Designing for Multiplayer Mode with Alanah Lam

Right. Hello everybody. Thank you for being here at the Metalland stage. My name is Alena Lamb and we're going to be talking about design for multiplayer mode. Um, so the reason that I wanted to bring this up in design is because I feel like we have this tendency in web 3 to focus too much on the tooling and I want to take it back and focus more on the relationships.

Uh, the reason I care about this is I'm the founding designer at Future Primitive. We're an experimental venture studio building NFT and culture products. So for us, it's really important to get down and deep in the user journeys and care about, you know, what kind of value we're providing for this industry that's not just more stuff. So I have two amazing designers in their own domains joining me today. I have Vivec and Josiah.

Uh if you both want to introduce yourselves. Thank you. Um hi everybody. My name is Vive Singh. I work on a project called kernel which is a peer learning environment that focuses relationships at the core of the program.

So we bring together groups of about 200 people working in all different parts of web 3. And while there is a curriculum and a syllabus and strong perspectives on what we think is important to build and learn, um the primary orientation in the program is peers learning from one another and we found that that has led to a lot of opening in terms of what's possible. Cool. My name is Josiah Talis. I'm a product designer at a Dow tooling startup called Utopia Labs.

Uh, Utopia is a sort of application layer built on top of Nosis Safe that lets DAO operators uh, conduct payroll, do recurring payments, and then also publish um, sort of financial transparency and insights to their community uh, right from the app. Cool. Awesome. So, to start, I want to introduce my idea of multiplayer mode. Um, I started thinking about this while I was reading this book called How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell.

I always plug this book anytime I can. She has this concept called context collapse where the internet nowadays feels like an infinite doom scroll. It feels like you're in an apartment building with no walls and people just don't know what to expect from their interactions. They're left feeling exploited, exhausted. And I believe that web 3 has the potential to rebuild those structures to create a more intentional and intimate internet that we want to be on and feels restorative.

So, I would like to ask both of you what how would you describe a multiplayer UX these days? Sure. Um, Jenny Odell is incredible. Um Aaliyah who's in the audience is a colonel Stewart as well and has introduced me to her work and she works I think at the internet archive where there are others who talk a lot about trust and I think in crypto circles there's sometimes a suggestion that we now have moved into a postrust environment which we at kernel find to be completely false. Uh the reality is that we now have a bit more agency about where to put our trust and we can think about in more critical ways how to protect those spaces.

And there is a game on the internet called the evolution of trust by a man named Nikki Casease who makes the point that there are three main characteristics that help trust grow and maybe allow for multiplayer modes. Uh and he suggests that it is repeat interactions amongst peers, the potential for win-win games, and the reduction of miscommunication. And I find all three of those to be healthy to think about in game building and game design and in general in web 3 to think about how you might foster trust spaces. That's funny that Vague brought up the evolution of trust because I've also played that game and Nikki Case's work and the entire blog has a lot of kind of applied game theory uh writing which is super interesting and super relevant to web 3 and to web 3 communities. Um when I think about multi-player mode uh within like a digital like within a software application I think it's mostly a sort of set of values that designers and others can bring to the space around kind of community ownership transparency sort of a lot of the values that web 3 and and Dows have latched on to.

I think in a lot of ways we were lucky that this last super cycle bull run coincided with COVID because people were at home, they were in front of their computer screens. They were longing for human interaction, longing for a sense of community and it was harder to get that in the real world. So for the first time, you know, they're looking for how can we create these digital places and digital spaces where we can, you know, build relationships and and try to make those relationships more rich than your uh your sort of traditional internet friend relationship. and Dows kind of came along right at the right moment, I think, to seize on that and to incorporate that as a set of values into web 3. Yeah, that's a that's a great point.

And I want to follow up on that and ask, so you come from sort of a fang like more corporate web 2 background. So, how was it as a designer to move into web 3 and design for the many needs of Dows um in this space? Cuz I feel like nowadays, you know, web 2, you had this consumer platform economy. You were kind of designing for your target markets, your personas, but now we sort of design for these um collective organisms, these Dows, these Discord communities that take on their own ideologies. They sort of move like a mass.

And so, what has that been like to design tooling for for them? Definitely. Um, so I did spend the first five years of my career um working in web 2 corporate tech. um and kind of escaped the mother ship and and landed in the web 3 world. Um and so I I would say like the values are are very different jumping into web 3, right?

And it it is community ownership. It is kind of like uh you now are accountable not just to uh shareholders or to some board, but you're accountable to the entire community and uh products can sort of be held up and and held accountable at governance. Um, and so there's more stakeholders than just kind of the business unit of some entity. It's it's the end user can actually also sort of uh be more of a stakeholder in the design process. Um, the other thing I'll note though is like there's a little bit of an idea that the practice of design in web 3 is dramatically different than it is in web 2.

