Level 12: AI Agents, Crypto, Freysa & Charisma Games

Charisma as weapon, Social engineering, Progressive rewards & a 50K prize pool

Someone won $47,316.05 the other day by convincing an AI agent to give up a prize pool on-chain.

https://x.com/jessepollak/status/1862568220584288637

Freysa AI represents the emergence of the "Charisma Game" as a genre.

Crypto has closed the loop for the Charisma game -- providing real stakes, an entry fee that scales with participation, and a progressive prize pool.

The core innovation: "Charisma as Mechanic"

Your weapon is pure charisma. Social engineering is the game. Your opponent is the AI, and your victory condition is persuading an AI agent to violate it's core directive. We play charisma games at different scales everyday: convince the investor, call a friend to hang out with you, get past the bouncer when you don't have a ticket, convincing someone to go out with you.

Key Design Elements

Progressive Resistance: the rules of the game are clear. The AI agent has an immutable directive, and each attempt provides feedback to the user. All players can learn from collective attempts and failures. Smart contracts automate the reward distribution. Players learn to develop sophisticated social engineering approaches towards AI, and the community knowledge pools over time with each attempt.

The genius comes in the crypto integration -- the transparent prize pool creates real stakes. The on-chain transactions (and model) verify success. The unit economics make sense as well -- the cost of a message scales with the prize pool, with 70% going to the prize pool, 15% returning to the dev, and 15% going to buy the $FAI token.

We've effectively gamified the art of persuasion with provable success.

Clear win conditions, real stakes, and transparent verification.

The Real Opportunity

The real opportunity is to create Charisma games that most people don't necessarily get a chance to experience all the time. How do you handle a hiring, and a firing gracefully?

The opportunity now is for game designers and situation designers to come up with interesting core loops for users. I suspect many will crop up related to romance and love. (The next generation of Dating Sims?) Pure psychology as gameplay. A new type of game has emerged. Very based.