Infinity Keys aims to be as diligent to our community as we are to the hunts and platform being built. The core team will foster an environment where individuals support each other in solving and creating puzzles. It is our vision that as IK grows, the community will take a role in governance for IK to help create an ever-expanding world of gamified exploration.
We are building the infrastructure for players to create opportunities for each other as quests for treasure, as well as building good and creative exploration games of their own, and in a manner that treats everyone with kindness and respect. In this spirit, we’ve outlined three core principles for our interactions as a team and community. To build a community that honors and builds with these principles in mind, we will define our understanding of them here.
There’s treasure everywhere.
There are many kinds of treasure.
At the end of a hunt or quest, a treasure rewards curiosity, intellectual prowess, and passion for finding clues. The treasure behind Infinity Keys games could be any Web3 digital asset, such as existing NFTs, newly minted NFTs, achievement NFTs, ERC-20 style tokens, and more. The growing world of creators developing NFTs and art infinitely expands this design space for treasure and incentives. With these tools, players can gain access to exclusive content, behind-the-stage opportunities to meet and talk with creators, opportunities to contribute to canon work, or any other token-gated experience. Access is treasure.
From another angle, games themselves are a treasure. The act of play, such as overcoming challenges, facing competition, acting out fantasy, and more, provides players the opportunity to flex their intellectual muscles to embrace creativity and competition in a unique space adjacent to real life. Within the process of solving puzzles and interacting with a game’s mechanics, there is often a sublime pleasure that comes from simply playing. If you’ve solved an Infinity Keys hunt you likely felt the “Golden Aha” moment when the clues click into place and you feel the satisfaction of accomplishment. Play is treasure.
It is our contention that the community, the players themselves are at the heart of game experiences. Unique individual perspectives bring new ways of playing games and, crucially, new ways of looking at the world. For Infinity Keys, being open to learning about different experiences of others allows designers to think in new and creative ways in building engaging games. IK values and welcomes people from diverse backgrounds to create games that use different references and gameplay formats, to teach, give perspective, or bring to light new play experiences. People have intrinsic value, and when we bring our best selves to the collective, we can create beautiful games. People are treasures.
When we view the world through the lens that treasure is everywhere, we open ourselves to the beauty of our circumstances, community, and ourselves. Giving ourselves to the environment and each other allows us to reap the rewards of friendship and belonging—the Infinity Keys community should embody this value and reap the rewards of treasure on all levels.
As we ask our community to bring their best intellectual and creative selves forward, we need games that honor that. The IK team is dedicated to making fair games designed with intention and care to create meaningful experiences.
Making good games means designing games to engage curiosity, require unique modes of thinking and acting, and should result in emergent fun experiences. Good games provide a space for players to experience both intrinsic and extrinsic rewards—meaning there is a tangible reward or prize at the end of the game, but also, the player finishes a game or game task feeling like they accomplished something meaningful.
Good games help us foster an environment of collaboration; the IK team supports collaboration with others within the IK community to build and solve puzzles. Those puzzles don’t even have to be our own! In fact, we hope the community builds far more games than the team does over time. We strive to create a community that feels comfortable building and playing games with each other, whether on the Infinity Keys app or elsewhere in the metaverse (or even on a tabletop!). IK will thrive when people connect and build good games that link any other game, fandom, or cultural activity.
An individual’s experience, pedigree, or educational accolades all pale compared to their ability to be kind and respectful of others. To uphold our previous ideals of accepting that treasure is everywhere and the intention to make good games, we must respect each other. This includes telling hard truths by giving constructive and valuable feedback, and being transparent with the community (and team) across as many levels of the project as possible. Truth and transparency are respectful. Kindness dictates the manner by which we construct our actions and words. The IK community should be welcoming and kind. These games are for anyone, and nobody should feel blocked from participating due to tone of voice or perceived negative intent.
A fun mind bend is to consider spoilers in the light of kindness and respect. We admire transparency for the sake of fair play, but we strongly encourage the community to respect others’ fun and not spoil puzzles, hints, or clues for those who wish to experience the game on their own. Embrace co-op multiplayer games for more than optimizing for a single outcome, and create a community where everyone has the same opportunity to have rich experiences.
We must treat each other with kindness and respect.
We hope these initial conversations lay out the intended community culture and guidelines, and we will strive to foster these in the community Discord and other communication platforms where Infinity Keys lives. We think an inclusive, engaging, and curious culture will lay the groundwork for a thriving game and community to build, share, and explore all new kinds of experiences across the many metaverses.
You’re welcome to join us and be part of the mission. Join the early community by unlocking the first puzzle at infinitykeys.io.
Infinity Keys is a game creation system to easily build and share puzzle games and link to any other connected game. Create missions to find secret codes, engage across socials, and collect digital keys & treasures.