Baer Metagov
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Transcript
Alright. Now you're good. Go ahead.
Can everyone hear us? I'm not alone today, fortunately. Thank you, Josh, for the invite. Wait. Is our microphones working? Wait.
It works. Yep. Okay.
We're just gonna use the computer microphone, not the fancy one, which keeps bugging out. So yeah, thank you for the introduction. I'm Arthur. I'm also joined by Alessandro. Yeah. Alessandro. Hi everyone. Yeah. We're working on moving castles together.
Yeah.
And we we're we're working on a easy to understand short description. I think the modular mini versus is a is one. A community controlled games and media is another one we're trying out. We're still figuring out the exact tagline. But yeah, we are currently in trust, a space in Berlin, which has for the past years, mainly done public events and lectures. We always had a focus on streaming while doing that. And then during COVID, it forced us to start getting very creative with it. And we started building our own games, our own game shows and started experimenting more with the streams. At the same time, we started a Discord, which has grown to, I would say, like four or 500 members now. It's a paid Discord. So we use the funds that are gathered from the members to basically fund the maintenance and formats for the Discord itself. So we're seeing the Discord as a kind of, yeah, almost like you would do with a cultural institution treats the space as a space for public programming. So we do reading groups, we do play sessions, we have lectures in there and all kinds of stuff. And basically recirculate the member contributions to fund activities. And so now we through this experience of building this online community, we became more and more interested in the kind of tooling that facilitates the existence of something I trust. And how to build, yeah, more interactive or media projects that maybe embrace the kind of same chaotic yet fun collective agency, which we hope to see expressed in something like trust.
Also something that moves away from, like, tax based media, definitely. Yeah.
And so we're gonna give a kind of overview how we how it feels like we're we're not the only space that does this, obviously. There's in the cultural field or the ecosystem that we are in, a a lot of communities have kind of started appearing as discords and are kind of self categorizing as dark forest communities. And this this kind of graphic is floating around. I don't know where it comes from. It's floating around and it divides kind of online activities into three layers, clear net, dark forest, and dark net. And by this categorization, trust is a dark forest community. And we're gonna explore that a little bit because we think it's worth thinking about what this means. So the the Yancy Strickler calls this or says that dark forest or spaces where the pressure rise conversation is possible because of their non indexed, non optimized, and non gamified environments. And Venkatesh Rao, if you read between the lines, his CozyWeb is actually something very similar. It works on the protocol of everybody cutting and pasting bits of text, images, URLs, and screenshots across live streams. And they're both both these subscription are characterized by their intentional withdrawal from social media, so clear net, and are non indexical creating kind of unintentionally disconnected islands, or intentionally disconnected islands populated by these isolated communities. And this is kind of the new the new field that we're seeing. And new models, another kind of trust affiliated discord community, say that through this withdrawal and this isolation, these new subcultures find the space to develop shared interests and build their collective lore. But there is a kind of problem here that we see, which is that if we believe the most promising thing about emerging spaces like trust is their potential to grow into collectively owned social and cultural institutions built on potentially decentralized infrastructure that are democratically governed manifestations of collective interests. Then the idea of isolated communities that have no relationship to the outside and wait, no relationship to the outside look more like what we know as merchant guilds. The kind of small communities of self interest that yeah, optimize for often the financial interest of the in group. And it doesn't seem like a like a a random thing that the guild is now one of the main, like, organizational archetypes or primitives used in the Web three space to exactly describe these new kind
of yeah.
