Governance Games and Tool Experimentation in the Metagov Community
As a laboratory for digital governance, Metagov has a rich history of practicing governance through playing games and testing out cool software tools - come join the fun! 🤸🏽♀️🎲
If you’re receiving this newsletter, you probably already know at least something about Metagov and the stuff we do as “a laboratory for digital governance.” Our mission states: “we cultivate tools, practices, and communities that enable self-governance in the digital age.” But what does this really mean??? Great question—I’m glad you asked. One thing it means is that we’ve historically been a community very open to experimentation, games, and actually having fun whilst attempting to address some of the complex challenges of human coordination, collective decision-making, and distributions of power.
In this newsletter, I hope to point you to some of the Fun stuff we’ve done with the hopes of inspiring something within you… I don’t know what but I really want to find out so let’s go!
Here’s the roundup:
D20 is a governance game developed by a group of researchers from the Metagov community including Cent Hosten, Janita Chalam, and Hazel Dev, and yours truly. Using the d20 Discord bot, groups can come together to embark on a governance “quest”, where they make lightweight decisions about their group and experience varied mechanisms of decision-making. d20 moderates the group's governance through different "culture modules" using an LLM - playfully modifying users' messages to cultivate diverse interaction environments for participants. The purpose of d20 is to give online communities the opportunity to experience a diversity of governance structures, decision-making processes, power distributions, cultural dynamics and more–all within the channels of Discord.
We hosted a handful of sessions about d20 and playthroughs within and around the Metagov community (some recorded, some not). But you can learn more and see snippets of game play at the following links:
Our presentation at Metagov Seminar: https://archive.org/details/d20-metagov-20231129
At DWeb Camp 2023, we ran a playtest with a group of 8 campers placed into a “Build A Community” simulation.
D20’s earliest iteration - which had a much sexier name of “Governance Primer Game” - was just us asking players to self-impose rules and communication constraints in a Slack channel which was super fun and worth watching. In this version, we had players create proposals and decide on a new Metagov mascot.
D20 Governance teaser gif
Metagov Game Nights - check out the #metagov-game-nights channel
We’ve had waxing and waning energy around Metagov game nights, but we did successfully manage to collaboratively collect this list of games (feel free to add your name + games that would be fun to play) with the strong ambition to play at least some of them at some point.
If you’d like to host and facilitate a game night, feel free to do it! Head to the #metagov-game-nights channel in Slack. And if night time is not the right time for games, we can also use the Community Call slot (every other Thursday at 12pm ET) for games.
Although we have no recording to show for it, we did set up our tabletop simulators and play Metagov community member Michael Price’s game called Monster, which is a game that uses information asymmetry to solve the quarterbacking problem (where one experienced player plays an outsized role in making the decisions for a team).
Steve’s Distribution Game
Metagov community member Steve Vitka designed and hosted a collective decision-making game where participants simulate managing the allocation of a shared budget among multiple made-up organizations, including their own. Each organization has an ideal funding goal, but participants must also consider the broader ecosystem's needs. The budget is divided into allocations, and players secretly decide how they would distribute the funds. The game involves negotiation, strategy, and secret or public deal-making to influence the final allocation of funds. The goal is to collectively reach a fair or acceptable distribution that aligns as closely as possible with participants' hidden target allocations while staying within the total budget.
Steve’s hypothesis is that his method/game is “ungameable” - meaning that it is “very difficult for anyone to play the game in a way it wasn’t intended to be played to get a result that is not acceptable as fair by the group.” For all you gaming nerds out there, if this isn’t a challenge I don’t know what is.
You can watch the recording of Steve’s distribution game here. Passcode: ^.MD7xax
You can also use the Proposal Crafter to propose another round of Steve’s distribution game (or any game) in the #community channel.
