Questing onchain has always bothered me. Unfinished, underexplored, yet extremely popular to one very specific type of person. It’s time we take a second look at the inherent meaning-making behind onchain questing beyond click-farming.
Since 1998, when Joseph Pine and James Gilmore coined the term, the Experience Economy has only accelerated. With the pace of the internet and the rise of social algorithms, AI, prediction markets, and crypto, the new experience economy is filled to the brim with degenerate slop, yet not beyond repair. Beyond crumbling late-stage capitalism and experience products like AirBnB, Top Golf, and roomy Apple Stores, this new experience economy is being built onchain for a new generation.
Building new quests by fusing fun, more connected experiences may indeed lead to a cheaper, caring resolution to the loneliness epidemic and a path toward purpose.
This essay explores how principles from game design and event planning can transform onchain questing into a more meaningful, engaging experience, giving our physical self a tether to a new digital world.
However, speaking as a community builder and lifelong gamer, we seem to have stopped short of making quests meaningful in any sense of the word. With more fringe tech becoming more accessible, we now have the opportunity to build creative experiences that feel integrated and interoperable, bridging an in-person journey with the digital self.
The emergence of a new taste economy, as Daisy Alioto so aptly described it at FWB FEST this year, offers an opportunity to unfold design patterns that feel a little more adventurous and a lot more cooperative. In my view, no design pattern is more fitting for reimagining than questing.
But designing a community for this new internet requires a variety of emergent skills beyond just creating a compelling app with cool backend tech or your run-of-the-mill social club. Expert knowledge of event design and interfaces, game design, storytelling, and human psychology combine to create just the right ingredients for quests to be fun while eliminating unnecessary annoyance.
Before we get started, one thing to make absolutely certain is that a questing platform that lists NFTs as bait for airdrop farmers to swoop on like vultures is not in any shape a complete, meaningful quest. Questing platforms are well aware of this reality, though, so it’s up to individual communities to put in the creative work to finish the loop.
Now, this isn’t necessarily the fault of the market or the builders. This kind of thing just takes time to get right, especially when dealing with new interfaces.
Game Design for Events
For the non-gamers out there, most non-FPS (first-person-shooter) games these days operate in two main types: open-world and linear gameplay. In the first, players are given a wide stretch of land, a city, or some animated place to explore freely, like you would when visiting a new town on vacation. In the second linear gameplay option, a player has a series of steps to complete, usually in order—go here, do this, talk to this person, all in a sequence.
Both of these types work well for in-person events.
However, for them to work exceptionally, a team of excellent storytellers must work toward a cohesive, fun, well-crafted narrative. The four steps of game storytelling help guide their decisions:
- Introduction: Travel to a new area (including travel time and getting acquainted), talk to new people
- Expansion: Click on or complete objectives, collect items, learn mechanics, and introduce themes
- Progression: Craft things, use items, interact with the world
- Finale: Test of skills earned, a boss battle (or, in our case, hackathon judging)
Event designers can take these building blocks (and the respective onchain infrastructure) to create more vibrant, seamless, interoperable experiences that make communities swell. This type of gamification goes beyond leveling up in a noisy Discord server by piling onto the noise. Instead, it gets us out of the algorithmic echo chambers, creating ample opportunity for connections, similar to those made in classic online games like World of Warcraft, but in person or onchain.
For example, a raid (scavenger hunt that leads to a harder puzzle) at the next 30,000-member event where people must work together. Or technology that reads your phone’s proximity to resources (merch) and automatically opens chests when you’ve collected enough items. With a balance of positive and negative feedback loops, players of all skill levels find their place. This collaborative play is additive to community care, not extractive.
Now, let's look at what questing actually looks like for events when we combine these gameplay elements.
Quest Design for Events
Each of a game’s storytelling steps is replicated in questing as well, making it super easy to translate to various types of questing. For a full list of non-violent game design patterns, check out Patrick Littell’s incredibly resourceful free book on the subject.
The four fundamental quest game elements are:
- Explore: New areas, new people
- Expand: Discover panels, crafting, new skills
- Exploit: Get rewards, merch and items
- Excel: Move to next event or level up
Now, as we well know, to this date, crypto has largely stuck with one single part of the questing model: Expansion. Let me tell you, as a gamer and consumer, collecting things is the most boring part of any quest. If our imagination stops at the most monetizable part of a quest, that makes it very clear why we’re here. However, we can integrate the other steps in the model. Events that incorporate all elements of a quest build memories. After all, the number one goal for an event should be to create experiences worth retelling.
This year, FWB Fest ‘24 was the only event that did that correctly with a scavenger hunt in which nearly all the IYK tags to collect were situated around (walkable) places where one would naturally meet a friend. Oh, and they designed the scavenger hunt without making attendees pay for something or download a new app. This expansion experience gave the quest a social aspect, distributing rewards to successful content creators, players, and side event stations for their hard work.
Another up-and-coming project ripe for questing is Soulmates by Amelia Guertin. Soulmates is a matchmaking quiz that brings people together at crypto events. Loneliness epidemic be damned, Amelia shows that while meeting new people and dating can be awkward, it can still be fun by incorporating before and after feedback loops.
Event Designers Need Game Designing Skills
The event space for emerging tech has always amazed me, usually not in positive ways. From inviting too many speakers to side events sprawled across an entire major city, events are often a topic of contention. So before we get to the problems questing solves, we need to make sure we’re not adding unnecessary noise to already crowded cities, resulting in largely disappointing events.