The like the new group archetype kind of. And so we're interested in what do Dark Forest community, what does their relationship to the outside look like? Because often it exists. Often these Discord communities need to have a relationship to the outside, to bring in new members, to kind of finance themselves often. And they often do that through figureheads. So a podcaster has a Discord. Does that happens so in in our context, that's how it happens. You have a you have a media producing entity, a centralized person that produces a kind of a filter between the chaotic discord and the outside, the public so to speak. And what we're proposing is a different one. And we'll talk about this quickly. There is so there's this book called Working in Public, The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software. We've bastardized kind of one diagram there and made our own, which looks like this, where we categorize media or into four categories. We have private and centralized, which are, we're not gonna talk much about them because they don't really fit into, but an example would be a Finsta, like a secret Instagram for your friends. But we don't this is, like, not what we're actually gonna talk about. We have Dark Forest Clubs, which is what we just described. They're collective, but they are private in their best form. We're still at a stage where the infrastructure to facilitate these these organizations is actually not decentralized. And then we have clear net stadiums as we call them, which are the media representation of a community which always almost has a centralizing effect because there's one or several figureheads that represent the community, and that creates certain centralizing tendencies or creates clear power laws within the community that are really hard to avoid long term, even if you have a decentralized governance model or a decentralized infrastructure in the background. And so we feel like this exchange between the clear net version of a community and the Dark Forest community needs another model or another type of media to facilitate the relationship between the dark forest and the outside. And we propose that that could be moving castles. Yeah. So we've started to do experiments that exactly try to create games and media that are both an expression of collective, that are collect like represent collective agency, but at the same time are public. And we've done one where we started doing Twitch experiments where communities control games. So this is a simple Twitch stream where the community writes inputs and these inputs basically control the game. They can also spawn themselves into the world as a character. And this was a very early experiment while we were still figuring out what was
Last year.
Last year. And we've done more experiments now where this one was one we did at Daoist in Lisbon, where two discords are playing a game against each other, each discord with a different governance model underlying the game. So this is a very simple game where you basically each community can move a pawn around, but one of the pawns is controlled by democracy mode and the other one by anarchy mode. Right? Anarchy. Yeah. And it it was a test for us to both test the infrastructure of basically having a game controlled by two communities and to try out the idea of, like, communities having different governance weapon and mechanisms to represent their collective agency in a media or game form. And I don't know if anyone has seen this experiment from 02/2014, Twitch plays Pokemon, where Twitch audience plays Pokemon and basically controls one character. And we're interested in the idea of instead of having figureheads that function as clear in stadiums, can there be media that is a form of collective expression or form of collective agency, which can act as a representation of the organization or the collective to interact with the public. And we're basically building now a framework for that. So moving castles, and these are kind of copied where where we've adapted the design goals from modular politics for ourselves here. Moving castles are collected where many contributors share control through transparent and real time governance mechanisms. They are portable, which means that to avoid lock in mechanisms to specific platforms, we want movie cast to be able to move freely between platform standards and protocols from private to public without use losing any value knowledge or lore in the process. They, should be oops. They should be modular, which means that communities themselves can construct moving castles by creating, importing, and arranging composable parts together as a coherent whole while making these parts available for others to reuse and adapt, and they should be interoperable. They have the ability to interact with other communities, communicating, playing games, and sharing knowledge and skills in order to help these communities become moving castles themselves. And so the idea is that you have this modular architecture, and then you can construct things like this. You have raw API inputs. There is a collective governance mechanism in place, which would be one module, and then that can result in a Web three output, for example. And this would be, like, a game or a a type of media. And and the lines between game media and events becomes extremely fuzzy here. We see, like, this call is could also be a game or a media type. It's a it's like a a group ritual for a certain outcome, but those outcomes should not only be representational. We are interested in making the moving castles actually dashboards for the organization themselves so that there are real outputs. Yeah. So the organization can basically act. The governance also has practical or material or, you know, it actually changes what the organization does. This is our current kind of technical setup that we're building right now. It's for the MVP. I don't need to go too much into it, but we're basically building both kind of simple web three integrations, Discord and Twitch integrations. So you can do like private and public participation with different roles within games. And we wanna have a user identity layer so you can have persistent identities, votes, items, tokens, whatever. And we're gonna do our first season or arc as we call them around the theme of portals as a collaboration between Trust and Moving Castles in 2022, where we're gonna test, mainly gonna focus on testing assumptions of like what are the actual rituals or organizational events you can do with something like this. And we're gonna do four formats, probably one on collective world building, one which is a portal game show, which is a game show with many discords as kind of participating communities, so they play against each other. There's one which is about community knowledge building, and one which is a game show that is essentially about governance and fund allocation. And I think that's it. Do you have anything you wanna I'll let you do the other one. Yeah. I think I Josh said that 15 is a good goal, and we tried to cut it down a little bit. So there's a lot of space for questions and answers. And I didn't know we didn't know how many people had read the piece as well. So we wanted to go through, like, the the core argument, and then maybe there's things to explore further. I'm I'm especially interested with the Metagov group in thinking about governance as kind of a modular architecture that can be used within systems like this. And, like, the idea of, like, yeah, that that seems to be a really interesting question generally for this community.
