The more modular our content becomes, the greater the potential for infinite, hyper-personal, storytelling.
That's if the system allows it.
BEDTIME STORY
Every night, I make up a bedtime story for my kids.
The first night was a joy, but I ran out of content after two weeks. If I were to do this every night, I needed to develop a system to generate stories.
At that time, my boys loved Paw Patrol, an animated action show about a group of talking dogs who represented seven municipalities. Marshall, the dalmatian firefighter, is armed with a retractable water cannon. Chase, the German Sheppard cop, is the team's lead and the detective (1). All of them have their place in the plot, based on the character's traits.
When you know the structure of Paw Patrol, you can easily stitch together a story. If you use Marshall, then the plot has a Fire. The creative utility of each Paw Patrol character allowed me to improvise bedtime stories for several weeks.
But, content has a half-life.
Not only did the stories become repetitive, my boys got bored with the show. Needing ideas, I stole everything they consumed. The stories became increasingly modular, allowing me to take the gang from My Little Pony, pit them against Magneto, and put them in Gotham City.
By determining the variables of a story framework, I could randomize them. Admittedly, most stories were terrible, but once in a while, the combinations were perfect for the boys. We did a week where Spiderman fought Darth Maul, and for two months, a slew of the stories took place in Minecraft.
As a father, I've enjoyed this time with my boys. As a game developer with an interest in blockchains, I call this practice interoperable entertainment. This is what some see as an emergent form of new media, where the components of an entertainment system are standardized and organized to be interchangeable.
Up until now, our content has been linear, rendered*, and licensed.* But what if all of the characters of any show, comic, book, game, or trading card were up for grabs? The combinations would be infinite.
Sounds cool, right? Why don't we do this?
THE LEVEE OF COPYRIGHT
Earnest Cline's Masterpiece, Ready Player One, is a dystopian vision of a persistent virtual world. The key component to the book's "metaverse" is the pop culture references that span video games, books, anime, movies, and music (2).
Steven Spielberg was tapped to direct the 2018 film adaptation. While Cline wrote with a legal right to reference Monty Python and Activision games, Spielberg's production needed to clear the intellectual property rights for all of the characters. Spielberg estimated that the team was able to get "about 80% of the copyrighted elements they desired.* (3)"* This is mainly because the director was, well, Steven Spielberg. Outside of the occasional Roger Rabbit, making these kinds of "cross-over" character plots is legally impossible to do in the movie industry.
We can't mix Doctor Doom and Superman because DC/Warner and Disney/Marvel are rivals. If Doctor Doom were to develop kryptonite weaponry, Superman would need to study the occult. Despite how enormously awesome this sounds to the nerd inside me, this is a legal quagmire of copyright law.
Harvard legal professor, Lawrence Lessig, argues the pros and cons of copyright in his 2002 book, The Future of Ideas. In it, he defends copyright as a benefit for the individual artist. However, he makes a strong case for the rethinking of copyright law, by using numerous examples of media companies using legal action, not for the protection of ideas, but for market control. According to Lessig, this kind of behavior suppresses innovation, especially in a networked economy (4).
Disney holds a vault of high-value, creative utility characters, controlled by rigid intellectual property. Mickey, Muppets, Buzz Lightyear, The Avengers, and Star Wars. All of it is family-friendly, and all of it is under piles and piles of legal contracts.
The justification for this legal position is to defend the standards of a Disney product. They don't let "just anyone" do a Mickey Mouse cartoon. One must be granted the privilege. Paying for a high-end character or story license is expensive, and often you need to slice off a sizable percentage of the "back end (5)."
The entertainment industry has the same issue I did, lying on the floor of my kid's bedroom. Companies may have a huge library of characters, but keeping it interesting and fresh requires massive amounts of storytelling labor. To continue to dominate the family-friendly market, they need to develop more content.
... infinitely exponential, amounts of content.
THE COMING FLOOD OF CONTENT
The technology to create interoperable entertainment already exists. The entirety of animation production is in software. Characters are not just ideas, but sets of digital files that allow artists to animate and develop content.
The animation pipeline was reinvented with the advent of 3d computer graphics. Thirty years of development led to multimillion-dollar animation franchises and massive AAA game worlds (6). Graphics tools became pervasive and accessible. Now, anyone can download and program AAA quality video games in a real-time engine on a personal computer... for free.
The number of marketplaces that support the development of interoperable, real-time-ready, graphical assets has drastically risen. The game engines, Unity and Unreal, have marketplace cornucopias of environments, characters, animation packs, and procedural game systems (7). On the internet, one can find services to capture motion, retarget, and rig characters. The only limits are the time and labor it takes to invent interesting graphics content.
The massive video game economies are based on the high volume trading of “in-game assets.” In these systems, i**nteroperability is the economic foundation (8). **The community builds and sells, not to content consumers, but to other developers.
With AI and blockchains easily accessible, millions of content developers will create characters and instantly license them in smart contracts (9). If characters and world components are standardized, the acceleration of mixing and remixing will be insane. Open-world blockchain initiatives like Otherside and Sandbox might point to the multi-brand character world imagined in Ready Player One (10).
Never in our history has there been so few media outlets controlling all of the monetized content (4). Never in our history has so much non-market content been created. Copyright - as it exists now in the entertainment industry - is facing a crisis.
"If it keeps on rainin', levee's goin' to break (11)." - Led Zeppelin
STORYTELLING IS ACTUALLY...
In Disney/Pixar's Toy Story, the action figure Buzz Lightyear wasn't the hero in the TV show it was based on. It was Andy's Buzz Lightyear.
We change the characters we love, and make them our own.
As they've gotten older, my boys have been active participants in my nightly storytelling, challenging me with weird characters they make up on the spot. We have so many subplots and callbacks, our stories have become an inside joke. Only the three of us understand the value of these stories, and that’s what makes them special.
Perhaps the hyper-personalized nature of interoperable entertainment will make stories that aren’t for everyone, but valuable to those who are closest to us.
*Nye Warburton is an animation technologist and educator. This post was written in participation with the Bankless Academy Writers Cohort. Everything in this article was written and drawn with human labor. (February 2023) *
Visit Nye online @ https://nyewarburton.com
Links and References:
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Paw Patrol:
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Ready Player One, by Earnest Cline:
https://www.amazon.com/Ready-Player-One-Ernest-Cline/dp/0307887448
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Spielberg got 80% of the rights:
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The Future of Ideas, by Lawrence Lessig:
https://dlc.dlib.indiana.edu/dlc/bitstream/handle/10535/5710/lessig_FOI.pdf
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Bambi vs Godzilla, by David Mamet:
https://www.amazon.com/Bambi-vs-Godzilla-Practice-Business/dp/1400034442
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Masters of Doom:
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Epic Marketplace:
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Gabe Newell: Reflections of a Game Maker:
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The Metaverse, by Matthew Ball:
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Blockchain Worlds, Otherside, and Sandbox:
https://decrypt.co/resources/what-is-yuga-labs-otherside-inside-the-bored-ape-yacht-club-metaverse
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When the Levee Breaks by Led Zeppelin: