The Respect Game is an amazing onchain social game that grows communities and makes governance fair, fun, and naturally scalable. Through an elegant consensus process, it helps communities unlock the collective wisdom of their members while ensuring contributors are recognized and rewarded for creating public goods.
At its core, the Respect Game is a simple process. Participants gather in small groups to share their contributions to a shared goal, collaborate to evaluate each other's work, and build reputation through consensus. This human-centered design combines with onchain attestations and soulbound Respect tokens to create a highly scalable system for democratic coordination, impact evaluation, and collective decision-making.
Any community or organization can play the Respect Game to enjoy its profound benefits and unleash the power of voluntary collaboration. From local cooperatives to global DAOs, it provides the foundation for a new kind of democratic coordination - one that scales naturally like the branches of a tree while ensuring the value created benefits those who contribute.
Table of Contents
- Gameplay Walkthrough
- Respect Game Rules
- Benefits Overview Video
- What is Respect, Anyway?
- Respect Game Apps
- Respect Game Events
- Watch the Respect Game
- Get Involved
Gameplay Walkthrough
Below, you'll find a video from the inaugural Optimism Fractal event, where the Optimystics team provides a comprehensive overview of the game mechanics in Optimism Fractal’s implementation:
Respect Game Rules
These are the rules of the Respect Game played at Optimism Fractal. For more detailed rules, see here. The Respect Game provides a vast design space of different variations and these rules can be customized to fit the unique needs of any community or organization.
- Participants gather in randomized groups of three to six players. If there are many participants, they split into multiple groups. The Respect Game can accommodate any amount of players due to it’s fractal nature.
- Each participant of the group is given up to 4 minutes to introduce themselves, present their contributions, and share what they've done recently to help the community. This could include creating content, building software, inviting friends, or any other helpful activities.
- After everyone has shared their contributions, the group discusses and ranks each other’s work in order of helpfulness. The players try to rank who did the most to help the community in the past week, then who helped the second most, the third most, and so forth. In order to win, the players must reach consensus by at least 2/3rds of the group agreeing to the ranks.
- Once the group reaches consensus the participants of the group signal it onchain, which calls a function of smart contract. Everyone in the group earns Respect if at least 2/3rds of the break-out group participants submit this result onchain by calling smart contract during the game.
- Based on these rankings, Respect is distributed to each participant. The better your contribution is ranked, the more respect you earn. In the current configuration, 55 Respect is given to the first place, 34 Respect to second place, 21 Respect to third place, 13 Respect to fourth place, 8 Respect to fifth place, and 5 Respect is given to sixth place in each breakout room where consensus is formed.
- The game repeats with regular meetings where members share their latest contributions and receive more respect over time.Respect is not transferable, meaning you keep them as a personal token of your contributions and they build up for each person over time.
Benefits Overview Video
For more details about the benefits of Respect, check out the more comprehensive Optimism Fractal benefits guide or watch our introductory video during the first Optimism Fractal event in October 2023 where the Optimystics team explains how these concepts come together to help communities thrive. While our understanding has evolved significantly since then, this video captures some of the core vision that continues to drive development:
The Respect Game offers so many benefits that are challenging to fully articulate in a single overview. We've touched on some advantages earlier and in the video above, as well as in this article about Optimism Fractal's benefits. Now, let's delve into a more comprehensive look at the key advantages this innovative system brings to communities:
- Respect Scores: Respect tokens serve as a decentralized and peer reviewed reputation score onchain. This provides a decentralized and transparent, credibly neutral composable record of an individual's contributions and impact within the community.
- Collaboration and Networking: The system encourages collaboration and networking in fun weekly meetings. By participating and contributing to the community, individuals earn respect points, which can lead to higher rankings and recognition. This process fosters a supportive and exciting environment where members are incentivized to contribute positively.
- Onchain Composability: The respect system is highly composable, meaning it can be integrated with various decentralized applications and tools. This flexibility allows for broad applications, including reward systems, decision-making processes, and verification of contributions.