Take, for example, this list of just under 400 ETHCC ‘24 side events that Michael Williams, Head of Product at Serotonin, helped put together with the aid of the Serotonin Platform. That’s a ton of events for around 5,000+ people, especially considering that other major events like DragonCon welcome around 70,000 people each year, with a fraction of the side events put on by major sponsors. Most of these events require excessive transportation, backtracking, and a test of time management skills.
Now, the good news is that by building more connected, varied experiences to onchain activations, we can start to measure for fun, all while integrating tech that helps creators earn more at the same time. Let’s dive into how event designers can build better quests and campaigns.
How Questing Builds Better Offchain and Onchain Economies
Though internet users may be burned out by all the social apps and things they are constantly asked to do, watch, or read, the fun part of communities does require a bit of friction. Unfortunately, all questing is work. We’re not getting out of that part of the equation. The good thing is that quests are also labors of love on both ends. As I often say, “I don’t invest with money, but I do invest with love,” and that love goes both ways.
Whether you’re joining a run club, a chess club, or a Don’t Die club, quests offer opportunities to add gamification in the form of resources (fake or real), storytelling, and character development that translate really well for in-person and onchain cooperation.
These mechanisms allow for collaborative control a new experience economy requires:
- A Tap: How do we translate the token faucet into a safe in-person experience? Is this necessary? Can this be done pre-event in the introduction phase?
- An Inventory: How can we build better UX for loyalty quests via ERC6551 token-bound contracts? How do we reward players via contracts that give power-ups once a player collects enough items? Does this properly limit the player or cause undue in-person friction?
- A Converter: How do we exchange one resource for another (typically through burn mechanics) to level up? Can we use an earned persuasion check to give the player better in-person merch retrieval? How does this affect the pace of the event or game?
- A Drain: Can we remove resources from the economy or fiddle with a difficult meter that constrains or slows a player? Efficiency nerds love this one trick!
- Trading Systems: Can we create more fun in-game and in-person shopkeepers and merch table experiences? I love a good “the shop is cheaper in this part of the map” arb-type scenario! This is typically where cryptocurrency excels but is often limited by capital and, at times, frankly, diversity of imagination.
These are the questions and mechanisms game designers, event planners, and TGE (token generation event) ask themselves all the time. However, they have yet to utilize onchain at a true scale through things like interoperability, chain abstraction, cheaper L2 alternatives, smart wallets, paymasters, and widespread AI agents.
An in-game side quest might have you collect 20 stars, while an in-person quest might have you collect 20 people’s social links. The tap for one looks completely different than the other, as do the other mechanics, but the feedback loops typically work just the same. Except this time, the community determines the meta and governs changes to the game or algorithms, creating more fair, aligned experiences.
As a side note, quests create a unique opportunity for spreading the word about a community, game, or campaign via content creators. I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve spent reading about changes to Overwatch meta or guides for Skyrim quests. It’s definitely somewhere in the tens of thousands.
Fun as a KPI
Even if you’re not a gamer, if you watch enough Twitch streamers or you have kids, you start to get a read on what makes modern video games fun. However, determining what makes actions fun in person or onchain is a bit more tricky.
That being said, measuring for or building with fun at the forefront is the hard part. Games, and by extension quests, “are fun because they are experiences we encounter through play,” says Ian Bogost, writer and video game designer, in a 2014 WIRED by Design talk. Coming in with the community aspect of games, he adds, “Fun comes from the attention and care you bring to something that offers enough freedom of movement - enough play - that such attention matters."
Events have long been a staple of web3 development. This is one reason we’re starting to see more brands attempting to measure for fun, which, in my view, goes a level beyond previous cycle measurements for vibes. When we can measure onchain how much fun people are having in person, the leverage is infinite. For builders like Winny, founder of Chipped Social, whose motto is “Fun as a KPI,” a tap of an NFC chipped nail measures how often you meet new people. That's considered a luxury for many these days, as is constantly attending events across the world. This is exactly why Chipped works; it provides endless interaction outside of just crypto events.
Luckily, our ecosystem has quite a few S-tier event builders. Each understands “Fun as a KPI” and how to engage in the experience economy. A few communities I see doing this well currently are Lens/AAVE, FWB, Boys Club, and Allships, which know how to engage the senses, have relentless authenticity, and lead with wonder.
Closing Thoughts, Finding Meaning
All these words to explain such simple concepts. What do I really want out of all this?
Well, to be honest, I'd personally love more puzzle games. I want to think with my friends more often. I want to vote them off an island. Okay fine, I want more Crypto The Game. But seriously, take a page from their book, an event literally made of side quests with friends (and enemies).
It seems absolutely ridiculous that, exaggeration or not, Ethereum was conceived due to frustration with a WoW update. And we have yet to give justice to the source material by making actually fun onchain quests.
Layer3 is not a questing platform; it is a tool, and we should use it and others like it as such to complete feedback loops (positive or negative, both equal in importance) woven through storytelling and interoperable between communities for maximum fun. Token incentives are just one single layer of a complete quest experience.
Why are onchain quests better than a database with XP and endless Google Sheets passed from group chat to group chat? Onchain quests provide a full marketing funnel that doesn’t force users/players/community members to pay to win; they help build an interchangeable, interoperable, sovereign digital identity, all while being a vessel for fun. The key here is to push the narrative away from “do this quest with the hope of an airdrop” to “do this quest in the hopes of fun,” which, as we’ve seen, has not been the focus of a hyper-financial, currency-obsessed industry thus far.
Look, quests are fun, especially when you do them with friends. It’s not a matter of if, but when we start seeing unique video-game-like experiences in person beyond Pokemon Go using a combination of onchain and offchain tech.
