The enclosure game at The SPACE! Getting Started for Beginners

Introduction to the rules of the game

Simply put, The Space is a 200px by 200px square canvas, allowing everyone to draw pixels together. But every time you click a pixel, you need to consume cryptocurrency and gas fees (the cost during the test is provided by the space.game game organizer, which is Matters Lab).

Each player will receive 2000 $SPACE as starting capital; the initial price of each pixel is 0. When you start to color, you can set a higher price for the pixels, so that if someone wants to change your painting, they have to pay for your pixel.

When a pixel hangs in your name, the platform charges you a 1% tax on the pixel price every day. Therefore, if your pixel price is too low, it is easy to be bought and changed. If your pixel price is too high, then your wallet will not be enough to pay taxes soon, either you reduce the price yourself, or wait for your wallet to go bankrupt and the system will clear the pixel for recycling.

At the same time, the daily income tax for each pixel will be distributed proportionally to everyone who once owned the pixel and the platform (it seems to be). I can't see my dividend income temporarily in this beta version, and I don't understand this paragraph in the official description :

Acc. Income is the "dividend" that is continuously accumulated on each pixel that Mint is an NFT. Dividend = total tax currently collected ➗ There is always the amount of pixels of the owner (that is, the amount of pixels that Mint is an NFT), that is, the accumulation of each NFT pixel Dividends are distributed at the same rate

The goal of this design seems to be to ensure Universal Basic Income. That is to say, even if the pixels you owned before were bought by the local tyrants because your price was too low in the morning, and now the price is too high for you to buy, you can still rely on tax dividends to obtain income, so as not to live on the streets to continue.

a simple game

Players who come to The Space to play seem to be drawing pictures at first, green here, pink there, and the pricing is not too outrageous. Since every time you click a pixel, you have to confirm with the little fox wallet, so it is a test of patience to draw. Impatient like me, I ran around to see who had already drawn a rough shape, and ran to help paint it 😂

Of course, there are also people who fight because of conceptual confrontation. For example, someone painted a CN first, and it was painted as EN, and someone wrote "China", which was wiped out.

These petty fights never reached a scale, until the "rogue landlord" @swiftevo and "little cat" @zhongwu did it:

Probably the incident is - I guess, I didn't interview the parties 😅 I will not be responsible for any discrepancies - @zhongwu originally was painting cats and cats well, @swiftevo ran over to paint people's eyes, and then set a height a little price. At first, the artist thought it was just an ordinary turf war, so he spent money to buy it back to continue his creation. As a result, I didn't expect the price to get higher and higher, and there was a rogue pricing such as $S11111 in the key pixel position of Maoyan. The artist had no choice but to give up.

The problem is that although real estate speculators can make a lot of money, if the doers don't come to build, your land prices won't be able to drive up . @swiftevo I should have realized this problem very quickly, so I spent all the money I made, drew a QR code in the corner of the Space, and scanned it to connect to the game guide that he wrote for this purpose, Explain the mental journey of making money and spending money. He is also a wonderful person haha.

Compare The Space and r/place

This game was inspired by r/place on Reddit . On April Fool's Day 2017, Reddit held a three-day pixel art spree. The game rules of r/place are very simple, players will have a cooling-off period of a few minutes for every pixel they click, before they can click the next one. The 2017 game designed a canvas of 1000x1000 pixels, and the cumulative number of participants in 72 hours was as high as one million; at the end of the game, there were as many as 90,000 simultaneous online users. ( Source )

A user base of this order of magnitude naturally exploded with unprecedented creativity. In fact, many people form groups to participate in the "competition". The group first made an appointment on what content to draw this time and which board it would occupy. Once the game started, the group would take turns to draw and encircle the field, so there was a wonderful confrontation performance in the game playback:

This April Fool's Day Reddit did it again, because everyone had too much fun, the game that was originally planned to end in three days was postponed again and again, and the canvas was also expanded several times during the game, from 1000x1000 to 2000x2000 😂 The picture is too beautiful, let's go by yourself Check it out !

r/place can become such a game, depending on Reddit's huge user base and appeal, which can gather millions of users around the world within a few days to complete this performance art within 72 hours. The time limit and the group of comrades in arms have brought unprecedented excitement to the game, and you can smell the adrenaline bursting just by looking at the playback . The Space, on the other hand, has far fewer users, and with the testing time approaching a month, players can easily get weak. There wasn't much movement on the canvas this week, and the discussion on Discord went back to the starting point of helping newcomers answer technical questions.

