# Composability and Gamification

- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2023-10-09
- Duration: 09:45
- Topics: blockchain, smart contracts, distributed ledger, ethereum, Science & Technology
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-ynYPfFEdXUM
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynYPfFEdXUM

## Description

Visit the https://archive.devcon.org/ to gain access to the entire library of Devcon talks with the ease of filtering, playlists, personalized suggestions, decentralized access on IPFS and more.
https://archive.devcon.org/archive/watch/6/composability-and-gamification/index

Web3 tech provides features that have been practically unexplored by game designers. Games use DeFi mechanics, or self-custody and P2P marketplace mechanics, but few have used composability to create new game experiences for incentivization.

This presentation by PhD in gaming Andy Boyan will explore how composable Web3 standards enable a revolution in gaming far beyond ownership and collection, featuring Infinity Keys, an achievements game built on composable assets across Web3.

Speaker(s): Andy Boyan
Track: Governance & Coordination
Keywords: game design,gamification,composability

Follow us: https://twitter.com/efdevcon, https://twitter.com/ethereum
Learn more about devcon: https://www.devcon.org/
Learn more about ethereum: https://ethereum.org/ 

Devcon is the Ethereum conference for developers, researchers, thinkers, and makers. 
Devcon 6 was held in Bogotá, Colombia on Oct 11 - 14, 2022.
Devcon is organized and presented by the Ethereum Foundation, with the support of our sponsors. To find out more, please visit https://ethereum.foundation/

