Communities and the storytelling revolution
Long live the novel: community owned and led storytelling is a revolution in how we tell stories; it's carried by web3.
“The novel is dead, long live the novel.” Or so the cliché-ists are prone to pronouncing. But in a sense it’s true: what society demands from a novel is changing. Jonathan Franzen recently admitted that he had redefined his definition of a novel to include serial cable TV, “because it became so striking how (shows like The Sopranos and Mad Men) were finding their way back to the serial novel form that Dickens and Dostoyevsky used.”
There’s much to be said for the decline of the novel, including repeated cries that we are mistaking renaissance for decline, or that novelists, borne from the word novelty, live in fear of becoming unoriginal, such that these cries are overblown; the boy crying wolf.
But wolves exist: I think everyone senses the sea change brought by the internet — that vast tempest of uncurated media — upon print and prose. Ross Douthat bemoans the death of the “Last Great American Novelist”; Will Self warns that “this time it’s for real”. Joyce Carol Oates regrets the subsumption of Woolf to the wolf, which bears teeth comprised of tales lacking substance and books of auto(biographical) fiction. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that since 2003, the time spent reading for pleasure by the average American has fallen by over 20%.
There are many diagnoses. Douthat’s view at its core is a conservative one: “the (apparent) exhaustion of the Western mind”. Mary Ann Sieghart implies that the genuine male reticence to read novels by women means we are missing the contemporary wave of great writers. Moreover, we, in part, want literature to capture the social context of our time. But as Julian Lucas writes in a recent Bookforum contributors’ reflection on what is missing from contemporary fiction (emphasis added):
“Novelists used to moonlight as psychologists, sociologists, and all-purpose explainers, wielding an authority that the specialization of knowledge has largely discredited.”
War and Peace is no longer a go-to-guide for understanding early 19th-century high society, nor what happened at Borodino. Others argue that writing itself became specialised: in an effort to carve out its own area of academic legitimacy, writing became numb. Though perhaps this is more symptom than cause.1
The idea behind “long live the novel” is that after its ‘death’, the novel in some way lives on. In his own explanation for the rise of TV, Franzen adds that “people had been born after that form had died, but there was still a natural hunger for it (engaging serial books, à la Dickens).” Where has that hunger taken us, and where next?
Video games as literature: reader-led storytelling
I hate the word gamification. It’s a tacky and temporary take for the simple, ongoing art of making something more engaging. But this is not to say that it’s powerless — video games engage people in completely new and deeper ways. They warrant respect as a potential cultural medium all on their own, but in earning this status, video games, like television, have absorbed and augmented much of what makes a good novel so captivating.
Of course, this does not apply to all games. Candy Crush is not Chaucer. But we know just as well as Oates that not all novels are good either. The point is not that video games and novels are the same, it is that there is considerable overlap which suggests that the hunger noted by Franzen could take people to video games.
We find this overlap when we find games and literature that takes us on a journey; when we explore ethical mirrors held up to society, when we consume moving commentary on the state of the world, when we relate to a character’s progression. Such themes appear in print or PlayStation. In a book you dive into a fantasy world, or a new interpretation of your own, and become immersed in the story.
But video games are just the same. Indeed, some are exploring their synthesis. In 2015, the British writer Iain Pears published Arcadia, a novel released with an app that let readers follow whichever storylines they pleased, subtly altering the cause-and-effect of the plot depending on the reader’s choices of what to read and when. Similarly, Erik Hoel analyses the now ‘ancient’ (read: 20th-century) games Planescape and Torment:
“Everyone knows all the best parts are just probing the weirdos who inhabit the strange world, learning the lore, having philosophical conversations, and interacting with your companions” — Erik Hoel
Erik adds that the depth of these video games – the things that bring them towards parity with the novels that you passionately recommend to others – can be defined as simply this: the chance to choose your own philosophical novel. They embody realism about the world just as novels integrate social analysis within a fictional universe. He continues: the reward for games which sacrifice the fantasies of magic swords and flashing lights (the gamification against which I viscerally react), is “commentary, emotionality, lifelike characters … that’s what literature does”. These are not just games.