This is I think it's hard to understate how much I like this proposal. I think it's awesome what you guys the experiments you guys have built out are awesome. And also just really like the fact that it's taking this much more, like, playful perspective on something that, you know, when you talk about governance, you know, you can often sub well, let's say sometimes you will get into these conversations about legal norms and procedures and this thing versus that. Whereas I think this is like, moving castles is, like, just an awesome exploration of what's possible in this space. I just wanna sort of, first off, like, applaud that. However, you know, the rest of this conversation, I think there's two questions already there. It's gonna be we're gonna have jump into maybe some more critiquing. And I'll start off with, like, you one of the first quotes you mentioned was, this idea of, like, a non index, non optimized, non gamified. That was a quote from somebody else. It's maybe not something you guys want to defend entirely on your own. And you're I think this is in reference to, like, these dark forest clubs. But when you say like, but does modularity and portability, which are least and interoperability, you know, things that you guys are shooting for, in a technical space imply at least some notion of indexification. And if not gamification, then at least some notion of quantification, like the precursor?
Yeah. Thanks. Well, thanks for the nice comments, for the nice and then I think the, I mean, I so first, I don't think we're the the if it wasn't clear in the presentation, we hope that it's clear in the text that we're not trying to support the idea of dark forest communities. I think that the Yancy Strickler piece and especially the embrace of it is problematic, I would say, or bad. I think that the I don't think that, like, calling a Discord community non indexable or, like, a secret club makes it like, I I think we're walking towards that seeing that these dark forest communities, as they're called, are actually not that at all. And I think that that, yes, we might I don't think that we're through this framework are creating more indexability. I think the non indexability or that intent is kind of like, it's not actually happening on the dark web. It's happening in a in a in a Yeah. The Silicon Valley startup framework already. If the send you mean that the standardization we're proposing by the modularity will help with the indexation? Is that what you said?
Yeah. So just, like, just by sort of virtue of sticking being able to stick these things together and sort of, like, exposing certain kinds of data, making sort of these pieces modular, ends up sort of like at the very least, you have, like, one system communicating to another or go exposing information. So maybe, like, Unity now sees what you're doing on Discord or wherever it is. Right? So this is one of those things in which you're being playful, but also data is being exposed in various ways that could obviously, like, you know, be designed and gamified.
I I think also for us, it's there's this constant discourse of, like, or, like, we were talking about a lot a lot about, like, kind of always moving. That's why, I mean, always as good as moving Casa, but like what they were like, how people could move between different states of like, so for example, going from the dark forest, like pick something up from the clear net and bring it back to like a dark forest community. So having these, like, stages where, like, maybe at some point, you you open up some of that communication also in the in the modularity, but then you may you you are able to, like, once you build your own thing to kind of close it off in some way. So maybe, yeah, that's something to take into consideration also like this kind of like possibility of moving between different, stages of, how open or closed.
Do you mean on like a very core infrastructural scale that we're basically connecting by creating plugins, we're connecting Unreal to Discord and therefore we allow Unreal to basically pull from new data streams as a company? Or are you talking about a more on an organizational scale that the interoperability, which I don't think is bad, on an organization. I think the first one is bad, if that's what you mean. But the second one where there's more interoperability between these communities, and more like open openness or more communication between them, I don't think is a is a bad thing at all. I think that it's very weird to me why the the architecture of Discord does not allow cross Discord events, for example. That's just a very weird, like, why why can't you like, why aren't there functions so you can have a room that isn't two Discords at the same time? Why doesn't MetaGo have a connection to as a Slack to many different similar communities and does calls with them. I think that's actually like it would be a very productive thing. And I think that maybe like the outside that we're talking about is more like a network of interoperable communities.
