I stumbled upon my old Gameboy the other day, and after putting in some batteries, I got addicted to Tetris all over again. I mean seriously addicted. At one point, my partner decided the only way to stop me was to hide all the batteries. (Thank you.)
But this little Tetris binge got me thinking about the game itself. When you break it down, Tetris is a pretty simple game. The goal is to stack a full row using a few basic shapes. When you do, that row disappears. Keep it up, and the speed increases until, inevitably, you hit game over and start again.
This core loop got me thinking about how, in the onchain world, we rarely spend enough time designing and developing the core loop of the experiences we want to create.
In the onchain space, we tend to focus heavily on world-building, selling a vision of what could be far down the road. This works well when you're raising a round because it paints a compelling picture of the future. We invest heavily in these worlds—often through branding and storytelling—with the goal of attracting a community that buys into our dream. But we’re asking people to sign up and commit to worlds that have no real play value yet.
When I think about game design, I believe the onchain world could learn a lot by exploring this concept further. There are essentially two ways games come to life. The first starts with a great story that needs to be told. A valid question here is whether this story could be a movie or a book instead. Does interactivity add to the emotional experience? Often, it does. But take The Last of Us, for example: as brilliant as the game is, the TV show proves you can also just sit back and enjoy it without picking up a controller. Onchain projects often aren't stories that need to be told.
The second way is through an addictive loop—a game mechanic that drives you to keep trying again and again. This can take different forms. On one side, you have games like Tetris, with a rapid pace, a simple learning curve, and the drive to beat your high score. On the other side, you have something like Ultra Hand in Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom—a sandbox where the joy comes from experimentation. The ability to discover shortcuts, unexpected outcomes, and the “wait, I can do this?” moments are what keep you coming back.
When we build onchain, we rarely focus on the core loop—how to make it joyful, addictive, and surprising. This isn’t about gamifying your experience; it’s about thinking of games as worlds built around a few key mechanics and goals.
From what I've learned from game designers, world-building often isn’t the first step. You rarely start by creating a fully completed open world and then ask, "What can we do in there?" Even for open-world games, you start with a simple story and mechanic. So why, in the onchain world, do we focus so much on the broader world rather than the key loop—the key mechanic?
Another observation: the tech stack is often not the first choice when a game mechanic is being explored and prototyped. There's a great talk about Zelda where they show how the 3D open world multiplayer started as a simple 2D game. But once the mechanic worked, they expanded from there.
In the onchain world, we love to debate the tech stack first. Most of our discussions are focused on protocol A versus B, or chain A versus B. It’s like debating for years whether to use Unity or Unreal Engine without answering what we’d actually do with either. Starting with technology often means we’re immediately hit by the complexity of working with it. Restrictions can be creative tools, but the ability to even prototype a new loop is massively restricted, slow, and often not much more insightful than a pen-and-paper board game would have been.
This might explain why many experiments in bringing gaming onchain are sad sandboxes—potentially great worlds, with great world-building, designed around tech, but lacking a loop to keep players coming back.
As I explore how to encourage builders to move faster and more broadly, I believe we need tools that enable rapid testing of new activities onchain—a different way to turn onchain actions into engaging loops. But we need tools that allow us to swiftly prototype, explore, and discover new things. If it’s fun, it won’t matter that we made signing in easier, transactions faster, or abstracted some complexity. We need new loops.
So instead of starting by imagining the world and tech around it first, maybe we should all start by experimenting and sharing new loops onchain—loops that drive engagement and inspire new activities. Seriously, who’s going to build the onchain Ultra Hand?
