On-Chain Storytelling: From Lootverse to full-chain games, a collective storytelling experiment

Image source Loot Survivor

Table of contents

1. Introduction: Loot's "Narrative Device"

2. Scarcity: the investment value of Loot’s early economy and stories

3. Lootverse as the content layer of AW

Appendix I

Appendix II

1. Introduction: Loot’s “Narrative Device”

"Collaborative storytelling" was supposed to be a more natural state of storytelling. Before the beginning of the letter history, the narrator is hidden behind the story, and the story grows and evolves at an untestable speed every time it is told. In the historical ghosting of the dynamic narration, those plots that were finally fixed formed the narrative world of the tribe in the eyes of people at that time. It was a world that was originally permissionless, everyone participated, and stories could be combined.

Timshel defined Loot in a tweet as a "massively-multiplayer collaborative world-building experiment," a collective narrative experiment. **In collective narrative, a very important element is "narrative device". **

**Creating NFT is, to a large extent, creating a "narrative device". ** Someone once said that Loot is a "perfect writing", as it stipulates eight categories and five eras, it is a minimalist narrative starting point. This is also an explanation for the degeneration of jpg NFTs to txt NFTs: image NFTs do not have much text depth, and most of them are just a statement, "worldly, yet carefree" (borrowed from Venkatesh); while txt NFTs do not even have a statement , leaving more space. Rich media is not necessarily more effective in creating narrative devices, the message it conveys is stronger, but not necessarily more inspiring.

What problems might be encountered with collective narratives? Is there some kind of "core"? Back to the real epic: The study of Homer's epic once produced a "fundamental revolution" at the beginning of the last century, and the initiator of this revolution was Millman Parry. He laid the foundation for the study of oral tradition, and summarized some formulas and epithets that recurred in oral traditions into a certain "formula". Going back to Timshel’s definition of Loot in parallel, although this “world-building experiment” is on the chain, the challenges it faces are still roughly similar to those of previous collective narratives: how to end the story line; Conflicts; what "formula" to use to build similar world expansions, etc.

This could have been a very wonderful story of the birth of a modern (antique) epic, but at the beginning, the script didn't go the way it was written. The real-life Lootverse first hit the speculative market in general, before the issues within the narrative were resolved. Story elements in the market first become speculative targets, and only secondarily become part of a scene in the story-world. The "core story" has a one-to-one correspondence with the asset value. So, here comes the next part: the story of Loot's early economy.

2. Scarcity: the investment value of Loot’s early economy and stories

Loot Early Economy

* *

In a Loot Eco chart drawn by dom in the early days, it can be seen that the beginning of the Loot economy is a "rarity explorer". As a kind of "story economy", scarcity is almost decisive for the operation of Lootverse: people are more interested in the order of rarity than the story itself. In other words, Loot's story and ip creation is a meaning production mechanism in the Loot ecosystem, while sorting and hyping the scarcity of Loot and its derivatives is a meaning consumption mechanism. And consumption prematurely overtakes production.

Loot does not have its own official token, and core contributors rarely get the same rewards as other development teams. But around the concept of scarcity, Loot ecology has a lot of derivatives from the very beginning, based on the part written in the Loot contract, and also based on the imagination of community members in each branch. They have been made into various exquisite Google sheets according to their own scarcity. These extremely rich charts constitute the most important output of Loot in the first few months. **In the initial bubble era of the Loot universe, where the scarcity is, the core story will be there; where the core story is, the assets will flow. In this prematurely formed closed loop, assets have become the ultimate guide for most participants, and the story is just a "middleware". **This leads to a community mentality that is fundamentally different from similar co-creation/co-op IPs or traditional literary experiments at the outset.

Abundance mentality and scarcity mentality in the community

Will Papper, as a deep participant and stakeholder in Lootverse, has a very thorough discussion on this:

When Loot first launched, the builder had an Abundance Mindset and wanted to get people involved and create a really strong ecosystem. There was this mentality in the early days of Adventure Gold as well. Then at some point this abundance mindset turns into a Scarcity Mindset. I think the turning point was the launch of More Loot.

What exactly is the abundance and scarcity mindset? Take Synthetic Loot and More Loot (mLoot) as examples. Synthetic Loot is a creator-friendly Loot, which is equivalent to the SBT of the Loot ecology and cannot be circulated. As a tradable NFT, More Loot is an "inappropriate" inflation. When Lootverse does not have a solid enough community and story foundation, it dilutes the interests of community members who already own OG Loot.

Will believes that fundamentally "inflation can keep everyone's interests aligned" and promote the development of the community with a mentality of abundance rather than a scarcity mentality. However, manual inflation control is performed during the bubble period, which is extremely sensitive to the community sentiment at that time It's catastrophic. The rewards are diluted and the player is out.

