Fau0x Salon Governance RPG Card Deck

We at the 0x Salon have developed a non-Web3-specific card game (Fau0x Salon, 2021) which serves as a discursive tool for participants to role-play post-disciplinary conversations from a variety of perspectives. The card deck "pops-up" salon-style events (intimate and diverse peer-group discussions) with some facilitation, allowing participants to role-play through problems, topics, and governance tensions from the perspectives of fictional character archetypes rather than themselves. We have been invited to present the Fau0x Salon project in an exhibition in Switzerland in November. The 2021 version of the card deck is here: https://www.are.na/0x-salon/wip-salon-deck-v2

We would like to prepare a Web3-specific version of this card deck, and seek contributions to help us with R&D, design, playtest, and production costs. Our goal is to complete a new version of the deck, do a series of playtests and workshops at Web3 events, make many hard copies available, and open-source the deck so that anyone can print their own copy and play.

In a way, we are developing a "Web3 governance therapy tool" 🚀. One problem we are trying to solve is around the 'eternal September' problem of welcoming new people into the Web3 ecosystem with nuanced and unbiased information. There's also a related challenge, in the 'governance' of the human organisations that necessarily form around decentralised protocols, such as foundations, startups, benefactors, investors, as well as developers, miners / validators / service providers, users, …. Due to the complex balance of stakeholder incentives in Ethereum and other Web3 networks, individual stakeholders may not be incentive-aligned, which can lead to “off-chain tensions” or even adversarial behaviour that is detrimental to the protocol.

Due to these somewhat split loyalties, and the distributed nature of many Web3 project teams, time spent together IRL (where communication is most effective) is scarce. Having a “governance RPG” as a tool for teams to role-play through scenarios would enable team members to work through points of tension, without bringing their own personal characters or desiderata into the equation.

About the 0x Salon 0x Salon is a collective endeavour which critically interrogates digital culture — primarily that of the blockchain community — through discourse events and residencies, producing scholarly and creative interventions in the process.

Since 2020, we have been hosting salons ⁠— intimate post-disciplinary discussions ⁠— on a range of conversation topics. We are conducting an ongoing, non-profit experiment in knowledge sharing and collective cultural production.

Stewarded by 0x Salon team members, our community researches topics, organises events, and produces lore, critical theory, poetry, philosophy, games, theatre, and visual art. Our website principally functions as a transmedia archival space, chronicling discussions within the 0x Salon and the resulting activities.