# Planet A @ EthBerlin2 and CCCamp 2019 — Postmortem

## Kosta

Direct feedback from the people:

- 👎no instructions in the app itself. Will be good to have a game explainer right in the app.
- 👍many people liked the idea (once it was explained)
- 💡would be good to know how you can spend GOE right from app e.g. have a list of merch with prices. Or even a marketplace for small digital goodies like Kudos.

Observed behaviour:

- all the people had no clue they can spend their GOE anyhow
- people had no incentive to earn GOE (related to previous bullet point)
- people mostly planted trees, likely because of the above points (no value for GOE, don't know what else to do)
- some people had troubles to see their own GOE balance (you need to scroll down). Some people considered "locked CO2" number as a balance. My assumption: too many numbers, the most important one (GOE balance) is not even on the screen.
- no clear next action once you scanned the paper wallet. For most of the people it wasn't obvious you have to click the passport icon (probably it wasn't even recognized as a passport icon)
- people had no idea about the global picture (like CC-Camp vs EthBerlinZwei sharing the same Air, what are the countries for etc)

My impressions:

- no one knew shit → we should better advertise our experiments long before the event, probably multiple times
- simpler UI needed (less numbers, hide/deemphasize secondary things)
- in-app explainer needed, it was tedious to explain people what they can do and only possible in person.
- stuff we give out for GOE should be valueable/interesting. Otherwise no incentive to hassle with the app even if it obvious what to do. Swag works poorly as there is plenty of it already.
- numbers should be tuned:
- tree planting shouldn't be available right away or/and should lock less CO2 etc
- prisoner dilemma wasn't entirely a prisoner dillemma: people may talk and cooperate to choose the best strategy, which in fact was "cooperate+defect and then split" :) Reason: mean outcome for cooperate-defect (0.27 GOE) was way higher than for cooperate-cooperate (0.15 GOE)
- probably would be good to be able to nudge people with push-messages announcing the current situation etc

## Tim

### What worked

- Self-organized sessions and our dome build up drew a lot of interested people in
- The artifically bureaucratic on-boarding process that we did on Friday resonated really positively with people and brought us an interview with a podcast
- Many people liked the game idea a lot and even tried to help us making it work

### What didn't work

- The game idea wasn't obvious enough
- Additionally, we didn't provide any instructions or tutorial in the game and hence on-boarding was very slow and probably had a bad conversion rate
- We didn't build in any viral mechanics:
- Once you were on-boarded, it was difficult playing the game as you didn't know who was playing the game too. We tried to counter act that by throwing handshaking parties. In fact, that helped on-board more people but didn't really make a big dent.
- We've talked to some players and the feedback they gave us was: "We would have loved to have some Planet A stickers, we can put on our shirt to signal that we're 'open for business'"
- The simulated model was static and not aggressive enough:
- We've ended up with approx. -200Gt less than what we've started with. Hence, we've never ended up in the situation where we had to increase the prices of what we've sold for Goellars
- Perfect handshaking emitted each time 0.15 G and emitted only 100 Mt of CO2. That allowed players to have a really good net-negative CO2 balance. E.g. Handshake 7x for 1 G and emit 700 Mt CO2, then lock 2 Gt for 1 Goellar. That yields a -1300 Mt CO2 balance for a player for handshaking 7x.
- When we've noticed this behavior, it was unclear what to do about it and in the end nothing was done about it except adjusting the handshaking cooldown.
- In-game errors weren't caught correctly in the frontend and the game hadn't been tested properly before the events:
- Kingdom of Heatwave and Tornayda players weren't able to play because of a bug that mapped the color of the passport incorrectly.
- When handshaking twice on the same QR code, many users got an "map of undefined bla" error. We should have caught this error and displayed an actionable error to the user

## Johann

### onboarding
- :+1: wallets included in badge fold given out by ethBerlin. made it very hard to loose wallet. no wallets were lieing around at the event.
- :-1: many visitors (most i talked to) didn't receive a badge, but came from DappConn, and could re-use the badge. with only very little communication with organizers we could have prevented this error.
- :-1: goellars were not introduced by event organizer. running a digital currency can be a great way to appeal to visitors, and simplify the organization (decentralized event), but was avoided "on purpose".
- :-1: introduction talk happened too late (after all sponsors, people were tired). no slides, so no way to show people how to use it.

### pop-up economy
- :-1: worst part of the event, didn't exist
- :-1: the worthless money failed to create any incentive structures. without incentive structures any Apps built "on top of the economy" could not work.

### planetA itself
- :+1: worked and looked great overall. positive response.
- :+1: the games open approach, and altruistic intention reduced the shynes, every-one was interested.
- :-1: 2 countries didn't work when it was most important, at the initial socializing phase.
- :+1: people were onboarding each other into the game.
- :+1: Nifty Fanny in the arts room liked the idea and was giving out Goellars prizes for art-work.

## Michele

From my ivory tower I couldn't see what was going on with people at ethberlin2 or at the CCCamp, so I'll just add a couple of things trying not to repeat what the others have already written.

### what worked

- some people played the game, and apparently had fun doing so (I'm 100% relying on reports from you guys for this)
- aside from the initial fail with the 2 new countries, the game worked and we didn't experience down times
- some of the players didn't abandon the game til the very end of the events

### what didn't, or could be improved

- the game is meant to leverage people's greed for its mechanics to work. If the incentives are too small, it's bound to fail, and it's pointless to discuss about fine-tuning other aspects
- AFAIK, the game didn't even have a concept of winning or losing, which makes it even worse
- we didn't have a way to alter trends, so we were forced to watch the train wreck in slow motion without doing anything. Actually, it was made explicit that we should not try to intervene at all
- communication on Slack (between us) was quite poor and disorganized (I can provide examples if you're interested)
- little to no engagement on social media
- absolutely no reason to use the blockchain to play this game 😛

## Alberto