A world requires more than just physics; it needs real people, their interactions, and stories. While engineers construct the physical framework for Autonomous Worlds, determine how AWs appear; we also need storytellers to keep the narratives flowing, determine how AWs persist.
"Collaborative storytelling" originally represents a more natural state of story development. Before the advent of recorded history, the narrator was hidden behind the story, and the story grew and evolved at an immeasurable pace with each telling. In the dynamic retelling of history, those plotlines that eventually settled formed the diegesis of the tribe in people’s eyes at the time. It was a primal world where no permission was needed, everyone could participate, and stories could be combined.
Timshel defined Loot in a tweet as a "massively-multiplayer collaborative world-building experiment," a form of collective narrative experiment. A crucial element in collective narratives is the "narrative device."
Creating NFTs is, in large part, about crafting a "narrative device." Someone once said that Loot is a "perfect writing prompt," much like its defined eight categories and five epochs, providing a minimalist starting point for narratives. This could also explain the regression from jpg NFTs to txt NFTs: image-based NFTs don’t offer much textual depth; they mostly present a statement, "worldly, yet carefree." In contrast, txt-based NFTs don’t even have a statement, leaving more room for interpretation. When it comes to creating narrative devices, rich media isn’t necessarily more effective. It may convey stronger information, but it isn’t necessarily more inspiring. In a manner akin to the revolutionary impact of the oral "formula" concept in the study of Homeric epics (Milman Parry), Lootverse also possesses the potential to form a unique narrative "formula" that serves as a scaffold for future storytelling.
This could have been a fascinating modern (retro) epic tale, but from the start, the script did not follow as it was written. Before the narrative’s internal issues were resolved, the real-world Lootverse had already been fully listed on the market and entered the speculative market. In the market, story elements first became speculative targets, then components of a scene in the story-world. The "core story" acquired a corresponding asset value. Hence, we arrive at the next part: the story of Loot’s early economy.
In a diagram of the Loot Ecosystem sketched by Dom in the early days, we can see that “rarity explorer” was at the very beginning of the Loot economy. Scarcity, as a form of “narrative economy,” is almost decisive for the operation of Lootverse: people are more interested in ranking rarity than the story itself. In other words, the creation of stories and IPs in Loot is a mechanism of meaning production within the ecosystem, while ranking and speculating on the scarcity of Loot and its derivatives is a mechanism of meaning consumption. And consumption has outpaced production prematurely.
Loot does not have its own official token, and core contributors seldom receive rewards equivalent to those of other development teams. However, revolving around the concept of scarcity, a great deal of derivatives appeared in the Loot ecosystem right from the start. These were based partially on the elements already inscribed in the Loot contract, as well as the imaginations of community members across various sub-narratives. They have been transformed into a variety of intricate Google spreadsheets based on their own scarcity. These highly detailed charts constitute the most significant output of Loot in the initial months. In the early bubble era of the Loot universe, wherever scarcity lay, there was the core story; and wherever the core story was, assets flowed. In this prematurely formed closed-loop, assets became the ultimate orientation for most participants, with the story merely serving as a "middleware". This led to a fundamental difference in the initial mindset of the community compared to similar collaborative IP creations or traditional literary experiments.
Will Papper, as a deep participant and stakeholder in the Lootverse, has a quite insightful discourse on this. He believes that when Loot was first launched, builders had an “abundance mindset,” hoping to invite people to participate and create a truly powerful ecosystem. This mindset was also prevalent during the early days of Adventure Gold. However, at some point, this “abundance mindset,” transformed into a “scarcity mindset.” He identifies the release of More Loot as the turning point — Synthetic Loot is a creator-friendly version of Loot, akin to the SBT of the Loot ecosystem, and it is non-transferable. On the other hand, More Loot serves as a transferable NFT, representing an "untimely" inflation. When the Lootverse community and narrative foundations are not yet solid, it dilutes the value for community members who already own original (OG) Loot.
Will believes that fundamentally, "inflation can align everyone’s interests", and advocates for the development of the community with an abundance mindset, rather than a scarcity mindset. However, manually controlling inflation during a bubble period can be disastrous for the extremely sensitive community sentiment at that time. When rewards are diluted, players may leave the game.