Effective Altruism Quest
Let’s play a game: Answer a few questions and get a reward. Simple enough, right? Let’s keep that in mind as we talk about how the game is played. The following sentence explains the process, but it may also include some words that are unfamiliar to you. Whether you are coming from the blockchain or the EA community, don’t worry, we’ll explain each term one by one and get you ready to play!
The Game
Using the Gitcoin platform, embark on a Quest testing your knowledge of Effective Altruism to earn a Kudos.
Gitcoin
Gitcoin is on a mission to grow open source. It is a community for developers to collaborate and monetize their skills while working on Open Source projects through bounties. It is a decentralized application built on Ethereum’s blockchain. It is the awesome platform that hosts both the Kudos and the Quest. | What is Gitcoin—YouTube
Kudos
A kudos is a way of showing your appreciation for another Gitcoin member. It’s also a way to showcase special skills that a member might have, such as knowledge about Effective Altruism. More specifically, it is a type of “non-fungible token” using the ERC-721 standard developed by the Ethereum Foundation. This means the token is unique, like a collectible or commemorative, and can be used to symbolize reputation or as a type of reward. | More info.
Quests
Explore. Learn. Battle Baddies. Win Rewards. Gitcoin Quests is a fun, gamified way to learn about the web3 ecosystem, compete with your friends, earn rewards, and level up your decentralization-fu! This is the quiz you’ll take on the topic of Effective Altruism, and if you pass it you will earn the Kudos. | More info.
Effective Altruism
Effective Altruism is a research field which uses high-quality evidence and careful reasoning to work out how to help others as much as possible. It is also a community of people taking these answers seriously, by focusing their efforts on the most promising solutions to the world’s most pressing problems. Hint, this answer may be on the Quest, just sayin’.
Get Started
Download and install the Metamask browser extension (Chrome, Brave, and Firefox supported). Metamask is a crypto wallet and gateway to blockchain apps, such as the Gitcoin platform. What is Metamask—YouTube.
To login to Gitcoin, you’ll need a GitHub account so if you don’t have one go ahead and create it. Don’t know what GitHub is? Check out this explainer video and dive head first into the world of open source software.
Note, to receive the Kudos (assuming you complete the Quest!), you’ll be prompted to connect your Metamask wallet with Gitcoin and grant permission for Gitcoin to read the state of the wallet. This is to enable the transaction on the blockchain to mint the Kudos to you.
Ready Player One!
You’re now ready to start the Quest!. You’ll be facing off against the Evil Genius Bot with five multiple-choice questions, but first you’ll be given all the time you need to read the Introduction to Effective Altruism article, the content of which is used to form the questions in the Quest. When you’ve finished reading, start the quest and answer the questions. You’ll 30-45 seconds for each question to answer, and if you miss an answer you’ll have to wait three minutes as a cool-off period before trying again. Good luck, and enjoy!
Why is this post being downvoted? We created a game that uses novel technology to teach people about effective altruism using the introduction article from this very site. It brings together two disparate groups of people (EA and blockchain community) to better understand one another, and it is 100% free. Confused, and a little disappointed.
Yeah, it starts out looking too much like an ad for Gitcoin, when it would be better to describe who created the whatever-it-is, for whom it was created, and what people will get out of it.
My first thought is that Gitcoin would have been better described later, and as a clause, e.g. instead of a “Gitcoin” section, saying “Gitcoin is on a mission to grow open source...” you have a paragraph like “we built the quiz on Gitcoin, which is on a mission to grow open source...” because readers can’t see why they should read about Gitcoin in isolation.
It is odd that there is a section to explain what EA is—we are on EA forum, readers normally know already what EA is.
Why should people who are not Gitcoin members care about kudos?
Why do we need a Github account, is this meant for programmers?
Why do we need a browser extension?
The post needs to be structured so that the reader quickly gets a clue about what they would get out of reading the whole post, and for any instructions you give us, we need to be given a motivation to do it that we understand.
Upvoted because I think a negative score is too harsh… yet I don’t understand this well enough to be motivated to install a browser extension. Based on the existence of a section to explain what EA is, I assume this is designed for people who are new to EA, which I am not, so I deduce that I would get nothing out of it.
I agree with Edo’s assessment of how the post’s format probably led to a poor reception from the Forum community.
It’s a bit unclear what you want people to do—just play the game to learn about EA? (If so, this audience probably knows quite a bit already.) Are you looking for playtesters to provide feedback?
Using a foundation name as a username is fine, but might lead people to perceive this as a commercial offer of some kind, or just to be confused about who’s actually writing the post. I’d recommend starting off with an explanation of what the Foundation is and what your general goals are, rather than jumping straight into the game.
Thank you for your feedback. The Fugue Foundation is the nonprofit I run, which is dedicated to using open source technology to promote/further the principles of effective altruism. I have updated the bio for the profile to reflect this. Small but growing, we were fortunate enough to present at the EA Globalx Unconference this year.
Not sure, I upvoted it because I think it’s very cool that you made this! The post itself is perhaps too advertisy for the forum.
Also, I’m curious about several things. Do you mind sharing a bit about the game itself? Is it a simple trivia game? What type of questions are there? How is this going so far? What were your goals here?
Thank you for your interest (and your upvote, lol). I wrote the article in such a way as to explain terminology I thought to be unfamiliar to people in this forum. IMO, downvotes should be for things that are off topic (i.e., not EA related) but I’ve found when dealing with blockchain tech/cryptocurrency there are those that dismiss it outright without a second thought. No way to tell for sure, I digress.
The goal was simple. I wanted to make a Quest on the Gitcoin platform, which is like a quiz game, and I wanted to choose a topic that was unrelated to blockchain (there are many Quests you can play, most are tech related). So, sort of merge awareness of two disparate communities, EA and blockchain. There are five questions posed about EA as derived from the article I linked above (the intro to EA article from effectivealtruism.org, again, the irony with the down votes). The easiest way to understand it is to just play, but you do need a GitHub account to sign in. The part about Metamask is optional, it’s only if you want to receive the ERC721 NFT token if you pass the Quest, which is a type of digital collectible stored on a blockchain.
As far as I can tell with metrics, this post has not resulted in any increase in plays of the Quest, but it’s early days. Give it a go and post any thoughts/feedback. Cheers!
Thanks for the elaboration! Don’t take it too bad that this got downvoted—this is not necessarily an indication that people don’t appreciate the project itself, but I think it is more likely that the format of the post itself, which is unusual in the forum, was the problem (which can be a good opportunity to learn from).
Would you please give me an example within this article of what you are referring to, and how that format might translate to down votes (i.e., punitive action) as opposed to someone simply taking no action?
The downvotes are not here to punish you. They are meant to signal others that reading this post might not be the best use of their time.
Some triggers for me personally -
It’s a nice start, but it is not explicit at any point that you are talking about a game you designed. You go straight to explaining how it works, which is not interesting for its own sake. People want to be able to quickly understand what is this about.
I take this to feel that the post is not edited to fit the forum.
This is clearly meant for selling the game as something fun. People on the forum are probably not looking for something fun to do, but to understand how to make an impact. Also, people in the forum are not clearly motivated to learn blockchain. The main interest here for me is the outreach potential and the experience with designing games around EA.
I think that if you had written a short post about why you have made this game and what broadly it is, it would have been received better.
Thank you for your helpful feedback, much appreciated.