2 weeks Ago
Saro McKenna is the CEO of Dacoco GmbH and cofounder of Alien Worlds. The way stories are being told is changing. The internet, AI and blockchain have become the perfect ingredients for a new age of storytelling.
Now, it has become easier for more people to create art, stories and even videos using AI tools that are rapidly evolving and getting better every day. Disney’s CEO, Bob Iger, expressed concerns about managing AI and protecting copyright in an age when fans can generate and animate Disney’s beloved characters with ease. The company’s ex-supervising animator Aaron Blaise, meanwhile, said the gravest danger to animation was not AI but "an age-old threat: bad stories and bad management.
" Despite what some executives may think, there are arguments that fans should have the ability to create more content based on existing IPs, not less. Although the Star Wars spinoff The Acolyte received mostly positive reviews from critics, it garnered a mere 18% rating from fans on Rotten Tomatoes. This was due to what many viewed as breaches of established canon, revealing the deep attachment fans have to the original material and the potential to alienate long-time fans who feel protective of the narrative world they’ve invested in.
Exercising copyright is difficult, and the rise of social media only makes it harder. Because of this difficulty—and the heightened social engagement of fan communities online—some believe allowing fans to contribute to the universe could foster a more engaged and supportive fan base. We are starting to witness the emergence of a different kind of storytelling, one built around decentralized content franchises governed by creators and patrons.
Blockchain is at the heart of this nascent movement, though AI is also being woven into the process, helping communities scale content at an unprecedented rate. From Franchise To Autonomous Worlds We cannot talk about blockchain-based storytelling without discussing diegesis. Constituents of a story are diegetic, and for elements to become part of the canon, they must respect certain boundaries or introduction rules.
The cool thing about leveraging blockchain to tell stories is that the distributed ledger has clearly defined rule sets. Blockchain can, therefore, enforce diegetic boundary points; once something is brought on-chain (a character or an artwork, for example), it enters canon. In a fascinating essay , blockchains are described as "a type of substrate for worlds," as they "unambiguously hold the set of all diegetic entities within their state.
" These musings were published by the Autonomous Worlds Network (AWN), an ambitious organization that seeks to uncover and advance the plot of Autonomous Worlds, described as "digital planets" based on chain-enforced diegetic consensus. What we are contemplating here is a potential transition from corporate-controlled storytelling and intellectual property to community-owned and driven decentralized worlds. A separate essay published by AWN refers to the world-weaving potential of an "autonomous knowledge commons" that grants "noncentralized yet formalized access to both the means of narrative creation, linked to a permanent record of events, alongside the right to redeploy, or reseed, the results elsewhere.
" In other words, imagine the possibility that Star Wars was an Autonomous World, and you developed a riveting plot that the community agreed enriched the franchise. Your creations could be tokenized and integrated into the official mythology, and you could also retain the right to use your IP as you wish—in other games, a spinoff book, a television project or whatever the case may be. Several exciting ventures have already taken the Autonomous World concept and run with it.
Take the Loot Project, which describes itself as a collaborative media project connected by a set of intertwined games, lore, art and stories. In the Lootverse, a community of players comes together to build, interact, play and collect "Loot bag" NFTs of hunters, mages and warriors. These, in turn, can be used to participate in related on-chain worlds like Realms and The Crypt.
With decentralized world-building, users generate stories (often with the help of AI) and assign value to the diegetic constituents within it, while blockchain cements the diegetic boundaries. The question, then, is who rubber-stamps the lore? Well, that, too, can be decentralized through the use of DAOs. For example, in Alien Worlds, the virtual metaverse game I co-founded, decentralized player councils govern affairs on the game’s six planets, managing a treasury of Trilium (TLM) tokens, developing their own stories, funding game development, organizing community events and more.
Tokenized Storytelling And Decentralized IP In the past, game development was largely dominated by salaried developers working for studios, with publishers reaping the financial benefits from the games' success. With blockchain, NFTs and smart contracts, players themselves can capture that value, amplify their voices through involvement in DAOs and leverage AI to build the sort of mighty IPs previously only achievable by monied corporations. As Sasha Kapustina wrote in her 2022 essay " The Age Of Tokies ," "Tokenized storytelling is the artistic reflection and the cultural engine of the transition to a decentralized world.
The author is the community. The authorship is permissionless." In the case of Alien Worlds, strides are being made to decentralize the game further and put tokenized storytelling at the heart of the metaverse.
This concept of " tokenized lore " is simple: lore produced by players, governed by a decentralized community and approved by a DAO. Needless to say, this potent cocktail of blockchain, AI and community-driven IP is incredibly exciting, and a dynamic new age of content and media that is more connected, more decentralized and more empowering is coming into focus. Beyond games, what’s to stop a community from turning their IP into an animated series, a movie, a fashion brand and so much more? Even if media executives haven't realized it yet, I believe decentralized narratives and autonomous worlds are the future of storytelling.
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