Matt Dion from EA, Terry Chung from 1kx and Tak Fung (aka Mr Fung) join us to discuss governance in web 3 games.
In EVE Online, there is heightened transparency in the decision-making process but there is a centralized decision-maker in terms of the economy. Users don’t have direct voting power on economic decisions. EVE Online publishes very detailed monthly economic reports that everyone can look up. They explain the rationale behind every decision. We shouldn’t reinvent the wheel - we can’t directly vote for what the central banks should do and we probably shouldn’t.
Having direct voting is extremely dangerous. Having some sort of panel just like in real life could work. Real-life governance is not always fun but we have to protect real-life assets. We need a similar panel or council in the virtual world. EVE Online has a council method, similar to Illuvium. There are 10 council members who have a tenure of 1 year and they get paid. They represent the community, aggregate data, and share it with the devs. It’s up to the devs to listen to it or not.
There are different models where council members have the ultimate voting power, representing their electors. This creates the problem that council members can easily be corrupted - on-chain transactions can be tracked but what if the corrupted member is paid off-chain.
0:00 - Intro
3:25 - What Should Be Governed in a Game
6:47 - Runescape Model
8:49 - When to Open Up Governance
16:35 - Governance with Multiple Stakeholders & Plutocracy
22:15 - Roles of Guilds and Scholars in Governance
27:55 - EVE Online Model
31:03 - Corruption of the Player-Representative Councils
36:27 - Governance Lessons Learned from MMOs & Virtual Worlds
40:40 - Sandbox vs Second Life
45:40 - Advice to Game Devs
50:52 - Guilds
Useful Resources:
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Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/defi-vader/id1608016994
