A virtual ecosystem guided by an online community where autonomous critters use real-world money to donate to non-profits and orgs.
Twitch Plays God, at its core, is not a game whose goal is to raise a ton of money for charity. I think that is a good goal, but there are a lot of concerns and complications that arise when the solution to ending world suffering is "throw more money at it". Instead, I'm using the incentive of being able to donate to causes players care about as the carrot on the stick, when the cart is really trying to head towards two places.
The first major area I hope this game explores is collaborative group behavior and dynamics. How can we create systems that encourage participants to work together and acheive the holy grail of play, coliberation. Coliberation, as coined by Bernie DeKoven, describes the feeling as "a shared transcendence of personal limitations, of our understanding of our own capabilities; a sudden, momentary transformation of our awareness of the connections between ourselves, each other, and the world we find each other in, between the actual and the imagined.", and I closely link it to the definition of radical joy that's discussed in the book Joyful Militancy. And though we could create a playground for coliberation that doesn't allow for conflict, I believe strongly in Matt Lees' game theory that (paraphrased) says, "Cooperation without individual agency to defect from the group isn't true cooperation, it's coercion." This ecosystem, like the macrocosm it emulates, is full of agents with their own individual goals, so how can we leverage those individual drives in service of higher-minded community goals? How do people bond and join forces to achieve their shared goals, especially when one person with a ton of money can swing the ecosystem so wildly in favor of their priorties? That's where the second goal comes in.
Beyond the real world money, I actually am trying to push an anti-capitalist narrative that favors community and collective action over individual bank accounts. The game, as designed, reflects a world where people with more money have more power, but baked in to the systems and tools at players' disposal is the opportunity for a disruption of that power -- if the collective works together. But how does a non-hierarchical hive-mind rally around specific courses of action that can combat the pointed power of a few with more digits in their wallets?
My hope for this project is that it gains traction as a fun way for people to donate money to their favorite charities, maybe more than they would usually give to a blank website with no feedback other than a "thanks!" message. There's even a bit of scratching one's gambling itch, because sure, you could donate $20 to your favorite non-profit, but you could also put that $20 into some well designed critters and by the end of the week every critter in the ecosystem is donating to your fav! But, with money comes power and with power comes corruption (I guess?), and I imagine a scenario where there are power players, perhaps even from these orgs themselves, that realize there are ways to game the system if they spend enough money. That's where the community comes in (I hope), and the hive-mind can combat those targeted efforts. Furthermore, because of the community events (acts of god), without spending a single penny, the community can throw their support behind critters that represent their shared priority donations, manipulating the ecosystem to favor those critters.
I've speculated so much about what this might be like, or what it might do, but ultimately, I won't know anything about this for sure until I test it, and it's true form probably won't be seen until there's a critical mass of users engaging with it. So, I'll keep planting seeds and we'll see what pops up. Thanks for checking this out!
Want to help me make this thing? Feel free to add/suggest whatever! Currently looking for people who know about the following areas:
- reliable long-running programs
- safe un-hackable programs (esp. with money stuff)
- money stuff (getting and logging incoming funds and sending them out to the right places)
- data viz
- UI/UX
- twitch overlays
- The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
- Joyful Militancy by carla bergman and Nick Montgomery
- everything by Bernie DeKoven
- Epigenetic Trauma (podcast -- research further)
I chose to implement a simplified Concordet method as opposed to my initial belief that Instant Runoff (Ranked-Choice) Voting was the most democratic. RCV has a significant flaw in that the preferences of more extreme voters are given more weight, so in my Concordet-lite voting system, if there isn't a majority after everyone's first choice is considered, all second choices are tallied, not just those whose first choice was the least popular.
I'll defintely consider and test the option for the community to vote on their own voting system also, big fan of how Twitch Plays Pokemon did the anarchy/democracy system.
Check out these two videos for more interesting voting system analyses:
Simulating Alternate Voting Systems
- Free Rice by The World Food Programme -- look into their AD practices