“Last Week’s community playtest gave me what I needed to write up a spec for my SAP (simple allocation process) POC (proof of concept) tool.” - Steve in Slack
Practical Governance Workshop Series
Though not technically “games,” back in 2022, we hosted a series of “practical governance” seminars where we invited folks to present their more hands-on tools, projects, or practices to the community (as opposed to the typical research presentation format).
Exquisite Corpse in Common: An Experiment in Sociocratic Surrealism: In this session, we collaboratively wrote a poem using the basic principles of Sociocracy - including rounds-based deliberation, consent-based decisions, and delegation to linked circles - which was led and facilitated by Metagov community member Alex Rodriguez. In the session, we divided into groups to create, review, and decide on different parts of the poem's language using those principles as a guide. The result was a poem resembling the "exquisite corpse" drawing game, in which each participant will have contributed at least one word to the finished poem. You can watch the recording of the seminar here and/or you can read a blog post I wrote about the experience.
“The workshop was a novel introduction to sociocracy, or the circles method of decision-making… The benefits of the method are definitely that it is lively, inclusive, engaging, and thorough. The limitations might be in the linearity of the process; however, I recognize that it was likely substantially simplified for the sake of the workshop. A comment by Cent, with which I agree, was that the collective poem well-reflected the governance structure we were experimenting within.” - Val Elefante, Notes from The Exquisite Corpse in Common
PSi App: People Supported Intelligence: In the next session in the series, Niccolo Pescetelli, professor at New Jersey Institute of Technology, ran a simulation on the platform he co-founded called PSi. PSi is a scalable audio chat enabling people to make better decisions with their communities. You can watch the recording of that seminar here. You can also watch the research seminar where Niccolo presented the research behind PSi.
Screenshot of PSi from Niccolo’s workshop. Legra: Writing a screenplay using a distributed task application: The last workshop in the series brought the founders of Legra, Chris Wray and Rob Knight, to shepherd us through a simulation of their app, Legra, a task management platform designed for human-centric collaboration that works with your natural collaborative instincts rather than against them. Whereas Trello or Asana accumulates a list of tasks assigned by your manager, Legra codifies relationships of reliance between group members working towards a shared objective. The goal is to move away from a mastermind project manager and towards humans working together to align their intentions so that they can accomplish their goals. The result is a co-mapped dependency graph built from the bottom up. View the simulation here or again check out my blog post about the experience.
“Using Legra made me view my relationship with other group members and the group as a whole in a significantly different way compared to previous collaborative projects I’ve worked on… When every intent is established as a two-way agreement, as opposed to an assignment or a bounty, tasks are more precise because two people have come to shared agreement over what the task should be and when it should be deemed complete.” - Val Elefante, Notes from “Allegro Legra”: Metagov’s Practical Governance Workshop #3
Now, for some other game-and-experimentation related stuff that’s happened in Metagov:
Modpol: a governance mod for Minetest
Modpol is a project of the Media Economies Design Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder, in collaboration with Metagov. The tool enables online communities to design their own governance structures by assembling modules—choosing from existing ones or creating your own. Its first implementation lives in a multiplayer game called Minetest, which is an open-source, community-created, world-building game resembling the more popular, Microsoft-owned game Minecraft. Modpol is inspired by the research of Metagov research director Seth Frey who found, in a large study he conducted of Minecraft servers, that autocracy was the norm; but Modpol seeks to uncover if that would still be the case if gamers had a different set of tools… Read more in this blog post by Nathan Schneider on Hackernoon.
Screenshot from Modpol
Content-Moderation-by-Design: The Game (Metagov Seminar with Anna Lenhart)
Summary of the game: “Social media content moderation practices vary from company to company, are inherently opaque and span well beyond simply allowing or banning content. This game is meant to give a taste of the challenges posed by hosting a site for user generated content. By playing the role of both a startup social media platform (Contentr) policy trust and safety team and a content moderator, participants can begin to experience some of the challenges associated with moderating user generated online content in a way that balances values such as free expression and community safety.” Watch Anna’s seminar about the game here.