That's, I think, a separate resource question that I would love to dig into, why Discord and Slack don't natively support these things. But, yeah, I I would agree. I I would the the the second sort of question is less bad. I think there are still things that we should consider when we're sort of thinking about that. But, Kalia, do you wanna ask a question?
Yeah. Interoperability is a big idea. It's harder to do. So I was asking a very specific question about, you know, portability and, you know, are you looking at the emerging standards of verifiable credentials and decentralized identifiers as anchors for that portability across contexts?
We're I mean, we still haven't developed the identity layer to the extent we want to. Right now, we're gonna have in our in our prototype, the interoperability will mostly be some kind of, like, simple NFT thing as, like, a prototype. It it won't be part of the first MVP in in in yeah. The the NFT layer won't be a decentralized solution and as part of the first MVP. Yeah. So we're we're we're thinking about it, but it's not part of the the first version that we're launching in q one twenty twenty two. And I think what we're gonna do is we're gonna build the the idea would be that we build a network of similar communities with the first MVP where it's still quite that we don't release the tooling yet, and then we need to work on an tooling that that has much more, let's say, integrity in how and how it has interoperability built into it from
the core.
But
So, I mean, I would strongly recommend investigating both decentralized identifiers and verifiable credentials in a sense that, you know, not just because, you know, we it's a community of people who thought long and hard about how identity could and should work in the digital realm and also built up a whole stack that does it. My concern is that people are sort of grabbing on to NFTs as as this thing that could be a substrate for identity. And then that will end up becoming this de facto norm that has some pretty dangerous properties. Anyways, so just like, if you think NFTs are good, you'll probably like decentralized identifiers. So go look at them, please.
Can you link something in the in the chat? If you have a good resource for what specifically we should look at, that would be very helpful. If there's like Yeah. Thanks.
Let's see.
I like the IDs, but that going on to my so I put some notes here. So you guys talk about a bunch of stuff that is super I find super important, mostly thinking about the shape of cyberspace. But as you're kind of, like, exploring both how the side this particular space is sort of is shaped and making games that allow people to sort of shape it. I wanted to kinda highlight this concept of, like, the sort of membranes for both for people and for information flowing in and out of these, you know, closed, but not that closed groups in in the analogy to the dark to to the sort of guilds, this sort of more secretive society like entities, I think there's sort of a a mapping between how information flows work or don't work the same way. Specifically that, you know, in a secretive environment, it is hard to get in. How to get in is unclear. Information does not flow out. Normatively, you are not supposed to flow information out. This is, like, very, very stark line between inside and outside. And in a lot of these kinds of spaces that are emerging, those boundaries are fuzzy, but also the rules are a little, hopefully, in some cases at least, more explicit. Do this thing, get this affordance, you know, join this channel, get this token. But, like, for the most part, you can find out what you need to do to get the affordances you want and that there aren't strong norms about not sharing information from inside outward. And so I guess I'm just kinda poking at how you think about, the way that people are choosing to shape these spaces and how the sort of fuzziness of the boundaries and the permissibility of flow of people and information in both directions, might or might not help characterize the difference between something sort of secretive in nature and something open in nature. You're muted.
Okay. I don't think we're proposing, again, the guild as a good prim architect type of form for the we think that they should exactly be porous and allow inter like interchange or information to flow across them. This is why we why we are we are building it the way we intend to build it or at least build it as as a as a network of probably this group.
