Web3 is best under­stood as a game, or a game of games. I don’t intend that as a dig: it’s a really good game! Vast and open-ended, deeply social, with lots of scores to tally … AND you can win real money?? I mean, that’s terrific.

The highest revenue NFT project to date, NBA Top Shot, has generated $200M in gross sales in just the past month while spending very little on marketing. It’s been able to grow so efficiently because users feel like owners — they have skin in the game. It’s true peer-to-peer marketing, fueled by community, excitement, and ownership. 

Modern video games like Fortnite contain sophisticated economies that mix fungible tokens like V-Bucks with NFTs/virtual goods like skins. Someday every internet community might have its own micro-economy, including NFTs and fungible tokens that users can use, own, and collect.

Games such as The Sims Series, and Second Life are designed to be non-linear and to depend on collective intelligence for expansion. This way of sharing is gradually evolving and influencing the mindset of the current and future generations.[117] For them, collective intelligence has become a norm.

The UNU open platform for "human swarming" (or "social swarming") establishes real-time closed-loop systems around groups of networked users molded after biological swarms, enabling human participants to behave as a unified collective intelligence.[140][141] When connected to UNU, groups of distributed users collectively answer questions and make predictions in real-time.[142] Early testing shows that human swarms can out-predict individuals.[140] In 2016, an UNU swarm was challenged by a reporter to predict the winners of the Kentucky Derby, and successfully picked the first four horses, in order, beating 540 to 1 odds.

The idea of collective intelligence also forms the framework for contemporary democratic theories often referred to as epistemic democracy.

People use tags to aid classification, mark ownership, note boundaries, and indicate online identity. Tags may take the form of words, images, or other identifying marks. An analogous example of tags in the physical world is museum object tagging. People were using textual keywords to classify information and objects long before computers. Computer based search algorithms made the use of such keywords a rapid way of exploring records.