Underrated Series #2: Phi, FarmVille, & Fun - Joshua Litchman

Phi is a unique addition to the Web3 consumer application landscape, facilitating user engagement, participation, and understanding of the primitives that exist within the ecosystem. Much of the activity that users perform on-chain is invisible to other users, in other words, there’s a limited social graph or interface for users to see what they and their peers have done and/or are doing.

The new internet needs a radically new way of understanding how events happen on-chain. I briefly explored this concept in a recent twitter thread, where I dissected how even legitimate ideas can be discarded as fantastical even if there’s real value behind them simply because they cannot be explained by the current framework. Rethinking how we understand flattens the adoption curve.

https://twitter.com/JoshLitchman/status/1552753721758588928?s=20&t=clSzh7Mn9qq366Xlxyt7sA

Web3 has a bad habit – its builders often times create overly utilitarian products to solve problems that require a forgotten element. Humanism. Kara Weber from Dapper Labs talked about this at length when I first met with her. She spoke about how Dapper has prioritized creating products that “delight” the user.

Phi compellingly summarizes their mission with the following quote found in their documentation:

“We can onboard the next billion people to the rabbit hole of crypto in an enjoyable way.”

I empathize with this ethos. The products that make up the next wave of Web3 technology must delight their users and create thoughtful experiences to encourage people to actually enjoy the process of jumping through many of the hoops that Web3 currently requires. And what’s more, the solution to this problem would simultaneously solve for many of the user engagement issues which afflict consumer applications.

Screenshots of Phi lands from the initial demo group on Goerli

There have been crude attempts to solve for on-chain transparency – through a wave of unrefined products that have served their purpose but need to be thoughtfully reinvented for the end consumer. These are products that many who are crypto-native use daily. By way of example, Etherscan – a block explorer and analytics platform – gives users a view into both their own and other users’ activity on the Ethereum blockchain. While the product serves an important purpose, it fails its users by being a soulless and purely functional solution to this problem.

So while Etherscan may pass the functionality test, it fails to pass the “Kara Weber test,” or the mass-usability test. By no fault of their own, many of these products haven’t iterated long enough to create wholly better versions of themselves that can be used on a broader scale.

A sample of phi land

Enter Phi. Phi provides users a personalized metaverse that creates gamified visualizations of a user’s on-chain activity. Through the use of ENS hyperlinks, Phi builds relationships between unique player lands. This becomes a social graph between individuals and communities, transforming each independent land into a huge network space.

Phi represents a multifaceted innovation in the consumer layer of Web3 for the following reasons:

Actions are visually represented
Participation is gamified and more fun for the user
Gamified elements become habitual to the “player/user,” creating positive feedback loops which encourage engagement

While there are other products which aim to solve the social graph dilemma through new social networks, Phi shows us that simplicity and familiarity can possibly be the best method to test new ways of digital networking. The way in which we comprehend how social media will look in Web3 is obviously based on what we know about how it looks in Web2. But by applying a new framework which gamifies engagement, Phi presents a new architecture for how we understand social interaction in a user-owned internet.

Let’s explore this:

Simplicity → Phi simplifies the process of understanding, in essence, what a blockchain really allows for in a social environment. Regular social media users really may not care what type of technology powers their social networks. Phi fosters uncomplicated social interaction based on participation and ownership rather than simply who your friends are IRL.

Familiarity → Phi positions itself for wide adoption by injecting a familiar feel to how they’ve productized their service. Phi helps us think about social networks in a familiar yet innovative way. Take a minute to harken back to the “good ol’ days” of Facebook.

One of the most popular games ever to grace the platform was FarmVille, an agriculture-simulation social network game developed and published by Zynga. After launching on Facebook in 2009, FarmVille became the most popular game on the site, and held that position for over two years. At its peak, in March 2010, the game had 83.76 million monthly active users. Daily active users peaked at 34.5 million.

While the social features within FarmVille may have been lacking and the game at times felt more like a chore than a fun way to spend an afternoon, there are fundamental reasons why the game became so popular. Players could curate their in-game assets and arrange their farm as they desired to show off to visiting friends – very similar to the experience when visiting flex-worthy spaces in oncyber.

Phi takes advantage of similar FarmVille-like gameplay dynamics while applying them to actual behaviors on-chain rather than siloing assets internally based only on game participation. Unlike FarmVille, Phi allows users to retain ownership of their assets and objects and provides the social infrastructure for the entire network.

I’ll leave you with an excerpt from Sabine Cikic and Julian Kucklich’s paper on the architecture of games:

“Perhaps the most remarkable characteristic of digital social games such as Zynga's FarmVille is that they are designed in such a way that any user, regardless of their skills and experience, can familiarize themselves in a matter of moments with the object of the game, the interface, and the tools and options involved in playing them.”

Sources & Additional Reading

Thanks to Mene Mazarakis for putting Phi on my radar and to Rob Sarrow for spending some time thinking about the innovations behind social graph applications in Web3.