How Web3 Animation Project ‘The Gimmicks’ Survives a Crypto Winter

When the going gets tough, the tough get “DIC punches.” In the world of “The Gimmicks,” a Web3 animation project, “DIC punch” stands for “decentralized inclusive community,” but it’s pronounced “dick punch,” and they are a way for people to say hello to each other, like the Facebook “poke.”

And the DIC punches haven’t slowed down during crypto winter. “It was important for us to launch ‘House of Chico’ when we did, at the end of October,” says Luisa Huang, co-founder of Toonstar (“The Gimmicks’” parent company), as it showed that even in a brutal landscape for crypto, “we fundamentally believe in the underlying technology and how it’s going to reshape entertainment.”

For those just tuning in, “House of Chico” is the second season of “The Gimmicks” – basically a vulgar animated comedy that’s a mix of “South Park,” wrestling, and crypto. It’s a grand experiment in community-driven storytelling, as the NFT (non-fungible-token) holders can vote on what happens to the characters.

One reason for its success? The token holders of “The Gimmicks” aren’t using it to get rich – they’re just having fun. They enjoy being part of the story. That might be a useful lesson for others in Web3: If there’s compelling content or a convincing use case, you can find traction even in a world of slumping prices.

In Season One of “The Gimmicks,” you were still experimenting with how much creative agency to give the community and how much to give the showrunners. What have you learned since then? Have you recalibrated?

And each episode could have a different sort of complexion, as to how much that is. Some parts of it are choose-your-own-adventure, where you only have three choices. We try to give the impressions that you [the community member] have as much impact as you can, but at the end of the day, it might only be three choices. There’s no way around that. But there are other ways, like with the Wiki [like Wikipedia but for “The Gimmicks”], where the community feeds so many ideas to the show.

Huang: We also evolved our thinking on the voting structure. We started asking questions that would build on top of prior decisions. So for example, in episode one of “House of Chico,” the butler gets attacked by the armadillo, and the audience had a choice of, well, okay, what happens to the butler? Does he die?

Huang: Yeah. They effectively killed him. But what ended up happening was that the butler turned into a ghost, and now he haunts Chico. So they [the community] effectively created a new character. They had a true impact on the season.

Attanasio: And the other way we’re experimenting is instead of asking, “Go right or go left?” you start to get into the why. You ask questions about motivations. This gives you longer-term implications to a story arc.

Attanasio: You can ask why a character did something. So the villain in “House of Chico” is Señor Tomas. You ask a question of, hey, why is he doing these bad things? And all of a sudden, it feels like you’re going deeper.

Huang: Good question. There are two aspects of the Wiki, and we’ve upgraded the system. First off, the versions of the Wiki are all recorded on-chain. So you can see the evolution. And then there’s also the concept of, well, the “F**k yeah, buddy” button.

Huang: So when you finish reading the Wiki, and you’re like, “Oh my God, this is like amazing,” you can then hit the “F**k yeah, buddy” button. It’s at the bottom of the story. Pressing that button basically moves that Wiki up in the ranking system. It’s a little like Rotten Tomatoes-ish.

Then you’re able to see which stories are resonating with people. So there are two ways people can participate in the Wikis now; they can actively write and contribute, or they can give lots of “F**k yeah, buddy”s.”

Huang: You need to own an NFT in order to write your Wiki and to vote. And when you vote, it generates DIC punch tokens that go into your wallet, and that allows you the ability to give “F**k yeah, buddy” to other people.

Huang: It’s a tough time to really bring people into the ecosystem. Because of everything that’s happened, there’s a fear, right? People are, like, what is this Web3 stuff? The only thing they have in their heads is, “Oh, there’s that crazy dude who just made billions of dollars just vanish.” That’s the headline that sticks.

Huang: And one of our goals was that entertainment would bring more people into the [Web3] ecosystem. The point of our project wasn’t to get degens involved. It was about creating an accessible project for people who loved animation, or loved entertainment.

And we also try to make a distinction. This is no knock on DeFi (decentralized finance), because we also think that DeFi has use cases, but the point is that we’re not DeFi. That’s not us. We’re not about flipping assets or investments. We’re about building the next-generation entertainment IP (intellectual property) and doing it through interactive storytelling and killer community experiences.

We wanted to show that regardless of what was happening in the industry, this is actually something that we are committed to. We fundamentally believe in the underlying technology and how it’s going to reshape entertainment. So we’re not going to fold “House Chico” for better weather. It’s, like, full steam ahead.

The DIC punches are still flying. The viewership on the series is up to 7 million views. Seven million views on the content, and that’s really driven by 5,000 token holders. So the reach multiplier is super high. And I think that only comes when you have people who are super active and engaged, because we’ve spent zero on marketing. This is all grassroots.

When we last spoke, you guys were still in the early stages of figuring out how this whole thing is monetized. I know you’re still in early days, and still focused on storytelling, community building and experimentation. But do you have any more clarity on monetization?

Attanasio: We are looking at doing more spinoffs in “The Gimmicks” world, but all those would have to tie to the core theme, which is generally “South Park” meets sports. We started with wrestling, but we’ll probably do some spinoffs that are maybe more fan focused, or related to other types of sports.

Attanasio: We have this stat, that the average “Gimmicks” token holder spends 15 to 20 hours per week in the community. That’s DIC punching, it’s writing Wikis, it’s interacting with other community members.

People just want to be more involved. They want to be interactive. And there are just more creators in general, or people who aspire to be a creator, and they’re willing to spend that kind of time with characters that they really love. So we can’t predict exactly what it will look like, but we do think that this is the future of storytelling.