---
# System prepended metadata

title: Gitcoin Comic Design Sprint
tags: [Gitcoin Graphic Novel]

---

---
###### tags: `Gitcoin Graphic Novel`
---

# Gitcoin Comic Design Sprint
### Overview
#### From GV Sprint
* On Monday, you’ll map out the problem and pick an important place to focus. 
* On Tuesday, you’ll sketch competing solutions on paper. 
* On Wednesday, you’ll make difficult decisions and turn your ideas into a testable hypothesis. 
* On Thursday, you’ll ~~hammer out a high-fidelity prototype.~~
* And on Friday, you’ll ~~test it with real live humans.~~

### Primary Goals from Gitcoin
Cancer/Climate Change/Misinformation SUCK
Cancer/Climate Change/Misinformation are MOLOCH
We can defeat Moloch
Ethereum is how we defeat Moloch
Join us in the greatest LARP

Shelling point for the hopeful

#### Audience Profile
* Likes Avengers-style metaverses
* Knows how (or can learn how) to buy NFTs
* Tells their friends about the cool shit they discover

**Moloch wins! Audience gets sad > funneled to The Greatest LARP to mine those consummerist extincts**

### Agenda for Our Purposes
* Monday:
    * Explain the sprint
    * Set goals
    * Make a map
    * Compile what we know
    * "How might we"
    * ABC = Always Be Capturing
* Tuesday:
    * Demos from other products
    * Divide or swarm: idea generation!
* Wednesday:
    * Critique solutions
    * Converge: make decisions
    * Divide winners
    * Make a storyboard
    * Assemble the "prototype": enough information to pass off to the artist team to begin work



### Day 1
#### Objectives
##### Planning
* What work can get done in this sprint?
* How will the chosen work get done?
* Define and build backlog items
* Timebox our 3 day sessions in relation to outputs

##### Define Roles:
* **Plor:** Scrum Master
*Keeps the sprint team moving and aligned*
* **Travis:** Creative Development & Product Owner
*Primary generator of creative content*
* **DAO Jones:** Transmedia Development
*Primary aggregator of transmedia outcroppings*
* **bestape:** GCMC Integrations, General Development
*Identifies and prompts initiatives underway outside of the RG group*

##### The What
The objective of the sprint and what backlog items contribute to that goal. Decide what can be done in the sprint and what we will do during the sprint to make that happen.
* Creative goals
* Production goals
* Transmedia goals
* Community goals

##### The How
Plan the work necessary to deliver the sprint goal.
* ID opportunities for divergence & convergence, solo & team
##### The Who
Client defines desired value.
* *Instill the importance of coordination through graphic storytelling.*

Team defines how to deliver that value.

##### The Inputs
* Define the backlog.


##### The Outputs
Define the specific outputs of the sprint, in this case:
* Audience <> Characters
* Character Stories > Flows (mini-narratives)
* Flows entangled into context/landscape
* Flows refined to converge on red routes
* Sitemap/IA defines core narrative, lays foundation for Universe Guide


## Day 2 Notes
### To begin Day 2:
* Quick Stand-up: 15 mins
* Overview of Day 2 sprint sections: 15 minutes
* Review Comic #2: 15 mins
* Review Cellarius Universe Guide: 15 mins

#### On Day 1 we diverged on characters by considering:
* IRL audience
* D&D/RaidGuild lore
* Character motivations as a psychological bridge between the two worlds (real & LARP)

#### Moloch is more complicated than a clearly rendered "evil"
* Inside all of us
* Characters are both protagonists and antagonists
* Psychologically unnerving, dark sensibility, tormented by the terrors of possession of ourselves, locked in our own dungeons

#### Day 2 is a meditation on **world:** ideology, context, landscape, origin stories (where and why the characters are questing):
* How ideologies have shifted from early Bitcoiners or the Bitcoin whitepaper to the present Ethereum community
* Towards an articulation of *the quadratic lands* as the utopia we are all collectively reaching for without slipping into dangerous high-modernist delusion
* A meditation on the **game board & game master**

