# gamified community bootstrapping By [maryx.eth](https://paragraph.com/@maryx) · 2022-05-31 --- What is community bootstrapping? When a new crypto project comes out, one of the most important issue the team has to deal with is how to cold start a community. It needs to find the sweet balance between not looking cheap and not being too mysterious that it ends up having nobody cares to know about it. Community bootstrapping is about gathering a group of self-motivated early supporters that bring in good vibe to the community, educate themselves and those around them about the project and in the best case scenario, help the project “go viral”. A short summary on the history of community bootstrapping Traditionally, in order to gain publicity in a short amount of time, projects would choose to use gorilla marketing method by giving away a certain percentage of their token to individuals who have completed a series of tasks on social media … … (your old, boring like, follow, retweet airdrop for example) in exchange for a sudden spike on its social media exposure. The problem with this method is that you really can’t expect those who care about airdrops worth a few dollars to bring in any meaningful attentions. Their own social media page will normally look like shit with all the airdrop retweets and bot-like comments just to finish the basic tasks. These people are basically the same dudes who spam your discord DM with shitty NFT drop info. Then came the Polkadot hype with the introduction of launchpad whitelist. These projects adopted a similar method but instead of giving away peanuts worth airdrops, they bring the element of luck on to the table. like, follow, retweet and fill in the form then you get a chance to win a public sale allocation. These allocations normally can be resold for a few thousand dollars after IDO and in a way it have attracted people with higher profile to do the marketing for these projects. But the problem remained the same. These people don’t really care about your project at all and they don’t even care to pretend that they care because the rule simply doesn’t require any emotional or intellectual investment. Do what you are told to do and leave the rest to luck. What does gamification mean to community building? Game is all about immersive experience. It’s about simulating a real life experience that you normally can not have in YOUR life. Let’s say there’s one episode of the game where you need to break into the headquarter of a evil company and get the key to a safe box. Here’s two kind of game experience: In the first scenario, you are instructed to kill one guy after another on a pre-designed route. There is few or none improv action you can take. Simply follow the instruction and maybe after a few death, you get the key. In the second scenario, the goal remains the same that you still need to get the key, but instead of instructing you step-by-step on how to reach the goal, you are given a tons of info about your environment … such as the location of you enemy, the movement of the cameras, corners where you can hide and objects that you can pick up. You will need to figure out how to get the key yourself… …You can choose to just kill everybody on your way or you can distract the guards and get the key without having anyone notice. There is only one way to finish the job in the first scenario, and near infinite ways in the second. Which one do you prefer? I’ll take the second one since it’s more fun and engaging, but more importantly only with enough freedom to make decisions I can start to feel I’m actually having the experience myself, otherwise why don’t I just watch a movie? That’s the essence of community bootstrap gamification: offering your community experience rather than rigid mechanic process. Offering clear goal but giving few to none instruction. Proof of INTELLECTUAL work rather than simple proof of work. The beautiful thing about it is that by gamifying the process yourself, you leave no room for people to game the process by cheating. Let’s compare the [@templedao](https://twitter.com/templedao) fire ritual and retweet campaign for example. Like, follow, retweet are all simple actions that can be totally automated, meaning that it doesn’t matter if the account is controlled by a real human being or a bot. 100% gamable. To succeed in fire ritual, on the other hand, nobody has any clue on wtf they are supposed to do, so that they are forced to do whatever they are good at to get a super limited fire ritual role. Some people are great at making memes, then they spend hours on studying the connection between the connection between Temple as a symbol and what the protocol actually do to produce memes that make sense; some people are good at doing analysis, so they studied protocol mechanisms even harder to produce educational contents. No one asks them to do that, but the incentive is so strong that people are willing to finally start thinking what they can actually contribute to the success of the project. All before they even really get the allocation. This way, community members, without knowing it, start to bring in good vibes to the community. An outsider would start to wonder what black magic is this that makes everyone trying so hard to get verified and contributing so willingly to this project. With an intention or not, good vibe is good vibe. Borrowing Jean Baudrillard’s word, good vibe is a “simulacra” rather than a “simulation”, meaning that it is exactly what it appears to be, without the distinction between the real thing and its imitation. You don’t have to be a true believer from the bottom of your heart like a cult follower in order to “make it”, as long as you care enough to put in real intellectual work, you will get what you deserve. At least ideally. This way, a true engagement hack is achieved: forget about your “what an amazing project and I hope for its success” Quote retweet, it won’t work. Everyone will need to fully immerse him/herself to the experience for a chance to … … reach the goal, which in turn makes the experience even more real. A meta positive feedback loop. The idea of metaverse inspires us to abandon the old distinction between what’s real and what’s not. What happens in Web3 is neither real nor non-real, it is just a game, but a game with real incentives. If you want to build a successful community and keep it thrive, start to think like a game designer. Everything will become a game in the century to come. This is in no way nihilism, this is the rebirth from ashes. Let that sink in. Kudos to whoever the fuck is behind [@FetchVentures](https://twitter.com/FetchVentures) for this incredible community building experimentation. Projects like [@templedao](https://twitter.com/templedao) [@incooomfinance](https://twitter.com/incooomfinance) [@manifest](https://twitter.com/manifest) have been a great source of inspiration for my pondering on social science --- *Originally published on [maryx.eth](https://paragraph.com/@maryx/gamified-community-bootstrapping)*