But of course, the medium is the message. Video games are also different. The aspect of gamification that is more palatable is the opportunity for readers to make consciousness playable. In Planescape, you are “constantly running into previous versions of yourself in the form of your past lives that you have no memories of, and this interrogates your personality.” Such an approach is more highbrow, but the constant theme is exploring your own fantasy life. You were in the story before, but now you’re writing your own.
Through contriving amnesia that lets the player forget a backstory that might otherwise constrain them, players have enormous freedom to explore and tell a story that is entirely their own. When it comes to exploring our external world or our internal mind, games that we might compare to 'great’ literature should do both, but there is enormous scope for gamified stories that only do one or the other. Indeed, video games are just one medium, one spectrum within a broader set. The shift is reader-led storytelling, not just player-led.
Community-led storytelling
I’ve written about the vibe shift to community-led experiences recently, so it’s no surprise to me that people have created their own stories as communities too. I haven’t even reached the point where I plug web3 yet either.
Instead, it starts on Twitch, with Artificial: Next, which doesn’t have as many magic swords or flashing lights as you might expect. Instead, viewers are invited to join one of two teams led by fictional2 tech rivals Sebastian Wu and Zander Cruz “as they fight for their AI’s dominance — aided and abetted by you, the audience.”
This isn’t a show description, it’s a manifesto: “Work with your team to bring your AI to victory by voting in faction-specific polls, designing a team strategy, and using channel points to upgrade your team...or sabotage your enemy. Which faction will you join?”
And we’re reminded in no uncertain terms about what this is, and is not:
“This is NOT a choose-your-own-adventure. It is not a game for an individual — it is an experience shared by the Twitch audience as a collective. Everyone watching has the opportunity to influence the story’s direction by joining a faction, redeeming channel points for bonus features, asking questions, voting on polls, participating in special world-building episodes, and much more!” (emphasis added)
Combining community with reader-led storytelling is not a new medium, it’s a lot broader than that. It’s a completely different technique of engaging with your audience, stretching across mediums and genres.
Community-owned storytelling
When a community tells its own story, whose story is it? One of the basic principles of web3 is the idea that you can own digital assets, like an avatar or a photograph, in the same way you own physical assets: outside the ecosystem in which you originally bought them. Owning digital assets before web3 is a bit like buying a house on Rightmove or Zillow, and every time you want to do something with your house, you need to do it through them. Instead, this ownership is backed up by national governments who enforce property deeds that apply regardless of platform, customer, or client. On YouTube, everything you do with your videos on the platform can be vetoed by YouTube. Instead, your ownership rights are backed up by blockchain that applies universally and irrevocably.
At the moment, a lot of people are using the technology to build infrastructure that lets people tell stories that communities can own. Jenkins the Valet is a great example in two ways. This is a project built by Tally Labs, a web3 company whose mission is to “blur the lines between community and creators”. Almost 7,000 passes to the Writer’s Room have been sold to people who want to build the story around Jenkins and his friends, and their adventures in a collection of different universes. Together, they sketched the book by voting on 30 “world-building and plot defining questions”, and it was written up by NYT bestseller Neil Strauss. In turn, the book, Bored and Dangerous3, creates more lore and stories, leveraging intellectual property (IP) that is owned by community members.
Storyverse is another web3 company pursuing similar ambitions in, yes, gaming. They help IP owners (such as of NFT art projects) create their own community-based stories that can inspire new tales and new community-owned intellectual property. Indeed, the second reason that Jenkins the Valet is a great example is that it was initially built upon an existing NFT project, leveraging IP associated with the Bored Ape Yacht Club: proof of concept in terms of how community-owned stories and IP can be the foundations upon which engaging ecosystems can be built.
