THE PROTOTYPE: Testing Our Theory for Multiplayer Futures
Multiplayer Futures: Toward an Emergence Economy (part 4)
This is part 4 of 7 in Multiplayer Futures: Toward an Emergence economy. You can read installments 1-3 here, read the entire paper in full here, and collect it on Zora here.
And if you already know this is something you’d like to be a part of, join RADAR.
THE PROTOTYPE: Testing Our Theory for Multiplayer Futures
Over the last year or so, we’ve been designing the processes, thinking and experimentation needed to turn visions of the future into memes, and memes into movements. It’s all been in the spirit of testing and learning; of embracing RADAR as a living organism that is always learning, always evolving, always adapting.
In V1, we explored A Future In Sync.
It started, as our cycles do, with research — and many, many experiments in cultivating collective intelligence.
We brought together an unlikely mix of researchers new to Discord; web3 natives introduced to futures through a new and yet-unproven server; and a host of curious humans seeking digital camaraderie — those who would stoke their interests and passions, and maybe teach them something interesting along the way.
And we set them on a journey that started with signals, signals, signals. It wasn’t a journey without its bumps, but it proved our community thesis: that we could bring together dozens of perspectives from around the world, throw them into the chaos of a Discord server, and let them work it out from there — facilitating and expanding collective wisdom through dot connection and pattern recognition in its purest sense.
Over the course of a few months, this group: curated hundreds of signals on dozens of topics; collectively decided upon a single topic to investigate, in line with RADAR’s values and vision; came together in Caves and Campfires, learning and leveraging new tools for collaboration; collected and connected dots across space and time, bringing their own unique backgrounds and perspectives to the table; and converged on a narrative of the present and map of the future as a community, rallying behind a center of gravity that would propel us into what came next.
See, we wanted to break the legacy paradigm where research too often sits static; we wanted to hold ourselves accountable to turning passive reporting into forward motion that could result in products, services, and concepts that would bring us closer to the better future we’d discovered.
Enter: Incubate — and our first Futurethon.
Following the launch of the Future In Sync report, we planned, produced, and ran the Futurethon — our reimagination of a traditional hackathon.
It’s not that we had any real beef with the traditional model of PvP hackathons; they just weren’t fit for our purpose. And so we dreamed up something new. The Futurethon was co-created in the RADAR community – over three collaborative workshops, 18 active contributors, hundreds of stickies, and quite literally countless 🥚emojis.
We flipped the traditional model of highly-competitive hackathons into a much more collaborative, open, and generative experience.
Instead of having a few days of super intense working time, we stretched it out over the course of a week and built a sustainable pace into the plan.
Instead of a set structure that everyone needed to dedicate themselves to, we designed a choose-your-own adventure experience, creating space for those who want to build, ideate, or simply listen in to participate in whatever way felt most comfortable to them.
Rather than having participants compete in teams to build a predefined product, we said no to ingoing ideas and instead created an environment for collective idea generation through inspiring talks and creative exercises.
Instead of cultivating an uber-competitive environment, we altered the structure to encourage collaboration. If your idea wasn’t voted to continue, you could jump in and contribute to another idea.
We knew we wanted to create a multiplayer moment that engaged builders in bringing A Future In Sync closer to reality — and we successfully did it. But what we didn’t count on was just how much energy we’d generate, how many connections we’d make, and the kind of network that would start to gather full of individuals aligned behind the desire to manifest this shared vision of a better future, of this particular future.
We’d created the momentum, but we didn’t have the infrastructure to sustain it. And so the energy dissipated. But for a moment, we were able to peer into this crack in the fabric and catch a glimpse of what we could really do.
We needed to take what was a multiplayer moment and turn it into a mode, into a movement.
We just needed the infrastructure to make it happen.
“We need new infrastructure, something transparent, ownable, accessible, financially sustainable, where we can share the value we create, something for the community, something that’s ours.” — ZORA
This has been installment 4 of 7 of Multiplayer Futures: Toward an Emergence Economy. You’ll find installment 5 in your inbox tomorrow, and if you missed it, you can read the previous installments here.
As a reminder, we’re extending availability of our Patron NFTs for those 7 days. If the vision laid out in these pages resonates, we invite you to take part in the inaugural cycle that will bring to life our theory of Multiplayer Futures: Play. It’s the first of many more to come.
See you tomorrow 🔮