@Yield Guild Games #YGGPlay $YGG
When individuals discuss failure of virtual economies they tend to blame scams bad actors or unsustainable token models. Those things are important but in my case one of the largest killers of digital worlds is a lot less noisy. Confusion. Players are active yet not sure of why. Developers are releasing updates but they do not know what really worked. When investors observe the movement of charts they cannot tell whether the movement is really caused by the use or speculation. Everybody is active and very few actually comprehend it.
I have been following the GameFi and virtual economy sector and virtual economy as a whole since many years and Yield Guild Games has existed most of that time. YGG initially resembled most other contemporary projects. A rapid moving organization on incentive basis implementing capital in search of opportunities and attempting to produce visible outcomes. It made sense back then. It was an anarchic place and survival was survival.
But with time something was different. Quietly. Gradually. No massive announcement or rebrand. YGG also ceased to attempt to merely generate results and began attempting to comprehend them. It started to behave not as a loud player within virtual economies but as a translator between the chaotic human behavior and the organization of the economic systems. That change can explain a great deal regarding why YGG today feels more stable and grounded than many of the projects appearing to be much larger several years ago.
Virtual worlds are noisy environments. Trade cooperate and leave is grounded by the players. That kind of activity is self-evident at the human level. You experience excitement boredom frustration and hype. but it is difficult to read economically. There is seldom much in the real happening of things that is not explained by numbers.
I have a habit of posing simple questions which most systems can not answer at any given time. Was an increase in the activity real interaction or people farming rewards and moving on? Was this an increase in asset prices because they were required by players or were traders just front running a story? When the participation decreases it is due to the failure of game design or the people are just too tired or distracted with something. It is only after the damage has been caused that most ecosystems figure out this.
Through its errors and experience, YGG appears to have grasped a valuable lesson in a young age. It is infrastructure itself to interpret. Even well designed systems get lost without it. There is information but there is no sense. Action occurs and knowledge is always left behind.
Here YGG vaults have a much greater value than most would think. Vaults are frequently termed reward systems or sources of capital. Yet on a more fundamental level they are translators. They make the behavior of players readable by economic systems.
Value appears when the assets are actively used. When they sit idle nothing is done. The signals of staying engaged increase when players remain active. Signals are weakened when players go. This may seem like a given but numerous early GameFi platforms simply failed in this regard. The involvement was not quality-based. There was no connection between effort and reward. Measures appeared well, and economies were gradually bleeding.
Newer systems of YGG eliminate that fog. They are literal. Virtually retro in a fine sense. When something is useful it generates value. If it is not useful it does not. Long periods of pretending to be active do not leave much room to fake. Literary systems are less misreadable. That is their strength.
This minimization of interpretive noise YGG provides players with developers and capital allocators with feedback that they can actually rely on. When trust is present there is behavior change. Decisions slow down. It is less likely that panic will spread due to less uncertainty. Redeployment is reflective rather than responsive.
Numbers, numbers, never suffice. Information may inform you of what happened but not often how and why. SubDAOs are essential in this case.
SubDAOs reside in proximity with certain games and communities. They remain engrained until they observe trends that are overlooked by dashboards. They do not need to be informed that engagement has decreased due to burnout of players but because a game is broken. They recognize that mechanics are misinterpreted, not such that they were designed to be poorly. They are aware of time-zones player skill gaps and social dynamics in culture.
In that regard subDAOs are translators of raw data to the real world action. They preclude knee jerk responses to noise and delayed reactions to real problems. This is not a position that is showcased often as it is not glamorous. But it is essential.
The majority of economies fail because of the lack of data. Their failure lies in the misinterpretation of information or over-reaction. Statistics invoke action rather than wisdom. YGG is different since it does not pursue ideal visibility. It chases usable clarity.
Vaults narrow the signal. SubDAOs add context. Governance is a react mechanism rather than a reflex mechanism. This hierarchical style adds some level of friction but significantly enhances the quality of decision making. Speed is a factor in volatile environments. But accuracy lasts longer. YGG apparently acquired this lesson more through experience than theory.
This role of a translator also alters the meaning of YGG to developers. It is very challenging to construct games within virtual economies. Feedback is loud but uneven. The conversations are dominated by a small group of high-vocality players when silent churn occurs elsewhere. Economic statistics indicate variations but no incentives.
YGG organized participation cleanses that confusion. When coordinated groups change cause and effect become visible. The developers can observe the effects of changes across the real behavior of players instead of isolated cases. Tune systems are not as much of a guess anymore as they are more of an observation.
YGG is not an outcome controller. It does not force success. What it gives us is legibility. Legibility is of great use to builders who work within intricate virtual economies. It makes out of chaos something readable.
Naturally being an interpretive layer is risky. Translating may bring bias. There are signals that might be overemphasized and those that are disregarded. The context may gradually become assumption. YGG must always fight the temptation to consider its own view as the truth.
Players behave differently. Games respond differently. One thing may be effective in one ecosystem, and not in another. Interpretation must be versatile. However, the risks are not associated with non-engagement. They are born of trying to see the reality not of imposing a hard theory on it.
This evolution is of particular interest in that it occurred rather quietly. YGG was not announce anything huge that it would turn into a decoder of virtual economies. Rather it was subject to recurrent instances where doing without knowing hurt. Capital was misallocated. Perks would create superficial involvement. Systems appeared okay and not right.
Each time YGG adapted. Small changes accumulated. Vaults became more precise. SubDAOs were more nuanced. The administration decelerated responses. These adaptations eventually became form.
YGG began to act not as a participant and pursue the results, but as a spectator who is actively engaged. That combination is rare. The majority of systems do or do not. YGG does both.
This also describes the reason why YGG is now more solid compared to numerous projects in the past that ruled headlines. It is not pursuing endless expansion or plot progression. It is preoccupied with clarity within the naturally messy settings.
Translation layers will be required in the future of virtual worlds when they will become enduring economic spaces. Not marketing layers. Not incentive layers. The systems that make people realize what they are making themselves.
In the absence of this, economies are weak. They go like swings between hype and collapse. They reward the short term extraction against long term involvement. They respond more quickly than they cognize.
YGG might not be the ultimate solution. The space is still evolving. But it is among the earliest great actors to behave like it knows things as well as do things.
Where confusion has lead to recurring failure such that insistence on clarity may turn out to be the most effective change of all.
@Yield Guild Games