I wasn't saying that you're presenting the guild. I I'm saying that, like, when we look at the way that you've expressed this, it really like, is a the guild as a point of departure provides you a foil for assessing these differences, but that that porousness is in, like, multiple facets. There's the degree to which people can flow in, what does flowing out look like, what it like, exit isn't necessarily, essentially excommunication. Like, in a in a particularly, like, tight, like, analogy to something more secretive secret society or heavy guild like in the extreme case, you have you know, you only really get in through some sort of inside connections. Information does not flow outward. The, you know, exit looks like excommunication. There's a very, very hard non porous boundary for both people and information. So, like, once we sort of say that that those are characteristics, then we can look very clearly at how the characteristics are different. And in fact, they're not just different coincidentally. They're the defining characteristics of a lot of these organizations are different. They're more porous. Information flows in both directions. People flow in both directions. People participate in more than one. Like, a lot of these things underpin that networkedness. So the the porousness and in a way, it's like the open source, to abuse the term, equivalent of an organization, And so that porousness becomes a defining characteristic, and it it's a it puts the guild more as a, as a foil than as the the primary example, but I just I think this is really important. It relates to a lot of things that we've been researching even here with our governance research in Metaeth and Govbase. We have some Discord bots that we're using to go into communities and literally get invited in to have conversations about how they do governance and collect data to better understand it. So I see this as really awesome playful experimentation and exploration where maybe we're doing something a little bit more, you know, formal technical research, like go in and ask questions and collect datasets. But the the essential properties that you've teased out through this comparison to the the guild are are, yeah, more in how they differentiate than how they're the same. Sorry. That was a lot.
So, Max, you wanna ask your question?
Yeah. Sure. So, I mean, it's it's not much more than what I typed. I just I one thing that I was paying attention to was the the distinct visual, like, the imagery behind it. And I'm curious if you could say a little more about what, like, the movements or or cultures that inspire the ways that you're thinking about, you know, graphically displaying moving castles in that community.
Yeah. I think, like, a reference that kind of comes up is always Katamari Damacy. Like, this this old game where, yeah, where you would just, like, basically have this ball. It would be like a little character from another planet that comes to Earth and just, like, starts rolling this ball and the ball just made of objects, scattered on the floor and you just have to, like, make this ball grow and grow and grow larger and larger and larger. And I think that for us, it's kind of like, I think is the reference maybe like always comes up in terms of like, having this very chaotic and yet functional world in which the reason necessarily like a shared, yeah, like a shared aesthetic or shared or unique identity to it. But it's always Yeah. It's always like kinda like, yeah, like always an assemblage of, or like a like a bit like contamination always of different different worlds or like aesthetics. And so I think for these first images that we produce for the piece, yeah, I mean, doesn't want to necessarily reflect the first, I mean, how the the the the first season will look like. But I think we we were like, obviously also influenced by the by, yeah, Zaki movie moving couple the same title actually. So having this like, I mean, it's really nice this image of the space, which is kind of like hold together by the wheel of its inhabitants. So that also conceptually the moment the the inhabitants doesn't don't have any interest in keeping the space alive, the space will just dissolve on itself or will remain as like a like a memory of it. So I think we are working also a lot with that in the aesthetics and kind of, I guess, like Fortnite also does it in a way that there's like, there is not this age of like this very altered content, but it's like always an assemblage of like different characters from different unit universes that kind of like bring their own aesthetic to it. And then there's this kind of like homogeneous blanket on them just to make it feel like they belong to the same space, maybe. Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, we've also been looking at a lot of orc Warhammer
stuff. We do a very different
scope. That's right. Which which are, I mean, known for just taking bits and pieces of other things and putting them together. I think kitbatching is also like a core thing. And I think our approach by, like, trying to really build it into existing platforms and using already the the places where people are instead of, like, trying to build our own standalone app at this point Mhmm. And, like, doing Discord integrations, doing Twitch integrations, and kind of, like, kickbashing together this infrastructure. I guess that manifests in, like, an infrastructural approach as well.
Maybe you could link the arena that we have if people want to take a look at it. We we really have, like, a reference spanning from, like, I guess, like, more traditional architecture drawings from the 60s and like very pop Nintendo games or very obscure references.
I'll link it in the chat.
