Grantee Exposé Lightning Talk 3 - Twitch Plays Pokemon on Plasma by Tom Nash (Devcon5)

Transcript

hello mates my name is Tom I run a company called flex steps with my co-founder Alex and we thought we would build something pretty fun we're interested in finding out how to get users for decentralized applications and one of the things that we see a lot of excitement around our dowse currently there's a lot of people who are really interested in how do we govern stuff in a decentralized way and have lots of different stakeholders and how do we reward those stakeholders and so on but it's really difficult it seems to get a lot of data about who is using dowels and why they're doing so and which incentive mechanisms are working and

which ones aren't and that kind of stuff so we were brainstorming one day and we thought maybe it would be really interesting to test various incentive mechanisms for decentralized governance with video games so we remember there's an experiment called twitch plays Pokemon which is from which should an Australian person developed in like 2014 where he put the game Pokemon on the streaming service twitch and anyone who typed a message into the twitch chat had that message turned into a game command than it was piped into the game and it was chaos is really funny and one really amazing thing that came out of that

experiment was the fact that the game did actually end people completed the game so although there were 80,000 concurrent players on average those those players managed to beat Pokemon which is a very complicated game for a computer to play anyway so we did something similar so we got Pokemon and at the ED con hackathon way back in March we created a smart contract on a loom network and everyone's input into the game was piped into a smart contract and we used the events to like feed into the game and all this kind of stuff and the theory behind it is could we figure out ways to reward people for

participating in a game as arbitrary as Pokemon that probably has a much wider in terms of the the types of users that it could attract than something like a traditional doubt or some of the types of stuff that that we're building and we're showcasing you know in the etherium community itself so yeah so we've put that in an application that we've built called drop party which is like a bunch of different kind of aetherium based games so they'll run on layer 2 and the focus of all of these things is like how can we get lots of people to to engage with blockchain tech and cryptocurrency tech without necessarily knowing they're doing so so

the frame is a bit silly like it's all very kind of quirky and and fun and try to pack it full of memes but we've got the DAO pokemon game called etherium galaxies which is the scavenger hunt here at Def Con so you can run around and collect a bunch of QR codes and they'll appear as different stars in your galaxy which is super cool game called hacker person where you just kind of earn and the internal currency which is called Yeats bide smack in the keyboard an NFC obliterator which lets you only eat by destroying NF T's and something which gives us your email address which will be great but yeah so the I don't know I didn't really prepare

a talk so I'm just yelling stuff but we we enjoy building fun decentralized applications so if you want to reach out to us on Twitter where our flex depths my mail address atomic flex depths calm and the website's flexed at Stockholm but yeah hope that was fun and informative thanks [Applause] you