FINALIST
TRUSTLESS LIFE
Category : GENERAL
By Akihiro Kato (Japan)
TRUSTLESS LIFE Trailer from Akihiro Kato on Vimeo.
Our society will be a blockchain technology-based society in the near future. This board game lets people imagine its potential and challenges by playing it. In our generation, “Trust” is one of the most important elements despite it being invisible. This games gives us a specific rate of “Trust” according to the existing rules in the community. Players will experience a “The Game of Life” in which the rates constantly go up and down and changes are recorded. In this game, the trust rate changes depending on one’s job. Players will be able to take more kind of action when their rate increases. Moreover, even if you’ve failed in the past, you can try hard and get your trust back. Even if you are a introverted person, no one will blame you if you are doing your job properly. As you see, this block chain system sets “Trust” as a very important element.This society will allow you to live your life as you like.
Our generation suffers from a feeling of powerlessness and a sense of stagnation. That’s because we are not actually in control of our lives. We are forced to obey silent rules others expose to us and are not allowed to have distinct opinions. Is this “no tolerance for diversity” society going to last forever? I believe the Internet, which has existed since I was a kid, has a great potential and as a technology that has branched out from it. Blockchain technology will bring an enormous change to this society. Furthermore, blockchain technology will help us restore the once lost control from this immature democracy. It might give us the opportunity to live in a society where diversity is something natural. Blockchain is a platform that allows us to encode contracts and execute them. What would happen to our lives when such technology becomes the basis of our society? It is something difficult to imagine but by playing this game, players will be able to think about its potentials and challenges in the future. I wanted to offer such a kind of experience.
I’ve created 4 prototypes of blockchain-themed boardgames until now and brushed them up doing some testplaying and receiving feedback. Once, I tried to introduce the blockchain system into the companion app, but since it’s a complex system that you can’t actually interact with, I felt the app wouldn’t be a major source of help for someone to understand what this system is. So, I came up with this board game based on “The Game of Life” which is quite familiar to everyone so that players could get an idea of what the future society is going to be like.
Wooden game board 45(w)×45(d)×6(h), 3 types of cards (60 in total, 20 each), companion app.