Yesterday we looked at what GameFi 1.0 got wrong: unsustainable token emissions and games that were more grind than fun. Today I want to flip that and look at what games got right, specifically how on‑chain games work as coordination labs for incentives, identity, and social dynamics that matter outside of gaming. This is not about building the next Axie, it is about stealing primitives that could make my dashboard project from Day 46 more sticky for regular users.
If you want to keep up with this 60‑day Web3 journey, you can follow me on X, on Medium, on Future, and you can join the Web3ForHumans Telegram community.
In Day 47, we saw how attaching money to every click turned players into workers and made the whole system fragile. But strip away the "earn salary" hype, and you see games doing something powerful: getting thousands of strangers to coordinate around shared goals, track reputation, and build habits over time. That coordination layer is what I am interested in for a dashboard that is supposed to help people understand their own Web3 activity.
Games Test Incentives Without Real Money (At First)
The smartest on‑chain games start simple. They do not launch with tokens. They launch with mechanics that make people want to show up daily, compete lightly, and feel progress. Only later do they layer money on top, if at all. This is the opposite of GameFi 1.0, where tokens came first and ruined everything.
Take something like Dark Forest, an on‑chain strategy game that has been running for years. Players explore a galaxy, build bases, attack each other, all happening live on Ethereum. No upfront NFT buy‑in, no promised yields. You just play, and your actions create real on‑chain history that others can see and react to. It proves people will grind for status and competition alone.
Or look at modern coordination games like Parsec, where guilds or teams coordinate resources and strategy on‑chain. Here the game is not "kill monsters", it is "how do we align 50 strangers to defend territory or pool resources without a central boss". That is pure DAO mechanics disguised as gameplay.
Reputation And Identity Emerge Naturally
One thing games force you to solve is identity. In a multiplayer game, you need to know who you are playing against, who you can trust for alliances, who has a history of backstabbing. On‑chain games solve this with simple, visible reputation systems.
- Your wallet address becomes your persistent identity across seasons.
- Leaderboards show not just scores, but patterns (aggressive, defensive, cooperative).
- Past actions are public forever, so betrayal has real cost.
This feels familiar if you read the earlier days on on‑chain identity. Games just make it concrete: your "Web3 resume" is your win/loss history, your guild contributions, your streak of daily logins. No need for fancy ENS names or SBTs if the game already tracks it.
What This Means For Non‑Game Projects
The reason I care about game coordination is because my Day 46 dashboard needs the same stickiness. People will not check "what is my DeFi/DePIN activity doing" every day unless there is light game pressure: visible progress, streaks, social proof.
From games, I want to borrow:
- Quests: "Connect 3 wallets this week" or "track one DePIN position".
- Seasons: Monthly resets so progress feels fresh, not endless grind.
- Leaderboards: Anonymized (just wallet hashes), showing top impact trackers. No tokens, just bragging rights.
None of this needs complex tokens or yields. It is just psychology: humans love checking streaks, comparing lightly, completing small goals. Games proved this works at scale.
Tomorrow: Applying This To v0
So what happens next. Tomorrow I will take these 2-3 game primitives and sketch exactly how they fit into the dashboard v0 without turning it into a game. No farming, no emissions, just coordination hooks that make tracking your "money + infra + impact" feel rewarding.
The point of these GameFi days was never to build a game. It was to understand coordination at scale, then steal the best parts for something practical like understanding your own Web3 footprint.
If you want to follow along as I keep learning, building, and occasionally changing my mind about Web3, you can find the rest of this 60‑day journey on X, on Medium, on Future, and you can join the Web3ForHumans Telegram community to discuss these topics in plain language.
Resources
- Day 46 project kickoff – the impact/infra dashboard we are now adding game coordination to: Day 46
- Day 47 GameFi breakdown – what broke and set up today's coordination angle: Day 47
- Dark Forest – on‑chain strategy game showing persistent reputation.
- Parsec – guild coordination example beyond simple P2E.
- Earlier identity foundations – how games naturally build Web3 resumes: On-Chain Identity
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