Yeah. I see.
Are you planning on sharing it now? Or Yeah. I understand. Just a link. Just a link. Okay. Perfect.
And, yeah, there's one which is also called modular architectures, and there's also composite creatures is also very interesting as, like, a a reference. The idea of, like, these golems or clay figures that are made up of many, many subjectivities creating one. And, like, there's the similar there, the kind of spontaneous, like, falling apart when the when the spirits or the collective will no longer, animates the body. Yeah. And So does it
sorry. Sorry. Is there have you have you thought about well, I mean, you you probably obviously have, but in what ways are you thinking about getting the community to kind of contribute and build upon this mythology, which, includes the visual aspect too. Because it feels like a strength of the presentation is what you just described. I think that is pretty compelling having all these references and themes, it gives the world a texture. Yeah. How do you think about other people building on it?
Yeah. We actually are gonna have one of the streams that we have planned for season one is basically this kind of like collective kickbashing game, where we are gonna produce or ask artists to produce instead of like full assets, full three d assets, we're gonna produce basically like pieces that then the community can assemble together. So like really like you can think of of it as like Lego pieces. We are gonna basically produce some like weird blocks that the community can put together to create characters or to create part of the infrastructure of a castle or like, really anything. And I think that we are probably also want to, build, some kind of flow that goes in and out of Discord so that we can, for example, I don't know, pull images that people post on our Discord and use them as as texters or creating this kind of like bi directional communication between the three d world and the text based world of discord. So that there is also a way it kind of also become like, you know, this like library of Babylon which like everything or not everything but like some of the content just become like a physical memory in this in this space. And it's, like, navigable and explorable. Yeah.
So I have, like, a million questions around kind of the design of these games. But maybe, like, the thing I wanted to start out with is kind of a so in in some sense, like, you were talking about building, like, mashups of different, well, in this case, just platforms and, like, you know, some sort of game system building Unity. Right?
Unreal.
Or unreal. But, potentially, it could be, like, multiple sort of, like, you know, game worlds talking to each other via Discord. Right? And this is kinda like what you articulate. Now some of these experiments are currently being kind of conducted in the form using NFTs, actually, in the sense of, like, you know, there are blockchain games that, you know, meant certain assets and those assets and they're used in a different game. Right? So have you thought about these kinds of examples, and would they also fall under the rubric of these moving castles, or are they kinda like a pro is it a a different approach? How would you compare themselves?
I think that what would be cool is that I mean, we're still figuring out so much of this, but we're definitely looking at both the kind of wave that, like, assets, whatever we wanna call them, like, building blocks, are reused in Web three is, like, a very interesting like, even just, like, loot as a project or whatever we wanna look at. There are a number like, the the the idea of decentralized media media production around, like, a very, like, like, set of, like, primitive narrative tools. And then also the idea of, like, interoperability, narrative interoperability, or, like, asset interoperability in, like, media is super interesting and in games. And which is what you were describing, essentially. Like, the idea of a loot sword being able to be used in another game as well. Right?
I mean, it's a so that's that's the most common way in which it's used. Right? You know, like, you have something on, I don't know, like, what what is that game that blockade makes, you know, getting you somewhere else in a similar way. Right? But, I mean, you could also think about, like, just, like, as a very generic thing where, you know, you have a client. You have some data on the blockchain. Right? And then I have a fork of a client. You know? It's like, first, there was doing swap, and then there was sushi swap. Right? And it's just like a slight different interpretation of the assets or blockchain state. Right? So any of these things could be technically also kind of interoperability. That's also sort of, like, engaged through these tokens. So it could be more general. It doesn't have to be narrative is my point.
Yes. We're still we're we're figuring I mean, we're gonna start doing we're looking right now at, like, NFT experiments for, like, the the blocks also because it just feels like a like a, yeah, an interesting way to approach it. There are and so so we're definitely interested in it. It seems a way like, what we're figuring out now is, like, how do you basically what is the building block? How do you create a a kind of, like, a format that allows communities to construct them themselves? And then do you want at some point, and this is a question, like, we we were not sure about, like if we were a classical company, we would say, okay, we make a marketplace. And then you basically have you can basically build sell building blocks, and there's a marketplace for the building blocks. And then people can buy the building blocks, that and then construct their own moving castles from those blocks.