Nathan Schneider’s Monopoly Ledger
Last August, Nathan hosted a session in a Govbase Labs call (every Thursday at 5pm ET - free and open to all on Zoom). Monopoly Ledger is an experiment with a simple Javascript app to facilitate hacking the rules of Monopoly, as was the original intent of the game. In the session, players play around with different possible rule sets for the Monopoly, and what tools could help support them. Play around with the public instance here. Github link here.
Monopoly Community Land Trust Rules
Metagov community members Jeff Emmett and Scott Moore created this set of rules for Monopoly which aim to “give communities new tools to build the equitable future they want” including a lever for collective action to repurchase land into the commons.
Governance LARPs! (Live Action Role Play)
At DWeb Camp 2022, Black Swan a Berlin-based collective & friends of Metagov, devised a LARP called “The Modules” based off Metagov’s article on Modular Politics, The Modules creates a framework for designing and worlding organizational forms such as onboarding, decision-making, communication, and ownership. In this writeup by Metagov research director & ethnographer Ellie Rennie and co-author Kola Heyward-Rotimi, the two reveal some of the insights that emerged from the experience such as:
“organizations may manipulate their boundaries to gain advantage,
worldbuilding is a coordination challenge,
pluralism will not bend to an externally imposed homogenous approach even if intended to produce unity,
the devil is in the detail of governance mechanism design, and
groups that minimize decision-making whilst building a shared identity or interest can easily attract members but are also easy to dismantle.”
At ETH Denver 2023, Metagovernors Paul Gadi and Amber Case led a group through a “collective de-individuation exercise for collective game governance” (inspired by the game We-ness).
As you can see, governance is SO MUCH FUN! This newsletter contains the cold hard evidence. Just click open one of those videos and what do you see? Smiling. Faces. Authentic. Joy.
How do you get involved? Here are some ways:
Join some discussions in the #metagov-game-nights channel.
Add your games (and name) to the Metagov Game Night spreadsheet
Once you have an idea for a game you want to play, use our Proposal Crafter to share your vision for the game you’d like to play and your intention for hosting the session.
Post your proposal in the #community channel and wait for those approvals to start flooding in 👍🏽.
Once it passes, I’ll help you schedule it and get it on the Metagov calendar.
And voilà! We play.
So, dearest Metagovernors, I write this all to say… bring us your wildest game ideas. Organize a game night, demo your collective decision-making tool, and challenge us to try our darndest to game your ungameable games - @Steve, I’m coming for ya.
There are so many diverse ways of practicing governance, communicating with groups, making decisions together, sharing resources, distributing power - and we are open to experiments and trying stuff out - even your autocracy games. Tell me what to do, I don’t care. Let’s play.
Perhaps if we can increase experimentation of governance processes within our organizations, we can expose ourselves and communities to alternatives that may work better than what we’re already doing or what is default. Perhaps this realization can spur governance innovation, motivate governance evolution, and even increase governance efficiency and effectiveness. Experimentation in a low stakes environment, we suspect, can be extremely useful for “trying on” some new governance processes or structures before actually implementing them to govern real resources and real people within a community.
Metagov hopes to be an environment for testing out some new and different (or ancient and well-established) ways of doing governance - through games, tools, technologies and practices - for organizing ourselves in novel and innovative ways.
I hope I’ve accomplished my goal of inspiring something within you - and even if it’s just a smile I’ll take it :)
Playfully,
Val
PS: A little birdy 🐦 told me that apparently there is a working group part of Metagov’s Interoperable Deliberative Tool Cohort actively designing a game based on Metagovernor Daniel Kronovet's Chore Wheel system. They hope this experience will bring together a number of different tools in a fun, experimental format. Keep an eye on Slack for more info coming soon👀
PPS: If anyone ever says governance is boring, tell them they’re probably doing it wrong and send them this newsletter. Thanks!
epic post🔥🔊🌊🌱🏄🏽♂️