And I don't think that's true. Like the design process is exactly the same. You're understanding humans, observing user behaviors, understanding their goals and motivations, and all of that remains true. It's just that what you value is different. You know, we're no longer competing for human attention as our only monetization model.

I've designed plenty of, you know, pop-up banners and even uh product experiences where we're competing for a user's attention from other teams on the same product, right? Um like notifications notoriously for large software products are one team competing to notify a user of something and another team also competing to notify a user and basically pull engagement around the product to hit different teams KPIs. Um and I think when we or when I jumped into web 3 like one of the principles we talk about a lot at Utopia that we wanted to bring to the software was this idea of calm tech and like you know human attention is no longer the the end all beall. we can sort of uh have more creative uh monetization means either through just like tokens, but we also, you know, don't just have to have these large for-profit entities that kind of own these businesses or these these products. And so for the first time, we can kind of put human attention aside and just serve people's needs.

Yeah. Yeah, I really like that idea. Um I'm starting to think of design as a work of friction, being slow. um thinking about user goals more than just conversions. I think everyone here is sick of the overly greased funnel, the one cluck one-click e-commerce, like we don't need to have those things.

We don't actually need to build for those things. We can reject those patterns and build for more psychologically supportive patterns. Um so, VC on that note, I want to ask how you build for more intimate communities cuz I think user delight, you know, all designers here, we know user delight. I feel like that's a primitive for something better, which could be, you know, serendipity, um, intimacy, more rare human experiences that we can design through, uh, tokconomics and economies that don't just focus on transactions. Yeah.

Yeah. The last word there, transaction, is an interesting one because I think that the thing that has me excited about a project called Anoma, which is not something that I'm particularly uh tied to, is that they think about a layer one solution that's built upon intents. So in their model, instead of thinking just at the transaction layer, you can think about individuals in their L1 system being able to state their intents, state their preferences. And it's really interesting. It's the first time I heard at layer 1 somebody saying, okay, transactions are interesting.

That's a type of exchange between two people that enters in a particular type of economy. But intent is something that seems more native to communal space. It's where you could say that I intend to be this type of way within this quasi economic environment. And I think that that point is um basically this shift from funnels uh towards spaces. And maybe if we are no longer in user funnels but spaces of people and we think about the ways that relationships might be formed between those people as the highest measure of healthy growth.

um you end up with different outcomes. And so in kernel, I think the thing that we are most interested in is if the people that are in the environment uh are able to build trust with one another. They talk about things that are related to their crypto learning journey. They talk about things that might go beyond that. They maybe end up at each other's weddings.

If that happened, that would be a healthy measure of success. And it's also true that they could support each other in building token systems. And I think that you and the work at future primitive is really one of the star examples of that that we speak of a lot in kernel because thinking about the actual token design is is something that um it protects the space, right? like if it's not a funnel anymore, but it's a space, it doesn't need something to uh accelerate it down the funnel, but it does need something to protect it. And I wonder if um if there's anything that you guys have worked on that that feels like it's in that category.

Yeah, for sure. So, you know, I think like other companies that work on NFT projects, we've sort of struggled with finding the product market fit with having a a good NFT and that NFT be enough for the market. You know, you need utility beyond just getting this piece of artwork. There's almost like this augmented product that you have to build for. Your product doesn't just, you know, begin and end when you when you mince.

It's really the before, the after, the relationships. You're cultivating sort of a culture that really comes from that project. So, uh, one of the things that we're working on right now is called tokenbound. It's a new protocol that allows NFTTS to work as smart contract wallets and effectively own other NFTs and tokens. Um, and the ethos behind that was we were thinking that your wallet on chain is sort of your identity and people have started picking up these PFBs as their identities.

You know, Goney, people on Twitter using them uh to really carry on their character. But that all ends when your NFT, you know, gets abstracted through all these transactions and everything. So, we started playing around with this idea of tokenbound and now it's actually live. So, um, it's EIP6551 and we're playing with this idea of like what happens when you attach more, I guess, primitives of identity to something like an NFT where you used to own it and now your NFT can own other things. You can interact with DAPs as your NFT.

Uh we're actually here uh hacking at the hackathon with these. We made these bead lizards where if you find anyone with a lizard, you can come up and tap our NFC chips and mince a lizard NFT and then subsequent taps you'll mint beads. Uh the reason we built this, it's actually a toy project of token bound. So if you want to learn more, come find one of us or somebody with a lizard and tap us. But you know, we like to play with kind of silly examples of the technology.

Um, I hope that answered your question about about that. Definitely. Did you call it a toy project of Yeah, it's it's literally a toy project. It's cool because we can actually do toy projects now because it's not just this objective business need to just get ad dollars to things like a community can come in together, build a treasury and do things just for fun or for play or for experiment and build things you could not have built in more of a profit driven business context all the time. Yeah.