So, actually, on that subject, you know, the other comparison I was gonna give was Roblox. Right? So is Roblox building a version of moving castles, but in this case, owned by a billion dollar company and, you know, set up very clearly optimized for profit?
We've looked at we looked at Roblox a bunch. And we played it to our I mean, it's a horrible thing to play a lot of.
For everybody.
For everyone I mean, what's interesting about Roblox is like how much they are already doing a lot of the things that a, like, a lot of people talk about as the metaverse becoming. Like the idea of, like, having a, basically, a huge developer community that builds their own games within their framework with a native currency and, like, sub currencies for each world. It it it's just funny that Roblox is never brought up in Web three context, although they are the most successful, like, entity
when
it comes to exactly this stuff and capture more of the the young market in The US than than YouTube does, you know. So but I think the the structural difference between Roblox and Moving Castles, and I can't believe I'm is that Roblox controls Roblox is a metaverse in the classical sense that they control the the core economic and physical kind of rules of the games that are built within this environment. And we are more thinking about it maybe a fediverse approach or a kind of like a a mini verse approach where each community has control over the economic and, like, physical reality of their little world and can choose how to be interoperable in what way with other communities. And So and Yes.
Sorry. I didn't mean to interrupt.
No. That's I think that's the main difference. But I'm I'm I haven't articulated this before. But it Yeah. I think that's the big difference between like, it's Moving Castle is in a sense a kind of, like, slightly weird made up of this proposal where, like, you you build your own mini verse from into modular blocks, which allows for a much more customizability and, like, autonomy on a community basis for for, like, dictating what the economic relations between each other internally and to the outside could be and just any kind of, you know, code based relation. And we think that that makes it more attractive especially for us as a community and we hope that others feel the same way if, like, the community comes out as, like, the the primitive, let's say, for, like, how social interactions happen a lot online in the next, like, post Facebook, then we think there is an argument for making like, having a model that doesn't restrict the expression of communities for defining what their mini versus or their metaverse manifestations look like.
So running up on the last eight or so minutes, I wanna make sure other folks have an opportunity to ask any questions. I'm sure there are people shy people who are, you know, thinking about raising their hands and which I would encourage you to do so. Otherwise, I'm very happy to oh, no. I think I see somebody on mute. Seth or John? Jacob posted a question. Go ahead, Jacob.
Oh, yeah. I mean so
it doesn't get into the
the the large scale nuance of how to
Jacob, you just muted yourself.
So think about Pokemon Go, you know, another one of these games. Part of its success was to merge the real and the digital spaces. We've got so much biologically built into experience in the real world. There was some discussion about, you know, the the secret society. How do you how do you affect that when the space is essentially digital to begin with? It might be interesting to put some of the constraints that we have natively. I mean, you know, the fact of living in a being in a in a body in a particular place in a particular time, colocal with others, as a way of, making the the interaction more interesting and also applying some of these, some of these constraints about what defines a group to the to the to the process of building these clans and communities. You know, it think about, for instance, you you stash a QR code somewhere. It's the unique identifier of an NFT of some asset. You have to go and find it. You could build up these spaces, you know, in in locations where your where your creations are exist have some native existence in some, you know, geolocation and performing actions at that space has some particular benefit or not. I know you can spoof these things on some sort of device, but, you know, you can there's there's always ways to to spoof things digitally and to get around that. Just, you know, no suggestion. Might be interesting.
I actually used to work at a geolocation blockchain company. Just so it's it's yeah. It's an interesting field. I don't know I mean, what I don't know if you what you're proposing is that Moving Castle should be based on regional context. So, like, is that what you're saying? That the like, if we thought about building Moving Castles around geographic locations rather than online communities?
