Designing Collaborative Narrative Systems in Web3

“We are all storytellers. We all live in a network of stories. There isn’t a stronger connection between people than storytelling.” — Jimmy Neal Smith

A lot of projects are realizing that the ideal of web3 is far from the reality of web3. During the bull run, many projects launched under the assumption that their communities would self-organize with little guidance from leadership. This has turned out to be untrue, and those projects which have survived are the result of the grit, perseverance, and charisma of individual leaders.

As we move into the next phase of NFT storytelling projects, we need to learn how to build systems that decentralize leadership influence and encourage the community to take more value-generating roles. However, leadership can not simply hope this happens. It needs to be a conscious construction of two fundamental concepts: connection and collaboration.

Because if we are not telling this story together, these might as well just be digital jpg sales on web2. Let’s work toward making the ethos of web3 a reality. Let’s make genuine storytelling communities.

Connection: A Community Feel

Discord has become the go-to app for creating connection and community for most web3 projects. I would even go so far as to say that Discord is a necessary component of any web3 project. However, Discord has its drawbacks. It is really not a collaborative tool. It is a social tool which has been shoehorned into functioning for different purposes.

Collaboration: A Workshop Model and Mindset

1) Mindset: In order to co-create a narrative, communities will need to embrace a Workshop mindset in which concepts and peripheral narratives are never seen as “complete” until they are published in some form to an external audience, which may never actually happen. I think this is key. To tell collaborative stories requires immense complexity, which will often result in flaws of internal consistency in a world. If we view peripheral lore as canon, we run into issues of consistency. However, by viewing peripheral lore as continuous work-in-progress, we set ourselves free from the need to create a perfect narrative. This, in turn, should encourage more writers to write into the dynamic complexity of the world.

2) Model: As noted, Discord fills the role of connection very well; however, there is no current app that I am aware of that has filled the need for workshop style collaboration. As I mentioned, Discord can be (and has been) shoehorned to fill this role, but it feels clunky for the user. Perhaps it will evolve in order to better fill this role in the future. Twitter also fills this role, though, again, this is not its primary purpose. Ideally, some app (Discord or otherwise) would allow for the following mechanics/forums.

• Fodder Matcher: The mechanic that allows individual owners of NFTs to collaboratively craft stories based upon their story fodder. In effect, a fodder matcher. You may be matched with another owner who also has a chicken bone (as in the case of my Nuclear Nerd, Ton). There is no way to do this as far as I know right now.
• Story Chains: A mechanic to pass a story on to another participant. Nuclear Nerds have been using Discord to do this, but again, it is difficult and clunky in its mechanics. However, if done cleanly, you wind up with a “story circle” effect, in which each new writer picks up the narrative from the previous writer’s departure point. Discord is filling this role primarily right now.
• Independent Sub-plots: The ability to encourage sub-plots that branch off of the core narrative, but are not dependent upon, nor an influence upon, the core narrative. These sub-plots can occur chronologically or spatially independent of the core narrative. For example, Ton’s story is set chronologically within the Nuclear Nerds universe, but spatially independent of the core narrative: Ton is in New Jersey, whereas the core narrative is occurring out West. Individuals are taking on this task individually right now.
• Story Challenges: The ability to create and push out story challenges which others can fulfill. A mechanic for awarding prizes for these challenges would also be effective. Twitter is currently filling this role for the most part. Integration with Twitter in order to reach an external audience would be optimal.
• Live Workshops: Live writers workshops, led by community members, in which content is critiqued and worked over would be very effective in helping writers craft their stories. As this is an intimidating experience for many, the tone would need to be very informal, educational, and uplifting. Discord is filling this role now. Nuclear Nerds are doing very well with this.
• Embedded AI Generation: I think as this space advances, we will also see more and more “collaboration” with AI generators, both in text and image. This is a topic that will come up in various parts of this blog series, but suffice it to say that working through an AI generator is a form of collaboration that I think we should be taking advantage of.

For Struggling Projects:

The good news is that all of these things can be done with existing technologies, which precludes backend development. However, at the very least, struggling project leads can do the following:

AI Generated Fodder: Encourage your community to use both text and artwork generation programs. Give them the links, push them to the sites. Give your writers excesses of narrative fodder. You can even make starter prompts and visual art as inspiration for them. Post it in the Discord. Post it on your Twitter.

Storychains in Discord: Use Discord to start a storychain, then elect a community member to pick up the next part (or call for volunteers to do so).

Twitter Writing Challenges: Put out writing challenges to your community via Twitter (and Discord). Craft a narrative that leads to a community member having to solve some issue, confront some beast, or fulfill some question. Shoutout to Legends of Aurae for doing this very well.

Hold Town Halls/AMAs: In order for community to connect, they need to see leadership being willing to connect. Too many projects die because the leaders believe in the farce of web3 altruistic self-organization. These projects only organize around the structures you make available to them. So be deliberate about creating systems that encourage narrative collaboration. You need to be a collaborator too.