#### Day 2 Divergence in 3 parts:
* **The game board itself:** MMORPG architecture of the world, the map of the dungeon, the aesthetic backdrop, how we move through the actions, what are the rules
* **Game theory:** the metaphorical layer, the world as an economic game of rivalrous players with mutually exclusive conflicting perverse incentives, multipolar traps: scenarios pulled from MoM, the logic of incentives/desire, **magic** defined as casting influence on others from afar, FUD, Philosophical games, existential games, cancer, climate change, misinformation, miscommunication = these are symptoms of deeper seated pathologies
* **Philosophical scenarios:** "meta" theories of simulation, (un)realities, metaverse, AR/VR/ARG/holographic universe, illusion/delusion/hallucination, the game as a simulacra (the map) obscuring the physical meatspace (territory), semtiotics of cryptography, hyperassociation & dissociation of the mind-body split, inner life and outer image

#### Day 2 Deliverables:
* A game board! At least as a mental image
* Some basic game rules
* Some basic actions to ensure successful coordination

#### Towards a Universe Guide:
* All of this generation will become canon lore once combined with the contents of the first 2 comics
* The goal is an open-source narrative architecture that we are laying the foundation for
* Continue to identify transmedia opportunities, 2 categories:
    * We define and produce
    * We research and inform (and someone else makes them)
* Ideas: 
    * NFTs of characters
    * NFTs of world/background art
    * Game scenarios
    * Bounties for UG sections from Gitcoin
* Should have some transmedia scoped out before approaching the artist (Blaylock or other)


## Day 3
### Day 3 Agenda:
* Quick Stand-up (15 min)
* Intro/overview of Day 3 (15 min)
* Characters with traits and aesthetic ideas: who they are (20min)
* Psychological scenarios, plot lines: what/why they do (20 min)
* Landscapes with specific qualities: where they are (20 min)
* Artifact(s) in the world: how they do (20 min)

*Break*
* Relationship map: how it all connects as a world (20 min)
    * Linear element: historical timeline
    * Non-linear element: inflection points, tangents for future contributors to pick up
* Discussion about the *structure* of the Universe Guide (20 min)
* Discussion/strategy about open-source narrative framework (20 min)
* Discussion/strategy for transmedia bits & GCMC interactions (20 min)
* Retrospective?

### Main points for day3:
#### Converge on the characters that were generated on day 1:
   * Do not need to be consistent in their level of detail. Metric = enough detail to provide meaning, but let's not get bogged down in those details
   * Will consist of short descriptions, synopses including:
        * What they look like
        * Race/class
        * Brief bio/backstory
   * Goal is to create enough psychological complexity that the audience can immerse themselves in the world
   * Each character is **both protagonist and antagonist**

#### Converge on the plot/landscape/context that was generated on day 2:
* Goal is to paint a picture of a very rich world, **the world as a character of the story,** elaborate the feeling-space of the *quadratic lands* and infuse it with distinct characteristics
    * Like the characters, just enough detail for future contributors to be able to iterate on the ideas but not so much to inhibit iteration

#### Put the characters and world in relation to each other
* We will make a world map of these relations, a complex psychological network of embedded relations between characters and environment

#### Let's get specific on the narrative plot today
   * The first 2 comics emphasized action over character development. **We will attempt the opposite.**
   * Like Seinfeld: a comic about nothing(ness), focusing on the development of the characters and their environment without extraneous elements
   * Psychological complexity moves the tension forward: **psychodrama**

#### Facts/constraints of the story:
   1. Moloch wins in the end
   2. Moloch is never depicted, but manifests in each character in a unique way
   3. Story begins in a tavern, sets up a quest for fortune and glory, "slaying Web3 demons," seemingly predictable
   4. The demons cannot be found: dissipated into the landscape itself, the landscape as a mirror that reflects the image of the characters back to themselves
   5. Characters suffer from degen tendencies, hubris, narcissism, (and other human fallacies), motivated by the NOW-ME and lose sight on the FUTURE-WE
   6. The arc of the story reveals rampant individuals struggling against themselves and each other, towards an inflection point of understanding that *we are stronger together*
   7. We follow the characters through the metaverse to learn that even the simulation contains the same human weakness of the "real world," they bring the terror with them
   8. Characters collaborate on a tool/weapon/artifact (that symbolizes DAO/blockchain tooling) that allows Moloch to become visible
   9. No action ever takes place! Just tension building to set up the next story.