Infrastructure "Empty House"

From another perspective, why the Lootverse was over-speculated before it matured has nothing to do with the "collective narrative", but has to do with Web3's own obsession with the word "infrastructure": infrastructure is always more important than applications here. To be more "investible". Nader tweeted after the ETHCC not long ago, commenting that almost everyone he met was "building infrastructure" and waiting for others to use it. JK commented that this is because the infrastructure can generate more wealth - "Though what we really need are applications to prove more crypto use cases."

As a "decentralized story infrastructure", Loot fell into the same predicament as other infrastructures in the early days: too much "metadata" and too few "scenes".

The real scarcity is world-building

Creating enough storylines to get back to what Will calls the "abundance mentality" of co-creation (rather than a scarcity-driven speculative game) was a whole new challenge for the core Loot community. This challenge has been easily bypassed before due to the influx of speculators. But the good thing is that only co-creation that points to enough story scenes is really what Timshel and dom originally called "Collaborative world-building." It's the world-building process itself.

**The reason why this experiment is unprecedented at the level of collective narrative is that its success will exponentially increase the complexity of the text, forming a complex landscape that a single story can never achieve. **Timshel's AI can create a single story, but cannot create a universe with every community member's notch. The success of Lootverse may just provide the shortest path for people in the AI era to go beyond a "single work" through "joint works": The folds inside a single story can always be learned and reproduced, but the stories formed together cannot Reproducibility comes from each person embodied. Storytelling without human participation will always tell "stories of the past" (batch reorganization or low-level emergence in existing databases), whereas in the Lootverse we are finding ways to tell "stories of the future" (collective creation emergence).

The key question then becomes: **Where to find the next real story scene? **

3. Lootverse as the content layer of AW

Content form of autonomous world

An empty autonomous world (autonomous worlds) is like this: digital physics (digital physics) constitutes the basic principles of this world; the game engine gives each developer a sufficiently low development cost; and the identities of developers, creators, and players Unify (inhabitants) in this world.

Now, all that is missing from our autonomous world is the content layer. The value of the Lootverse is that it offers, for the time being, almost the only fully native story for this self-contained world. As a "bag of seeds" in the autonomous world, wherever Loot and its derivatives are decentralized, a new story may emerge.

This seed corresponds to different future forms:

1. In text form;

2. Static/dynamic non-interactive media forms;

3. Interactive media form.

Among them, the third is the game in a broad sense, which is also the latest scene of Lootverse. It's dangerous to bet on another A Song of Ice and Fire in the Lootverse, but it's quite natural to bet on a Lootverse with lots of good games. As a kind of "collective narrative", full-chain games have actually changed the nature of narrative, making it fundamentally different from previous oral literature traditions. **The full-chain game makes a story have no "end", so there is no need for the classic transition, there is no result, only the process. This brings up an important feature: **"Interactivity" is mentioned very high.

The most interactive form: full chain game

The stronger the interactivity, the stronger the player's sense of participation, the more people will remember the story, and the more important the story will be. In terms of interactivity, games are better than IP-style NFTs, and better than pure text descriptions. Bibliotheca DAO initially regards the full-chain game as an "eternal game" (as can be seen from the name "Eternum"), ** What a game without the possibility of "clearance" is a thorough Narrative seriousness. ** Interacting with unpassable interactions in an unending game, this behavior is very much like life itself, which is why Ludens uses "Mars" as a metaphor for the autonomous world, and the Topology team calls it "on-chain reality" (On-chain reality).

**An interactive Lootverse is the most achievable imagining of an autonomous world we can currently imagine. **Many full-chain game works have been derived from Lootverse, as follows: The Crypt Game; Bibliotheca DAO's Realms: Eternum, Loot Survivor; and Dope wars, etc. Among them, the Realms series originated from the terrain setting in Lootverse, and it is also one of the most recognized full-chain games derived from Loot.

Interactivity also means that the importance of social interaction in games has been raised to a higher level. The proposition of "decentralization" has not been consistently implemented in the Web3 world, but in the whole chain of games, decentralization is a necessary proposition. *As a result, the full-chain game puts forward a rigid new demand for infrastructure, that is, a trustless communication solution. **Currently, infrastructure service providers that provide trustless communication solutions for full-chain games include Web3MQ, etc. With trustless solutions, we're going from an era of "someone will always know who's a werewolf in this game" to an era of "no one in IRL knows who's a werewolf".

LDK and Autonomous World Infrastructure

The first-mover advantage in the full-chain game IP is not the main advantage of Lootverse. The more compatible aspect of the Loot ecology and the autonomous world is that it has formed its own LDK (Lore Development Kit). Like MUD and Dojo are game development engines, LDK is equivalent to the "narrative engine" (narrative engine, MovingCastles term) in collective narrative. In "LARGE LORE MODELS: Speculative Tools for Decentralized Narrative-Building" by dmstfctn, Eva Jager, and Alasdair Milne, it is also referred to as a collective writing plugin for the "Large Lore Model (LLoreM)". dmstfctn and others regard LLoreM as a real "autonomous world infrastructure" (for autonomous knowledge commons), and in the article regard it as the best way to combine human will to resist the flood of legends generated by GPT.

