seanwince.eth 🛡️🎩🟢↑

had one of the best weeks of my life in crypto playing @cryptothegame_. i decided to approach the game with a kind of naive honesty and trust in the people around me—not because i wasn't strategic, but because i figured the best strategy was to win the meta-game of making new friends, professional connections, and teammates who i might be able to build with for years to come. and on that level, despite my absolutely mediocre skills at all things immunity challenge, it felt like a smash success. i'm so grateful for everyone i met. i spend all day thinking about contests at @jokerace_io: what makes them succeed, what makes them fail, what makes them fun. @cryptothegame_ is a nearly perfect entertainment contest, for reasons i'll cover in a second. but it's also significant that the skills you need to win—you should be a coder, logician, gamer, coordinator, social media mind, and class president—are the combo of skills you need to succeed in crypto generally. the name is apt. generally, i think there are three types of incentives you can have in a contest—financial, social, and reputational. the classic example here is poker: some people come to win money, some to win friends, and some to win status. it succeeds as a game because it combines all three, and because the money is really the macguffin—an excuse for the game, an emotional amplifier for the gameplay, but not the thing that counts. to a great extent, that's also true of @cryptothegame_. where it truly wins is on social incentives—and it reminded me of the early days of the og jokecouncil race in 2022, when people would form cabals to amass votes to win contests on bad jokes. social incentives only work in contests when voters are incentivized to coordinate, which will always happen when they have something at stake personally. it's that simple, and it's what makes @cryptothegame_ magical. you win and lose by the alliances you build with others. you go to war because war is the most meaningful way to build a team. are there things i would love to see @cryptothegame_ pursue in future seasons? absolutely. above all, i'd like to see much more play with reputational incentives, especially as there's negative incentive right now for anyone to take a position of any kind of leadership in the game—to do so is to risk almost certain death with a single vote can always kill you. i can imagine getting one shot at immunity in the game by getting people to vote for you as a helpful member that day. i can imagine a proof-of-humanity or proof-of-value system that forced personal accountability and blocked whales. i can imagine the voters being revealed after each vote so that everyone could see who betrayed the cause and sniped each other—forcing a lot more reckoning around voting in the first place. but most of all, i'd love to imagine @cryptothegame_ being fully onchain with commit-reveal voting schemes so that everyone could do more complex data analytics, earn onchain reputation for their role (whether they win or lose), and even integrate other onchain services composably on the site. all of that is uniquely possible onchain, why we're here, and i suspect could make the game both more challenging and rewarding. but that's me. i've been building contests for years now and helping others build them at @jokerace_io, and i don't think i've seen one done quite as well as @cryptothegame_. it's a model for this entire space, and i'm grateful i got to take part.