- Awarding Public Goods Creators: The respect points are particularly focused on rewarding those who contribute to public goods and the broader ecosystem. This aligns with the mission of fostering collaboration and supporting creators who contribute to open-source projects or other community-benefiting initiatives.
- Democratic and Credibly Neutral Process: The allocation of respect points is designed to be democratic and credibly neutral. Participants are placed in random breakout rooms and measurements are taken by peers on a weekly basis to insure that the distribution of points is fair and based on genuine contributions.
- Collective Decision-Making: Respect tokens can be used to elect leaders of the community. Respect can give power in collective decisions and providing a structured way for the community to govern itself. The smart contracts can be operated by community members with the most Respect.
- Fractal Democracy: The concept of fractal democracy is used where decision-making is decentralized into smaller groups like branches of a tree. This allows for more efficient and representative decision-making processes.
- Encouraging Participation and Positive Contribution: Simply joining and participating in the community in a positive manner can earn respect points, encouraging a broad range of contributions and engagement levels.
- Accountability: Weekly meetings and peer-reviewed contributions foster a strong sense of accountability. Participants are motivated to consistently contribute meaningfully, knowing their efforts are recognized and assessed by their peers, which reinforces a culture of responsibility within the community.
- Motivation and Inspiration: The regular schedule of meetings and the opportunity to earn respect points create positive pressure that drives participants to excel. This rhythm inspires individuals to push their limits and contribute more, aligning their efforts with the collective goals of the community.
The Respect Game is designed to promote collaboration, contribution to public goods, and a democratic process of recognition and decision-making, all underpinned by a strong community ethos.
What is Respect, Anyway?
Respect is the recognition and appreciation of the value others bring to the world. It's a cornerstone of human relationships and collaboration, woven into the fabric of society throughout history. Despite its profound importance, respect has traditionally remained an intangible concept.
The Respect Token digitalizes this social concept, creating a measurable asset commemorated with unique artwork. As a soulbound token at the heart of the Respect Game, it offers communities tools for impact measurement, decision coordination, and collaboration. This innovative system provides a reputation metric for public goods creators, enables democratic governance, and strengthens community bonds.
Learn more about Respect's benefits and utility in this article, which explores Respect's role in community cooperation, its key applications, origins in fractal governance, and technical details. The article also examines how Optimism Fractal showcases Respect's potential on the Superchain and its broader societal benefits.
Respect Game Apps
How do we use the OP Mainnet to play the Respect Game? We demonstrate Fractalgram, an intuitive app that helps communities reach consensus while having fun!
We build open-source tools for anyone to empower their community with consensus games on the OP Stack. You can learn more about the open source apps and tools that we use to play the Respect Game at Optimystics.io/tools. Developers can explore the articles and code repositories to learn how to build exciting new applications with the Respect Game.
Respect Game Events
You can play the Respect Game at Optimism Fractal on Thursdays at 17 UTC. Optimism Fractal is dedicated to fostering collaboration and awarding public goods creators on Optimism. You can register for weekly email reminders at event page and find details at OptimismFractal.com. Optimism Fractal provides a perfect place to collaborate with talented optimists and earn awards for helping the Optimism Collective.
You can explore other communities that are playing the Respect Game on our events and communities pages. In addition to these events, our tools are all open source so anyone can play the Respect Game at their events. We’re happy to help you get started, so feel free to reach out with any questions or comments!
Watch the Respect Game
You can watch the Respect Game on our videos page and youtube channel. We publish videos of each weekly event featuring the Respect Game at both Optimism Fractal and Eden Fractal. In addition you can also explore hundreds of videos of Respect Gameplay on the Eden Creators youtube channel and OptimismFractal.com/media.
Get Involved
Thanks for reading and learning about the Respect Game. We invite you to join our weekly events, watch previous episodes of Optimism Fractal, and explore our blog to learn more about how the Respect Game can create profound benefits for the Optimism Collective. Feel free to reach out with any questions or comments on our Discord.
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