Beyond Games

1 - The confluence of tech advancement, incentive mechanism evolution at the society level, marco black swans etc leads to changes at scales far bigger than most imagine. This is a reminder to self: observe broadly and deeply, then think 100x bigger. Then, think another 100x bigger.

2 - The advent of the modular blockchain vision hints at on-chain activities engulfing and expanding our civilization by 10000x. To work towards that unbounded future, many infrastructure level tech will be built. We could abbreviate this future as the Great Expansion.

3 - The blockchain space is currently dominated by logical work, characterized by decentralized finance protocols. One aspect of the Great Expansion would be to enable native emotional work in the blockchain space. The product of such work is not useful in the utilitarian sense, but emotional and sensual - art, essentially.

4 - The blockchain space features a computational membrane that is resilient because of its degree of decentralization. On this membrane, our work can reach high degree of autonomy. Autonomy defines one native property of the space - work that stands on its own. Work that is living, breathing, and evolving. One example is the nouns contract. Creating many of these autonomous projects would contribute directly to the Great Expansion.

5 - The degree of decentralization also brings about the immortality property of the space. With the blockchain abstracted as a substrate that can persist as long as our civilization persists, barring catastrophic events, works onchain enjoy immortality. Leaving legacies is one way for human to overcome the finiteness of individual lives. Legacies from different individuals can be multiplicative, accelerating the Great Expansion.

6 - One more native property that defines the space is interoperability, by way of shared memory space and shared standards built from ground up.

7 - To go beyond games and build towards the Great Expansion, one needs to realize the common connotations of the word game - game as finite games with clear (artificial) objectives, and game as video games shaped by our gaming experience in the past 3 decades. Building the former has the tremendous opportunity cost of not building infinite games. Building the later suffers the consequence of not thinking natively but only skeuomorphically.