that uses the real world as a platform. It typically employs transmedia storytelling to deliver a story that may be altered through game play. In the GreatestLARP, our coordinated actions open new levels while funding public goods.

How does GreatestLARP gameplay work?

The GreatestLARP has five levels. In general, the game requires that we as a community mint 200 or more NFTs on each level before we can access the next level. This is exactly where coordination kicks in. If we don’t come together to mint enough NFTs, Moloch will remain and continue to wreak havoc on the world. But each level we complete brings us one step closer to defeating Moloch once and for all.

And since the entire point is to help us understand how people can coordinate and come together to fund public goods, all funds raised in the GreatestLARP go directly to the Gitcoin Grants Matching Pool, to fund public goods through Gitcoin Grants.

Let’s take a closer look at gameplay

Meet your warriors:

To assist us on our quest, we’ve got a total of seven warriors called ETHBots to help us. They are a group of robots created by the Ethereum community to fight Moloch created coordination failures. Click here to meet all seven of your warriors.

Level 1: Moloch is winning: Read the comic to start defeating him.

The first level starts with a comic that tells the story of how the people of quadratic city are at risk of losing their utopian and coordinated society to Moloch, due to corruption and indecisiveness. Your mission is to read the comic to understand the lore of the game. Not a bad start!

Level 2: Summon the ETHBots

Moloch is made of coordination failures, and the only way to beat a monster like that is more coordination.

ETHBots are built to coordinate. They are configured by the community they serve to create coordination. They are the vessels through which humanity coordinates to defeat Moloch.

To play this level, we need to launch a new hero into the world by minting it. Sounds simple, but not so fast! Minting is on a bonding curve, so the more bots minted, the more they cost. Once 200 Digital ETHBots are minted and 3 Statue ETHBots are minted, humanity can continue its fight against Moloch in Level 2. To proceed, you’ll need to connect either of your Formatic, Portis, walletconnect, Athreum, or coinbase wallet and simply mint the NFT. At the time of publication, the community has completed Level 2. Nice work!

Level 3: Fight the Many Molochs

To play this level, we need to capture Molochs by minting their NFT. Once 200 Digital Molochs are minted, and 3 Statue Molochs are minted, we may advance to the final boss. Again, minting is on a bonding curve, so the level gets progressively harder to beat as more Molochs are captured. But the good news is, at the time of this publication, the community has completed Level 3.

Level 4: The Final Boss

Level 4 is a 1/1 NFT crowdfund auction featuring a digital sculpture of ETHbot vs Moloch. This auction will begin on the 6th of December. This is how it will work:

• The auction will be live on Zora starting Dec 6. Join the Auction Launch here.
• But we’ll be using PartyBid as a crowdfunding tool to participate in the auction as a community.
• Once the PartyBid hits 100 ETH crowdfunded (or the 100 ETH reserve is met on Zora), a 24 hour auction will begin.
• Whoever has the highest bid after 24 hours (either the PartyBid or a whale on Zora) will win the NFT. The auction will extend if a bid occurs in the final 15 minutes.

If the PartyBid wins, all the participants automatically receive a percentage of ownership of the NFT, proportional to their contribution.. As always, community ownership echoes the theme of coordination and creates a fun way of collaborating to fund public goods.

Join the party!

Here’s a link to join the LARP. Feel free to join the telegram and say hi to the community.

Special thanks to the devs, artists, and participants working on this project, including: Pharo, Bliss, Fahim.eth, Owocki, Colton, Josh, Matt, Ryan, Guist.eth, octavian, Loie.

See you at the other side of true coordination!

Brought to you by Moonshot Collective.