IP owners in the Jenkins community can go on to create their own story ecosystems, and so forth, and they will succeed if they create genuinely engaging stories with their community. One co-founder of Tally Labs goes by the name Safa. They draw a now-familiar contrast between web2 and web3:
“Disney, the most famous web2 media business, is built on protecting their IP at all costs. When the Bored Apes came around and offered commercial rights to holders, an entirely new mindset emerged” — Safa, founder of Tally Labs
Runner is a great example beyond the controversy-plagued Bored Ape ecosystem. Founded by Hollywood stalwarts Bryan Unkeless, Cedric Nicolas-Troyan, Bryce Anderson, and Blaise Hemingway, the project’s ambitions span comic books, profile pictures, video games, and eventually a TV show.
As a team, they cover everything: Bryan co-produced The Hunger Games and founded Clubhouse Pictures, where Bryce, who used to work in creative development at Warner Bros., works as a production executive. Meanwhile, Cedric is an award-winning director, whilst Blaise is a relatively successful writer and producer who spent many years making stories on the Disney Animation Story Trust.
And again, what’s exciting about the project, which gives “limited commercial licenses” to its community, is the potential to branch out into a plethora of other stories. As Bryce puts it, “we wanted to create a world where 10,000 stories could be told.” His introductory blog post basically covers this entire essay: community members will vote on the creative direction and it’ll be characterised by “fan and creator-driven storytelling” (though I think ‘community-owned’ is much more concise). Cedric adds, “we tell the story of a dozen people in it, but there are millions of people in this world. If you want to play in it and tell other stories, please do” (emphasis added).
As Kevin Smith emphasises: “this is where they’re letting you tell a story”.
Many other organisations have caught onto the fact that community-owned storytelling captures a sweet spot when it comes to engaging your audience. Giving your community a stake in stories that they design themselves allows creators to develop niche, dedicated communities that people love to be involved in. DuskBreakers is a project led by the people behind Artificial: Next, creating storytelling lore experienced through games, video, comics, and profile picture collections, about a fictional 2040s. Stoner Cats, backed by Mila Kunis’ production agency, is similar.
In both, members of the community make key creative decisions about how the story develops and have a genuine, influential stake. As models, they’re both distinct from Jenkins, Runner, and Storyverse because they only offer non-commercial rights for the IP owned by the community, meaning we won’t see such a broad storytelling ecosystem, but this means that the DuskBreakers-Stoner Cats model lends itself particularly to the idea of niche, dedicated communities building stories, since these ecosystems won’t broaden out.
As an approach, this is equally relevant and is common across web3. Martin Scorsese’s executive producer Niels Juul has co-founded NFT Studios to house a community-owned organisation, KinoDAO, that makes films, whilst Julie Pacino’s feature film Keepers of the Inn is involving thousands in creative decisions.
These aren’t all community-owned to the same extent, but they serve to illustrate the broad applicability of community storytelling. It allows creators to build deeper levels of engagement with niche, dedicated communities, and by synthesising this with broader forms of community ownership, they can encourage community members to govern and create exponentially large storytelling ecosystems. Through this, web3 will carry a revolution in how we tell stories.
Edit, August 27th: how can you forget Pixel Vault as one of web3’s leading storytelling organisations! I don’t know; ask June’s Leo.
Additional reading
Culture3.xyz, my magazine exploring how web3 artists, builders, and communities are developing the future of the internet.
Fiction in the Age of Screens, a long Erik Hoel essay on ‘how today’s novelists cope with their HBO anxiety’.
The Vision for Runner, Bryce Anderson explains the vision behind a leading community storytelling ecosystem.
Community and the niche market vibe shift, my essay on why brands and creators that build for niche and dedicated communities will win the 2020s.
Anxious not to expose myself for masquerading on the wrong side of the great divide, I shall not foray through these explanations for the apparent demise of the novel. Indeed, following Huyssen himself, I will do my best to assume that such a divide between ‘high art’ and ‘marketised culture’ does not really exist. After all, everything is subject to the market.
Not fictional for long though; expect just the characters in the AI race to change.
The name Bored and Dangerous speaks volumes about our culture in itself.