Dark Forest Community Synopsis

This is the sixth of a series of 12 discrete stories about how a variety of web3 projects (ranging from crowd-funding platforms and NFTs to DeFi and gaming) have approached decentralized community building. You can read an aggregated overview of insights across all of these projects here.

Fully Decentralized ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ Fully Centralized

On August 2, 2020, “the seed of civilization was planted” and the unpredictable world of Dark Forest was announced to the world. Through a blog post, of course.

Introduced as a decentralized, real-time strategy (RTS) game, every player participates in the same active “world state” as they compete to claim as many planets and resources as possible. But what really piqued the interest of gamers and web3 developers alike was that Dark Forest was “on chain” with every transaction logged to the public blockchain and simultaneously “information incomplete,” where some information is hidden from other players.

This “hidden state” worldview concept is incredibly popular in most massive multiplayer online (MMO) games in the web2 world (such as World of Warcraft), but it had been a hard promise to achieve in on-chain web3 gaming – where, by definition, every action in gameplay is logged to a public blockchain and therefore visible to other players.

However, over the past few years, a breakthrough in cryptographic technology known as zero-knowledge proofs made it possible for participants to keep a “private state” while also submitting publicly verifiable transactions. Dark Forest was the first gaming project to lean into this technology. The challenge is an enticing one: Until you mine out the universe, you are incapable of knowing what’s going on in the game. As a result, the game attracted best-in-class builders and gamers to their ecosystem.

One such player was Will Robinson, who joined during the January 2021 round. But he joined the round late and ultimately got crushed. Despite having a PhD in game studies, Will quickly learned that securing one of the coveted 63 spots on the Dark Forest leaderboard required both mastery of game theory and zkSNARK cryptography skills. To up his odds at winning, Will scoured leaderboard winners, often reaching out via cold Twitter DM, to invite strong players to form a DAO called dfdao.

Over the course of the next several rounds, dfdao successfully recruited a handful of core contributors, built their own plugins and smart contracts and pushed the boundaries of game play through creative tactics like encouraging other players to “gift” their empires away when it became clear they would not win. In one particularly contentious competition with their primary competitor, orden_gg, the dfdao team deployed the “Death Star” planet

To be sure, it takes serious commitment to play the game at this level. Due to the relatively slow pace of on-chain transactions, top players “pilot” their games around the clock, making moves every five minutes. Will noted: “The last time I did that –lose sleep to play the game – was World of Warcraft in 2005 - 2006.”

I asked him why he thought it was worth so much effort to win a few NFT planets that carried no inherent value. Will said: “I’d been working in crypto for four years, but I realized this was the first game that was special. I thought, ‘This is where my future is. My job sucks (at the time), and I’m going to get rich off this.”

But as I watched the team relive their “glory days” moment as Ivan shared an image of the Death Star attack in his presentation at Devconnect, I knew there was another obvious answer: They are just having fun.

In the most recent synchronized 10-day “round” of Dark Forest, which occurred in February 2022, 1,800 players participated, and the radius of the universe was 150,000 world units. Securing a space on the Dark Forest leaderboard holds the equivalent of being a top earner of Stack Overflow reputation points, with Will even going so far as to suggest that “hiring from the leaderboard is one of the smartest things you can do in web3.”

In addition to many individual players, more DAOs and community initiatives have spun up around the game as well, including Project Sophon, which built Dark Forest Local so you can run Dark Forest locally on your computer, orden_gg, the recurring champions, and Marrow DAO, a Chinese DAO not interested in winning but in facilitating the game and getting others to build on top of it.

As the community has grown, so have the available resources for any individual player. Ivan Chub, one of Dark Forests’s core contributors, shared in a presentation from Devconnect that their open-sourced library includes 55 peer-reviewed plugins that anyone can use to enhance game play. Dfdao continues to deepen their partnership with the Dark Forest team by experimenting with a single-player versions of the game through their new “arena mode.” Two other notable ways that the Dark Forest core team has begun to push more power to this growing builder community was by introducing community rounds, giving anyone the ability to offer their own instance of Dark Forest, and lobbies, a configurable on-chain deployment system for your own Dark Forest universe.

Sure, using new tech is cool – but the thing that makes Dark Forest a standout is that they designed a framework to get other smart people to build on top of it, too. From the start, Dark Forest was designed to spur engagement, activity, and discovery among the nascent ZK community of Ethereum developers. Right in their early rules, they state loud and clear:

“You are free to use any programmatic tools at your disposal. In particular, you are free to inspect the source code, to write smart contracts which interact with the core Dark Forest contract, or to modify your frontend client (we will make the code used for this game public). Lies, deception, bribes, and coordinate reveals are also fair game.”

And their community has leaned into this – hard. Following alongside the saga of the v0.6 public round reads like a science fiction story from every side. Just read how the dfdao team described the moment they successfully targeted their competitor with their super-powered planet:

“Our team watched the fallout with glee. We were sleep deprived and elated to finally be making Orden squirm after three rounds of losing. We didn’t know if it was ethical or fair, and at that particular moment… we didn’t care. We had just built a machine gun planet, and as far as we knew, it was within the rules of the game!”

One final intriguing initial decision this team made was to fund development of the game entirely through donations and grants from the crypto community. Yes, it’s a game, but it’s also a public good. Today, Dark Forest is a part of the broader 0xPARC research and development community. By foregoing traditional funding structures, this enables the team to focus more on research than on revenue. Right now, they are exploring applied ZK cryptography practices and additional infrastructure for other autonomous worlds. The way Ivan put it: “We are not very motivated by profit; we are super motivated by learning”

• Core team: New version iterations to public rounds; determining new external partnerships

• Community of contributors: Co-producing events, community rounds, building plug-ins, providing game feedback & recommendations

• Aligned incentives: The competitive nature of web3 builders and gamers both spurred action among the community and experimentation in ZK research simultaneously

• Collaborative nature to bring in the full ecosystem of partners to enhance gameplay

• Fueling fun – it is a game after all; people just want to play along

“In the beginning we weren’t sure we wanted to be a crypto-native, open sourced game. Someone forked our game and we were pissed about it. But in the end decided to lean into that and decided it was our strength. Let people do what they want and they do amazing stuff and they surprise you" - Ivan Chub, Dark Forest core contributor (via a presentation at DevConnect)

Special thanks to Will Robinson, llpresswell, Ivan Chub’s presentation and Remy Hall, for their contributions to this narrative. You can also view the complete repository of articles and references across all projects as part of this study.