Sure. I mean, have some embeddedness in the geography itself where there are, you know, characteristics and traits that are particular to a spot that that, you know, invite groups of people to commingle in in that same location and build these more authentic relationships with one another at the same time that they're, interacting in this digital space. I mean, you know, I think about, like, human engagement. We we wrote, like, on the walls and cave painting some impressions of of our reality. We, we make we have an imagined world, that we build tools, you know, whether it's language or or, IRC chats, in order to to build these, relationships with symbolic, tools, these these imagined things. And so merging the two spaces, our imagination and with the world, it reifies the imaginations of our mind in the physical space. And, you know, think about, like, what the texture of what the aesthetic of a of a place is and why aesthetic matters. It is our imagination imprinting some expectation on the world around us. So there's some intrinsic quality to, you know, projecting out the internal states of our, you know, our internal mental states into the physical world. And so having these, you know, embedded tokens in physical locations co ops the, you know, the intense experience of of moving and being and seeing and touching and feeling and socializing with the digital world. So it may enhance the experience of interacting with with the product that you're making.
That's very interesting. I mean, something that we have asked ourselves is definitely how can, for example, create like hybrid formats where we can stream to the deep to the online community, but also have like some kind of IRL event in the space of trust. So like how to create these, yeah, these kind of game shows that also have a value for the people who are actually present in the space or something like that. But we never never discussed like this.
Yeah, we haven't progressed that much on it. I think the the latest version is that I don't I don't know if that answers your question on geolocation integration, but at least has a relationship to the physical space.
Sickness. Yeah.
No. I mean, it's definitely there. Like, consider, you know, you you build a an identity. You you take a selfie with the people that are there, and now you have a token that represents your involvement in this group. And that, you know, allows for establishment of, you know, I guess, trust networks, for lack of a better term. And that is a way of of, you know, saying, alright. This is the community that was here. We're doing this thing. We we put these things, and you can also cast this out online.
I guess what what for an online community like trust is really the interesting thing, and I guess the meta gov context is similar, is that it's it's possible to participate without the restriction of location, although, you know, I think there are, like, geographic realities that impact the possibility for participating in these kind of conversations. I think we, at least for now, haven't found a reason to restrict or to give special access to to based on geolocation. But it's an interesting question. And I guess it's a general question for the metaverse as a concept at large is the interplay between local context and kind of the the the the metaverse.
I mean, there is a sense in which like, I've been thinking recently about how to, like, you know, for example, get MediCloud to work with more, let's say, marginalized communities as opposed to, I don't know, rich people in web three. Right? Or, like, well paid engineers. And geolocation, I mean, marginalized communities, at least the kind of most typically are, like, often geographically centered. Right? Or this is our traditional way and, like, it and sort of either interacting or delivering services or engaging with these communities. So geolocation does offer a potential way of adding in this kind of more playful kind of approach of, I think, you know, addressing and engaging some of these kinds of communities, right, who may not be, like, natively, like, on Discord all the time or have the time to be on Discord all the time, but they're, like, walking around the neighborhoods, you know, getting services. And that could be, an interesting mechanism for engaging and deploying, for those kinds of examples. Either case, we are getting to the end of the call, so I wanna make sure we have time for our time honored tradition of in the next when I count down to three, I wanna invite everybody to unmute and to give Arthur and his team a round of applause. I'm sorry. Arthur and who? Oh, I've I've forgotten the name. I've apologized.
Sorry?
Alessandro.
Alessandro. Arthur and Alessandro, a round of applause for their incredible presentation, and I'm really hope to see more of this work, and hear more about it in the future. Thank you. Three, two, one.
Thank you very much.
Awesome, guys.
Thank you.
Alright. In that case, look forward to I'll just quick ending announcements. The seminar is shifting to a biweekly format. So if you have, you know, people you want to sort of engage or invite or just activities, feel free to propose them directly in the hashtag seminar planning channel. Alright? Thank you very much. Thanks, Al. Have a great day, folks.
Thank you, everyone. Ciao. Enjoy your day. Bye. Bye.