Specifically, the meta-timeline provided by Lootverse, the universal characters in Genesis Adventurers and the dungeon maps provided by Crypts & Caverns, as well as the eight thousand maps and their tribal distribution provided by Realms, all form part of LDK. **Based on composability, the emergence of LDK, Genesis Adventurers, Crypts & Caverns and other components makes world-building no longer a completely out-of-order, linear parallel process. ** Low-cost text creation can easily lead to chaos in the story universe, while high-cost game development faces the problem of background map alignment. LDK, with the advent of generic character and map components, is a neutral solution to this problem. In the current on-chain world, it is difficult for us to imagine a new possibility of building an LDK with sufficient recognition from scratch. **Loot LDK is the best story engine available in the entire blockchain world at this stage. **

*Reference for trustless communication solutions serving the whole chain of games:

Appendix I

Appendix I is a relatively light-hearted part, which connects some plain text experiments (many of which failed) past and present, and is also a tribute to the writers who participated in the creation of the early Lootverse. In the pre-full chain game/self-contained world period, Lootverse contributors carried out the initial meaning cultivation in this universe with little or no financial compensation:

• Dozens of authors contributed to writing Lootverse stories in three rounds of the Genesis Scroll writing competition held by Open Quill. These works are currently available on the Loottalk forums.
• The Banners team created a 23-chapter novel The Painter, based on creative experiments with Open Quill. This work is currently available on Royalroad.
• ……

Collective writing experiments are not uncommon in history: In the 1980s, a group of writers and artists in Seattle, inspired by "Invisible Cities", created a collective writing project named ** "Invisible Seattle"** , visit the streets, let Seattle write the novel in the name of the whole city. After four years of publication, the novel is rich and heavy, providing a slice of the times. In the 2000s, there was a Kyushu government in China. In 2021, during the hottest period of Loot, some professional writers also started collective writing experiments such as **"Realms of Ruins"**, but with the astonishing resistance of traditional publishing circles and traditional readers (in the form of NFT is harmful to the climate as the main point of attack) and ended badly. Because of the majors I studied in the past, I have also participated in several group writing experiments, including offline semi-closed writing, but most of them ended up with irreconcilable opinions, or the result of the overall output being less than the sum of the parts.

The avant-garde nature of pure text experiments is often earlier than other art forms, and the efforts and failures made at the level of "collective narrative" tend to accumulate more. A very internal question is involved here: Is the composability of text the same as the composability of development components? Is there a "plug and play" "story decoration"? A continuous "world" often means that every element in it has the possibility of linkage, which provides doubled information intake pressure for subsequent writers. Later creators create, just like foreigners writing Township records.

But before the birth of the full-chain game, when people took the brand-new form of Loot and didn't know what to do, they still adopted this oldest form of creation. The various unresolved issues contained in this form of creation, as well as the results of the issues, were summarized by one author as Loot's "Frankenstein Book":

But the result was a kind of Frankenstein’s monster that was less than the sum of its parts. You can write a new smart contract that attempts to join the pieces together, but as soon as someone wants to add a new piece to the stack you might have to start over… “Being future-proof is sort of difficult.”

Frankenstein is a monster in the history of literature, but every history of science fiction cannot avoid "Frankenstein". Disorderly or not, the Lootverse's experimental mettle has forged its own proof on-chain.

Appendix II

A DC History of the Lootverse

The following timeline is from the author's chronological arrangement of all announcements after reading the historical news of the Loot Discord community.

2021/9/1

dom made the first announcement on Loot Discord

2021/9/3

Lootproject.com was founded.

2021/9/4

The Loottalk.com forum is established. It subsequently became the main distribution location for Lootverse text stories and contests.

2021/9/15

Loot Improvement Proposal (LIP) is the first post on snapshot.

2021/10/19

Announcement Loot Alliance acts as community representative and Lootproject site administrator.

2021/10/29

Announces item level order and properties found directly from the OG Loot contract.

2021/11/10

First Loot Town Square.

2022/2/26

Loot.foundation is released, functioning as the semi-official documentation for Loot.

2022/4/2

Hyperlootproject.com launch announcement. Two days later, Hyperloot went live.

2022/4/21

The Genesis Scrolls announcement. As a collection of stories for the Lootverse, a call for authors has begun. Openquill Foundation website announcement.

2022/6/3

Timshel released Loot Deck, defining Loot as "on-chain scaffolding for a massively-multiplayer collaborative world-building experiment."

2022/6/8

Lootverse Eco Grants program launched.

2023/4/5

HyperLoot: CC0 Wars movie trailer released.

2023/5/31

Loot Survivor announcement.

Finally, I would like to thank Kaspar for his original article "Wanzi Penmo, A Peep at the Peak of Chain Game Forms from Dark Forest and Loot: Games on the Whole Chain" and the natural introduction, which gave me an initial impression of Loot and my interest in continuing to explore. Thanks also Creators, developers, and players who have been building in the Loot ecosystem. I wish the Loot chain game ecology better and better.