## Transcript

foreign [Music] and that is all of the Spanish I know unfortunately uh which is surprising because I've used Duolingo anybody use Duolingo but I used it a bunch and I'm not at all fluent now Duolingo boasts gamification that's how they like do what they do right and it certainly is fun right you get badges you get experience you level up but it doesn't always do the best job at learning at actual teaching and so what I want to talk a little bit about is gamification and what that means in terms of composability in web 3 today my background is I'm a former professor of games I study digital media effects for a variety of entertainment media and how the affordances of systems impacted player or user Behavior so yeah I studied video games for 10 years they gave me tenure and then I left for crypto because hey we're all here right um in my time in crypto work for a number of protocols that you'll know status chain link labs and last year during the metaverse excitement and um you know play to earn excitement and nfts what I noticed was that there was something missing there was a lot of talk about gamification in terms of incentives and Awards and bonuses and experience points but there wasn't a lot of talk about game mechanics and how those worked there was a lot of handwringing about it but but not a ton so I now founded a company called Infinity Keys we are a project that tries to think about composability in web3 especially on the evm and how we can make games with that so uh quickly right now if you go to Infinity Keys IO you can see a number of different kinds of games that we have they're mostly games where you have to solve a riddle find a passcode or go somewhere and find a passcode or go collect an nft and this is kind of core to what I want to talk about in terms of composability it's it's not finding a passcode and minting an nft achievement that's all that exciting that's a piece of it you can make fun games out of that but what is interesting and exciting is when we take the nft that you mint a composable asset and we require that in the next game and then we give you a reward in nft for that and then we require that in another game and then we start interlacing those assets together and requiring them and then my my the the final sort of end state that we're trying to build that Infiniti keys and that I want to encourage you all to build as well is we allow anyone to lace those assets together so developers and Engineers you know how to require composable assets you know for gating and have them talk to each other but average people don't know how to do that yet they still want to play games and they still want to be able to design games in many cases and so what I'm advocating for here is a new type of game a new type of a game that relies on composable assets I'm coining the term composability games we'll see if it's next um that allows anybody to do this sort of thing and um it's not just to make games and have people have good experiences that is a part of it that's a piece of it and that's what we're doing right now it's very fun and you're supposed to have like yeah I solved it like a good moment that feels good that's a nice experience to have with uh blockchain but if you take a look at this if you're familiar with complex systems or complex adaptive systems how they work is you have a whole bunch of small components that interrelate as part of a system and as they interrelate and as there's more of them emergent phenomena start to happen and I believe I think that if we do this with nfts and we start to connect them together not just nfts but tokens wallet signatures all sorts of sort of composable elements that live on evm we'll start to see a new kind of may I use the term metaverse metaverse isn't necessarily a 3D digital world it does not have to be by any means and what I think is more interesting are deep digital worlds hey everybody good to see the room uh and when I talk about deep digital worlds when you play a game y'all play WoW anybody world of warcrafters I know there's a couple or breath of the wild anybody Destiny all right I know I got some Destiny people in here when you play one of these games you go in there's so much to do it's an extremely rich and vibrant world because any town you walk into there's a hundred quests and there's NPCs that tell you where to go and then you go to the next town and it's a different culture and there's even more to do we a a metaverse isn't just a plot of pixelated land that you can build things and put up a new sign or even build games it's a rich array of things to do and you don't need 3D worlds to do that what you need is a whole bunch of stuff to do composable assets let us do that if we connect them together using fun experiences called games um so this is what uh I'm building we're building at Infinity keys and it's a piece of what you are all building as well and so I I really do think not only is it about composable assets um but it's about composable communities um I'm not going to talk about this too much because I do have limited time uh lightning talk many things to say not a lot of time to say it but that's okay uh come on in plenty of room we're here um but kind of core to what I want to think about here that's different than just requiring it one nft to Mint another nft is we need to make good games and make good experiences and that's something that um we haven't been that concerned with because we've been making sure that the technology Works making sure that we can a stake and those things are secure or can be secured if you use all the best practices making sure that we do convert to proof of stake well done uh on team but now we can start thinking about user experience Beyond just what's on the screen and what do they interact with but what are the feelings that they have games are more than just a place to reward you with even more tokens they're a place where you can help players have interesting emotional experiences and that is if you go to Infinity keys I O and you solve some of our basic puzzles they're easy but you like all right you feel good you get that little kick and that's enough in many cases and those emotions are really really powerful attractants as we bring more people into web 3 and into crypto economic systems right now a lot of the emotional experiences that people have with crypto is number go up which feels good but it's not sustainable and number goes down which is terrible and leaves a very long lasting impression the rest of us are here that like figured out that Curiosity um you know what else can we build how do we improve systems with that but most of the people that interact with crypto systems that's what they deal with number I go up number go down games can change that I really do think that and not only can games change that um but by leaning into composable assets and and permissionlessness of systems we can open that and broaden that to further and further reaches it doesn't have to be me creating games and a set of my nfts you can be a fan of a band and create trivia and reward nfts for very cheap or free on layer twos and Roll-Ups and all those sorts of things and make those a required asset for the next stage of your own hunt I I can make make a hunt about Devcon where you have to go and and collect poapps from five different people you got to collect one from Dave Hoffman and from Preston Van Loon and you got to find Hudson and now we've got a fun Quest and now we're using the composability of poapps which is a fantastic really fun system that we've come to love and now we can create layers on top of that and then once you have that layer we can create layers on top of that Etc et cetera Etc and by opening up to community we're creating uh Stronger systems I lost track of time and so I'm getting cut off so I will wrap up shortly I promise I think composability games will be something new and this is a meta that we have missed thus far um gaming web3 gaming is a has been about owning your assets which means selling your assets assets which is kind of boring maybe it's a value for some people but it is far from the greatest value that we offer as a community of people building together that the value is the network and so let's use the network to create value for people and their experiences uh that's what we're doing at Infinity Keys you can check us out we have a number of live puzzles we recently got a lens Grant and so put up I'm not going to read all this stuff but we recently put up a lens challenge where you have to go to different dapps on lens find passcodes bring them back to Mint key and then when you collect three keys you can mint a treasure chest it's all valueless free nfts for fun we're at Alpha but what we're starting to see is people coming into our community starting to build their own puzzles and figure out how can we expand this world and use the assets that you've already created that we created all last year ad nauseam how can we put those together and more in the future to create a wider world of composability in gaming there's treasure everywhere this is a really important statement to me it's not just the loot that you find it's there's treasure in you there's treasure in us and our ideas and the things that we can build together if we use systems that allow for composability and interconnection that is my time I'm happy to talk to anybody about games uh I also love music or whatever I'm around I'm very tall you can find me thank you very much for your time