Yeah. And I think you touched on a really good topic, play. For all the designers out there, if you're thinking about how to soup up your road maps or user journeys, like think about how you can introduce play into your zoo journey, you know, like how do you get people to just be there with each other, be serendipitously connected? Um, you know, I'm I'm biased. I love Colonel because I'm I'm a part of the most recent block, Colonel 7.

And I found that being able to be around other people working in the space, but in a playful manner. You know, we're not all just talking about work, that was really transformative. And I think that's something that we can do within all of our projects is getting people to connect, not just on their holdings, but themselves as people. Um, so with that said, I want to move into this next topic. Uh, there's sort of this area of websites and design that I'm really interested in.

It's sort of between um poetic computing and effective computing, but people make these experimental sites that have no reason other than to share the collective human experience. And I think that's a really interesting use case for web 3 because you can actually be on the internet enjoying human experiences without feeling like you're going to be exploited because the site is powered by ads or you know ultimately there's like a social login or something. So I want to ask both of you, you know, what are some other applications of the future internet that you're excited about that move away from this extractive uh web 2 world? Uh great question. I do think web 3 kind of made the internet fun again.

And for a lot of people um reminds you of the internet like 10 or 15 years ago, right? Where the internet felt small. It felt smaller. It felt less uh corporate, frankly. Um, and in a lot of ways, people are finding that again in web 3 with websites that exist just for fun, right?

As opposed to always being some page on some huge app and some purpose of selling some ads or being an influencer of of some kind or another. Um, a web 3 experience that got me really excited and comes kind of back to the multiplayer mode question was party bid. Like when party bid dropped and had cursor presence where everyone was, you know, collectively bidding on NFTs, but not just collectively bidding on NFTs. felt like they were in the same room and they were in the same digital space. You could see their cursor the way you can see their cursor in Figma, you know.

Um there are a few other like web 3 experiences that I think are trying to bring that aspect of feeling like you're in the same digital space at the same time and you can kind of interact with each other in a digital way, but it becomes very multiplayer and you're having a shared human experience even if you're, you know, across the country or across the world. I love that. And I think that that is a good example of what happens when you move from funnels to spaces because when you're looking at a space and a space maybe has thousands of people but not millions of users, you're looking at a very different type of app that you're trying to build. You might be building something fun that makes a thousand people's experience on the internet enjoyable. And if many of those home-cooked apps can be built, then you have this environment where it doesn't feel like you're being marketed to, right?

It feels like you're just enjoying a space. There's a few examples. Um, versus.xyz is a fun one. On that site, there's some shape-shifting poetry.

Um, on future primitive site, I think you see this playfulness. And I think that this is like the most exciting part of the the next wave of application building is that you don't have to build it with thousands and thousands of faces in mind. You can say, "No, this group of 1,000 people is in my environment. There are people that want to do specific types of things." And now I can slowly perpetually grow that environment um with a way that still technically um pushes the ball forward.

It changes your mindset completely as a designer. Yeah, for sure. Um so for the last couple minutes, what are some practical advice we can give to people to make truly multiplayer experiences that we've just talked about here? So I think to start off for one I saw this thread going around on Twitter about community designers which is this new role sort of like prompt engineers. I've never heard of it before but there's there are people that really focus on architecting your community design you know how you onboard people how you actually get them through your your space not your funnel.

Um, so that is one thing, hire a community designer, get them looking at your product roadmap, um, and actually innovate not just for your minting experience or within your product, but the everything before and after. Yeah. Is there anything else you'd like to add to that? I think a lot of that happens at events like this. like uh crypto and web 3 are are kind of fun in the sense that everyone gets to know each other online for months and months and months and then you know connects for the first time in person with people you really feel like you have a deep relationship with or even for us it's like our users of our our product utopia meeting them for the first time and being able to kind of feel like you know them but then have very human conversations about what's needed from the the software you know how can we improve it and really feel like you're co-creating it kind of with the users as opposed to some super formal research practice ice and having to compensate people to do usability studies and stuff like really thinking of them as a a stakeholder in the project because often they they actually are through token ownership.

Um I I have one piece of writing that has been seinal in my experience of this and I think that game design for all token designers is the category of research that defines the entire token ecosystem. If you look at game designers as the place to begin, you may be on a good track. So, the name of the research paper is called Pro-social Economics for Game Design. Um, and it's by a bunch of incredible game designers, and they talk about four things that you might consider building into your games. They talk about friendship, the formation of healthy relationships.

They talk about thriving individuals. Uh thinking about how you yourself can feel healthy within an environment, altruism, so the chance within the environment to help each other do interesting things. And then positive group norms. So an environment that helps uh these things propagate. Awesome.

Amazing. Well, thank you everybody for listening and I want to leave you with just one more thing. Next time you're at the writer's room or the desk or the product room, think about how you can create a more psychologically supportive design that's going to give us a better internet. Um, it's going to make us feel more like we're living in the digital gardens rather than the uh the doom scroll viewport of today. Thanks all.

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