DAOball: A simulated spectator sport experience

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DAOball → DAOventure (working title)

It’s been a while since we first announced DAOball, and a lot has happened since then. We want to give you all an update on where we’re at and where we’re headed.

The short version? We’re pivoting. DAOball is evolving into something new: DAOventure.

In this post, we’ll break down:

  • What we originally set out to do with DAOball
  • The challenges we ran into (there were quite a few)
  • What we learned from the experience
  • How all of this is informing our new project, DAOventure

We’re aiming for full transparency here. Game development, especially when you’re trying something new, is a messy process. We hope that by sharing our experience, we can contribute something useful to the community.

The DAOball Vision

  • Low-stakes DAO experiment: DAOball was conceived as an innovative project aimed at creating a low-stakes DAO open to community participation. We wanted to provide a platform where anyone could engage with decentralized governance in a fun, accessible way.

  • Integration of consensus into gameplay: The core idea was to create a game/simulation/experience that revolved around DAOs. Since a DAO is a mechanism to control and make choices through consensus, we designed DAOball to integrate consensus into all choices, specifically Team and League decisions.

Challenges Faced

Pacing and Complexity

  • Slow decision-making process: DAOs, especially chaotic and unstructured ones, are inherently messy and slow. This posed significant design restrictions for creating an engaging game, often resulting in a slow, unorganized, and potentially unfun experience.

  • Streamlining attempts: We implemented some streamlining designs to make choices less about ‘adopting a proposal’ and more like casual voting through multi-choice polling. While this addressed some issues, it still didn’t fully solve the problem of making many or complex choices quickly.

Competition Design

  • Balancing competition and simplicity: We faced challenges in designing a competitive aspect that wasn’t skill-based or overly complex. Our solution was to have teams compete in ‘scenarios’ based on game theory concepts like the tragedy of the commons or prisoner’s dilemma.

  • Complexity and content creation burden: This approach led to a system that was hard to understand and required a ‘game master’ rather than being procedurally generated. It diverted us from the initial concept of an autonomous simulation and instead required constant content creation.

Genre Ambiguity and User Expectations

  • Misaligned expectations: Many individuals who were introduced to the game expected a more classic sports management or fantasy experience, rather than our casual and DAO-ified approach.

  • Difficult to categorize: The game didn’t fit into normal genres and was hard to compare to existing games. This led to confusion and required lengthy explanations of what it is and how to play, which was not ideal for user onboarding.

Community Engagement

  • Limited but insightful feedback: While overall engagement was limited, feedback sessions revealed that the concepts were often confusing to potential players. The baseball theme seemed forced, with suggestions pointing towards a more flexible theme like D&D.

Learnings and Positive Outcomes

  • Avoid reinventing the wheel: One key lesson was to avoid reinventing the wheel unless prepared for many delays and rewrites. Utilizing existing frameworks and concepts can significantly speed up development and improve user understanding.

  • Foundation for future projects: Despite the challenges, we built a solid foundation that can be used for our next project and potentially other projects in the space. This includes:

  • Valuable insights: The experience provided us with crucial insights that are informing the development of our next iteration, DAOventure.

Reflections on DAO-Based Gaming

  • Lack of direct inspiration: It was challenging to find inspiration or ideas from other projects where DAOs were a part of the gameplay rather than just managing the game. The closest parallels we found were complex world politics MEGA games.

  • Potential for DAO integration: While DAOball faced significant hurdles, we still believe there’s potential in DAO-integrated gaming. However, success likely requires a more complex core gameplay than what we initially offered.

Looking Forward: DAOventure

As we pivot to DAOventure, we’re making several key changes based on our learnings:

  • Theme shift: Moving from baseball to a more flexible fantasy theme, allowing for greater creative freedom and easier onboarding for players.

  • Core gameplay: Transitioning to a fantasy text/image-based roguelite with simple procedural generation, leveraging classic tropes for a more intuitive experience.

  • Flexible DAO integration: Making DAO/group play optional, allowing for faster-paced individual experiences while still maintaining the option for collective decision-making.

  • DAO focus: Shifting the DAO’s primary role from playing the game to building and evolving it, allowing for community-driven content creation and game balance adjustments.

For a more detailed look at DAOventure and how it addresses the challenges we faced with DAOball, look out for our announcement post coming soon.

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