GOLEM

During the past 5 days we built GOLEM: an onchain governance fighting game.

Golems are game characters controlled by several players representing different governance models. Players use Golems to fight each-other in a team vs team fighting game using only the goverance model of their golem.

We believe that incorporating governance into gameplay has untapped potential for Autonomous Worlds, and we're exploring this concept as a game studio and design lab. The gameplay draws inspiration from the classic flash game "swords and sandals" while adding new visual layers and onchain governance elements.

To enable player interaction, we've implemented a validated off-chain communication layer. This layer allows players to see each other's cursors, signal vote preferences, and provides various social and front-end experiences. It uses a publish-and-subscribe method, where clients can send and receive messages, and includes a feature for clients to verify their Ethereum addresses. The server maintains an updated list of verified clients for everyone connected.

In addition to exploring governance as gameplay, we wanted to create this synch layer as part of a larger thesis for the construction of autonomous worlds. Our new layer allows for faster off-chain messaging while maintaining some security. We believe more variation in security/speed tradeoffs can enhance the overall user experience within the Autonomous Worlds ecosystem.

For future game development, there are two main aspects we aim to focus on:

Governance as User Generated Logics: We want to enable users to design their own golems by creating governance schemes to control them. To ensure diverse golem outcomes, we plan to automate the existing stable diffusion texture generation.

Fun Governance vs Optimal Governance: In future implementations we want to prioritize fun over optimal strategy by making golems stronger when more wizards are attached to them. This shifts the focus from finding the governance mechanism that plays the game the best, to building governance system that is most fun to the players that participate and still somewhat functional.

Overall, our goal is to create a lively and engaging experience within the Autonomous Worlds ecosystem by incorporating governance into gaming mechanics.

We started with a bunch of ideas, knowing that we wanted to pursue governance as gameplay in some way. We discussed what the simplest game to test this out with could be, and quickly arrived at the beat em up genre. The Golems were created using blender and a stable diffusion integration. Most hacked together thing is our offchain communication layer which powers all of the social elements. We have played with the idea of the offchain communication layer before but this gave us the push to develop it. We used MUD v2.