Sarojini McKenna, co founder of Alien Worlds, reckons that Alien Worlds is the only project in which DAOs are an actual gaming component as opposed to just a way of governing part of the project.
“We have this concept of DAOs in competition with each other, which is basically like teams in competition, but organised as DAOs. I think 2022 will probably be the year of the DAO. We’re pretty forward looking in the sense that we’ve got millions of users, and we’re either the first or second largest blockchain game now by users depending on what metric you look at; and we also have really battle tested DAO code,” she says.
Historically, McKenna and her co founders have been building this type of code for years originally working on the eosDAC as a block producer.
The actual opening up of those Minecraft servers for people to use is part of the roadmap in the first half of this year as well. Also, open sourcing that code so that anyone can run their own Minecraft server to play Alien Worlds.
“We’re known for being a technically preeminent team, that always was our background: building out blockchain tech and building out that interoperability is a huge part of the roadmap. The Minecraft implementation being one of the first but there’s other games like that that run in a decentralised way on servers, for example, and we’re looking into and analysing those different environments for building interoperability similarly to other blockchains. We’re the first blockchain game to be on three chains and looking into future roadmaps of other chains to build on.”
The mechanics of Alien Worlds is simple. Players go onto the website, play.alienworlds.io, and credentialise with crypto account. If they are going to play mining then they need to use a WAX Cloud Wallet or if they plan on going on missions then they need to link up with a Metamask and connect to the Binance Smart Chain wallet, now Binance Chain.
In addition, players can also run to be a candidate on the planet DAOs, which are six DAOs that are in competition with each other for the scarce resource [Trilium].
“The next piece that we’re rolling out will be planet DAOs; and that’s coming this year. So currently playing Alien Worlds involves using the NFTs within our Metaverse. NFTs in this case are utility NFTs; they’re not primarily collectibles and so they have attributes that are read by the gaming smart contract. You use them in the way that you might play cards or other types of things in other games. You might play them like a card that has attributes and powers. [In Alien Worlds], you’re playing your NFTs.
“So for example, landowners have come together and become collectives. People have joined together as candidates on Planet DAOs. There are communities that just share a particular interest or want to pursue a particular strategy. They have their own Telegram and Discord channels, for example. They’re self-organising into these collectives in anticipation of the opening of our planetary DAOs. They have a treasury of Trilium which is our token. And that is, a sizable amount of economic value, which is residing at the level of these DAOs. We could say we’re a decentralised game, and that’s very much true objectively in the sense that a lot of the value in the system is actually residing at a level that is totally outside of my control, for example. It’s sitting in these smart contracts that are governed by these DAO permissions. So the big strategic milestone that will be coming out of the DAOs is releasing them to community governance, which is really opening up the game around the DAOs.”
Each DAO will have five custodians every week, and those custodians get to vote on any transaction or action on that planet’s smart contracts, which can include holding Trilium, the fungible token, but also NFTs. Some of the planet DAOs are already developing strategies of what types of NFTs they’d like to either create or hold, including NFTs that could represent other real world objects and assets like silver, for example.
When the DAOs are opened to first elections, and then the actual governance by the custodians, they’ll then be able to start spending those treasuries for work proposals and anything else that they want to support, and that’s really where the DAOs come to life.
“It’s also a way in which the DAOs are competing: the more one DAO has staked to it, (the more Trilium that it has staked to it), the more inflation it gets every day. This is why they’re in competition with each other, and also why groups can take over other DAOs. If a group of players all want to stake their Trilium to a particular DAO, they might then be able to get control of that DAO. So this is the competitive dynamic. This is being developed right now.
“We expect in the first half of this year to be able to roll out those DAOs and that’s where people will be able to get involved in a more organised way than they have so far. There is the grass roots of a lot of self-organisation, but that will be a specific and formal way that they can get involved. We also have what we think of as games, so Alien Worlds is both a platform and a Metaverse, which involves all of the tokenomics, the fungible token, the NFTs and the DAOs themselves.”
That’s the Metaverse component, but it’s also a series of games. Dacoco, the founders of the project, are creating some of those games and other people are creating some of those games too. Anyone is free to create games in the Metaverse that use the Trilium fungible token.
“We also have a roadmap of releasing further games, which are not really baked into the infrastructure of the Metaverse for inflation, but there are particular gaming loops that people can play and participate in. Those include a Fighting Game and Quests. Additionally, these games also include fun gaming actions that happen off of the WAX blockchain or the BNB blockchain or the Ethereum blockchain, which are the three blockchains that we primarily have gaming logic on. These can include gaming actions that happen in other gaming environments, such as Minecraft. We’ve built a technical bridge into Minecraft, where people can play Minecraft to do actions within Minecraft that are recognised by our smart contracts and that understand who that person is, that credentialise their blockchain account into our gaming smart contracts”
That’s really the roadmap for this year: the opening up of the six planet DAOs, the implementation of some of these smaller gaming loops, like the Fighting Game and Questing, and then extending the Metaverse into other gaming environments and other chains.
And that’s what McKenna sees as the future of gaming and it’s a lot more complex than just fun.