Just imagine, if the cats on the Space are attacked by the landlord, @zhongwu is not fighting alone, but has comrades in arms to help resist foreign aggression and build a home together, wouldn't it be so easy to give up ?

Drawing a pixel painting alone is already hard work. In addition to defending against attacks and calculating capital reserves, it is difficult for one person to have the motivation to persevere without a few colleagues working side by side and discussing a combat strategy in advance. But when it comes to group collaboration, there are strategies formulated by group rules. I watched the r/place replays in 2017 (previous video), and there was a prism (rainbow spectrum) group that was particularly interesting. The other groups were all thinking about how to draw a recognizable logo graphic, and their group just painted the rainbow pattern. This pattern is easy to replicate and extensible, and will not be disfigured when attacked. It is varied and suitable for virus transmission:

But what The Space wants to experiment with is not just a pixel game like r/place, but a value game.

Create > price > buy and sell > pay taxes > redistribute value

In the test recruitment officially announced by @Matty , it was mentioned that the biggest difference between The Space and r/place is the introduction of NFT pricing, Haberg tax and Universal Base Income. So it is both a drawing game and an economic game. In order to learn this concept, I have read several articles by @Unidentified Flying Rabbit, and this discussion between ta and @刘国 about using the Haberg tax to govern the Matters label is also very meaningful.

But what I feel after playing is that if there is no passion for creation, no matter how many sales and tax mechanisms are designed in the future, it will be lonely . The social ideal of talking about so many taxes actually lacks a premise—

 Creative activity is greater than all subsequent economic activity. Once created, the pixels will have value, and then there will be pricing, there will be a buying and selling market, and there will be value added, and then we can talk about how to pay taxes fairly and redistribute value.

When you are faced with a white canvas, maybe you can first estimate that the center and four corners may become prime locations, you can buy them first and store them. But anyone who has ever painted should know that the best part of a painting (and presumably the most valuable part) can be found anywhere on the canvas, so stockpiling as soon as you get started is likely to get artists running to Cheaper corner painting to go. Of course, you can be a little more aggressive, first randomly circle some land on the entire canvas, and when the artist paints your area, he will have to pay you rent. But the artist may feel that the game is too boring at this time and don't want to play it.

Does this look like SOHO in New York? There are too many similar examples: the artists are clearly living a hippie-like life, working, feeding, and creating, and then came the real estate developers, saying that the place has such a strong artistic atmosphere, let’s build a few luxury apartments, Sure to find a buyer who likes arty style. They will also say: This is also good for the artist, the work can be sold to the local tyrant next door the next day. Then ten years later, all those who engaged in art ran away, leaving only the arty luxury flagship store standing in the wind.

Neighborhoods where artists can congregate and create have always been a place where the cost of living is not that high. Because once the cost of living is high, you have to work hard to make a living, and you have no time to create.

Value comes from creation. Creation comes from leisure.

I still think the Hubberg tax, including Radical Markets, which Glen Weyl proposed based on that , is a very promising form of society that is worth continuing to experiment with at The Space. But how to improve the enthusiasm of creators seems to be a difficult point.

The article was almost finished, only to find out that Mao Xian @zhongwu has participated in the pixel war for the third time. All the questions I mentioned in this article, ta have already said it in the two tests at the beginning of the year 😅:

• This article mentioned the confrontation between creation and capital, and game project managers have personally said that rules should be designed to protect creation.
• This article mentioned the group test, and the effect seems to be very good!

After reading the creation results of the previous rounds of testing, I suddenly felt a little ashamed for our players... 😂

Then just now the project manager seemed to read my heart and said:

Hmm... I feel like I've written in vain for most of the day. 😅 The next round of testing should be prepared in advance!