Top-Down vs Bottom-Up Fiction Using NFTs
A good story makes you feel something. Having ownership over the story makes those emotions stronger. Telling fiction with NFTs can be a powerful way to tell stories: both old and new.
Projects have been exploring this intersection the past few months. There is a tendency, however, for projects to take a more top-down approach while NFTs can & should explore bottom-up storytelling as a new medium.
Top-down fiction is what’s being told to us. It’s when you go watch Star Wars in the cinema or play a new role-playing game from Bethesda. Bottom-Up fiction is what we invent stories about the fictional world on our own. It’s when you’ve bought the lightsaber and you are running around in your yard making fuzzy whoosh noises, force throwing tennis balls at your dog. It’s when you roleplay in World of Warcraft at the local tavern outside Stormwind.
In this article, I want to share what this looks like in practice with NFTs and where I see this going into the future.
Top-Down NFT Fiction Projects
These are examples where the primary purpose is to use the medium to tell a story TO an audience. It does contain examples of contributions and interaction from fans, but the primary story is still being directed by the person/group/DAO/business that created it.
Top-down fiction can take the form of direct literature in an NFT.
Excerpts of Gridlock (Dec 2020)
This is from my own attempt at direct literature NFTs. These are excerpts of my debut novel, Hope Runners of Gridlock. You can also see more of my initial thoughts here on NFT Collectibles for Authors.
A story chain from Kalen Iwamoto’s “Few Understand” series.
There’s a burgeoning scene of poetry as well, adding in spoken word and visual elements!
A spoken word poem with visual elements from Artemis Wylde. Couldn’t embed the video here, so please click through and watch it!
A new slate of projects, however, have come aboard where the purpose is to tell fiction happens outside of the NFTs. In these examples, the NFTs are items, elements, or characters from the story itself. In some sense, these projects treat the NFTs as sellable merchandise. It’s a new form of crowdfunding (either pre or post sale). Because these projects also include abilities for choose-your-own-adventure or contributions, it’s more in the middle between top-down and pure bottom-up fiction.
Stoner Cats sold over $8 million of stoned cats. Alongside it will be an animated series following the adventures of these cats. Holders will be able to vote & co-create on some of the stories.
Similar to Stoner Cats, fans could buy horses from the upcoming animated series. They also are experimenting with a community writer’s room and talent fund (if your breed appears in the showe, you earn from it).
Similar idea. Animated series + some ability to influence the story + 3D collectible.
Aku follows the story of a young black boy that wants to become an astronaut. His space helmet allows him to explore many worlds. It’s being released in chapters, actual video snippets as NFTs. It’s been optioned to be produced into a feature film.
Shilling my own project here. Untitled Frontier produces free sci-fi and sells digital merchandise from the stories in the form of NFTs. We do plan on incentivizing more bottom-up storytelling in time.
Pills is a narrative wrapper around Ethereum, adding some colour to the projects and people that exist around it. Pills owners can vote and contribute to content. In some cases, they’ve explored doing ‘quests’ that’s unique experiences where fans actually engage with Ethereum to add to the story and narrative.
A magical project, where fans co-create a story + music together. An example: https://zora.co/songcamp/4280
Bottom-Up Fiction Projects
While these top-down projects aim to facilitate interactivity and contributions, it’s all still primarily ‘sanctioned’ or ‘canonised’ by the project itself. Bottom-up storytelling exists when, in an unsolicited manner, fans take ownership over an NFT and imbue it with their own fiction. It’s more than just allowing fans to vote or contribute content.
This is what’s new and interesting about embedding NFTs into fiction. Unlike other mediums before, it more directly allows fans to not just commit emotional time into world-building, but also potentially see commensurate financial reward for doing so. Fan fiction isn’t new, and in the past, we’ve seen some succeed on grand scales. Fifty Shades of Grey started as Twilight fan-fiction. The Redemption of Time started out as fan-fiction to Liu Cixin’s popular “Remembrance of Earth’s Past” trilogy and eventually was published as canon. This is, however, exceedingly rare. There’s a huge long tail of fan fiction that stays just that. From published works to kids inventing their own characters in their backyards.
What NFTs bring to the table is the ability to add story & provenance to an NFT as part of a fictional universe. If successful, it can actually bring forth value to that writer. An analog example would be the following: a fan buys a lightsaber from a store, modifies it a bit, and then starts to write a story specifically for that lightsaber. If the fan-fiction is a success, they can sell that lightsaber as a deluxe merchandise offering representing the story they added to the world. As you can see: cumbersome in the analog world.
NFTs more readily allow ownership + provenance. It can elevate fan fiction as a core offering merging into a new medium that’s somewhere between merchandise + fanfic + investment + ownership. Imagine being able to buy/own Obi-Wan Kenobi and adding to the character’s story. Social media users donning their avatar NFTs are proto-examples of these commitments. Jay-Z’s CryptoPunk has new provenance that simply comes from him ‘wearing’ it on Twitter. There’s not any fiction being produced here, but part of the story comes from meta-interplay as well. His CryptoPunk has accrued more value merely because he owned it.
Here are some early examples of bottom-up storytelling, where fans take over of an NFT and add new stories to it outside of the original project.
An interesting experiment that tells stories using CryptoPunks. To read the comic, you need to own one of 10,000 NFTs. There’s an additional mechanic that allows fans access to DAO if they choose to ‘burn’ their comic.
Probably my favourite example. A team chose a specific Bored Ape to represent a ‘valet’ that’s on top of all the stories coming from the ‘yacht club’. Fans can purchase writer room NFTs to contribute to a story that will also end up being a 1/1 NFT. Many layers here, but the primary interesting part is this specific ape has accrued broad new provenance and story.
While not explicitly adding new fiction, an alien cryptopunk bought by FlamingoDAO has been imbued with its own Twitter. This idea is also something that fuckintrolls want to incentivize.
A hat tip, a company/project to look out for, is Alethea. It allows NFT holders to add a GPT-3 character behind their NFT, allowing them to embed native and easy stories to their NFTs. It bridges them more readily into a fictional world.
Going Forward
There are likely more examples of bottom-up storytelling happening besides Twitter users donning their profiles with avatar NFTs, but it’s still broadly not pursued. There’s a host of options here where fans can come together, buy an NFT of an existing project, give it some polish and shine with a new story, and then if successful, continue doing so, or sell the NFT again after investing their time and energy into it. Perhaps PartyBids can be a great way to start.
Figuring out how to foster bottom-up storytelling is not easy. It’s messy, emergent, and likely has some nasty pitfalls. Contributions can be poor quality or downright hateful. There’s a swath of the current crypto market that’s full of questionable memes that are not friendly to all members of society. That being said, there are pre-NFT examples of collaborative fiction projects that have succeeded. These aren’t new problems. I detailed some of this in a related, broader topic of finite vs infinite storytelling.
A big question as well surrounding these projects is the question of IP, and how to treat IP. Some of the top-down projects now and into the future will likely still try to retain power over the IP. But, I think this is long-term, the wrong approach. NFTs accrue value precisely because it can be embedded into new contexts and attract its own stories. If you limit any access, you merely close doors. Most of the value will accrue to the NFTs, not the IP. That being said, some projects will figure out how to effectively manage this middle-ground. It does seem like it will be much harder to navigate, however.
As Jay Springett replied. What you want is Permissive IPs and Power Fandoms. We’re faced with a new era of fiction & storytelling and I’m excited to see it all unfold! If I’ve missed any examples, do please share them!
