Anticipation for Tokenized Lore has been building since we announced the concept late last year.
With the subsequent unanimous approval by Custodians of all six Planetary Syndicates, many are wondering what the development means for Alien Worlds and its community.
Let’s dive right in.
The Dawn of a New Era
Tokenized Lore is about empowering our players to build something special. It’s about giving Alien Worlds’ creators and contributors the autonomy to decide where the story goes next.
This paradigm shift is achieved by transforming the traditionally top-down creative model into a grassroots movement governed by transparent on-chain mechanisms. It’s not so much a case of tapping into the hive mind as letting the hive mind take over.
The stage for this innovation was set last year, when master storyteller Kevin J. Anderson – whose credits include Star Wars and the Dune prequel series – wrote foundational lore, providing an enticing framework upon which new Alien Worlds stories, characters, games, art, and other media can be built.
Since then, we have published a series of blog articles that break down all aspects of the new races, cultures, vehicles, and architecture, and appointed an official Scribe to oversee the Fandom website and review incoming lore contributions.
Targeted Community Grants were also unveiled, with specific programs dedicated to aspects like Lore Creation and APIs. In the case of the former, players have been busy submitting their own stories, with the best of them added to a GitHub library of content and entitling writers to a Galactic Hubs grant. The grant program also launched a $50,000 grant for game developers to build projects based on player-generated lore.
Elsewhere, a preview of what the expansion of our collaborative metaverse might look like came in the form of Starblind, an NFT-based comic produced by Lightning Works. Published on the Polygon blockchain and featuring nine tiers of rarity, the Galactic Hubs-funded comic featured a forging process, meaning collectors could combine two of the same tier to produce a higher-tier edition. An expanded Starblind sequel is currently in the works.
Now that the Tokenized Lore voting mechanism is going live later this year, the community can actually have a say in which stories become official canon. With every instance of canonized lore, the Alien Worlds mythology expands and diversifies.
It is difficult to overstate the significance of this mode of tokenized storytelling. Its launch will mean that the utility of the Trilium governance token has extended to governing something entirely new: an evolving transmedia franchise.
“Imagine if Star Wars basically told the whole world that you can come and make stuff for Star Wars now and make money off of it,” Starblind creator Geoff McCabe told CoinTelegraph in April. “It’s way ahead of its time, so it’s going to be difficult for people to understand the importance of this until three or four years from now.”
As we all know, these IPs represent multibillion dollar industries and it is our firm belief that the next great content franchise will be built by a community, rather than a corporation. In truth, decentralized communities already call the cultural tune; consider the hashtags, memes and powerful movements that organically bloom on social media without any corporate involvement.
By bringing voting mechanisms to the storytelling world, patrons can become personally involved in the creative process and effectively contribute to the IP. The levers of power are not wielded by centralized entities but by a global network of fans and followers.
In the case of Alien Worlds, that network consists of players of the mining game (9.5 million active wallets) and other mini-games in the ecosystem like Battlefleet Armageddon, as well as those participating in governance or building their own tools, services, and projects. All can participate in shaping Alien Worlds moving forward.
With its built-in incentive structure and community governance model, Tokenized Lore is set to change the game.
A Perfect Foundation for Game Development
As mentioned, Galactic Hubs recently announced a $50,000 grant for game developers to build projects based on player-generated lore. In truth, Tokenized Lore is the perfect foundation for game development as it lets animators and innovators plug into an ever-expanding world where the canon is community-led.
Consequently, devs can tap into an empowered and knowledgeable player base and speak their language from the get-go, thanks to a clear on-chain repository of approved mythology.
A recent survey of over 400 Alien Worlds Explorers found that they considered “the number of community-built games and applications” the biggest contributor to decentralization in the metaverse. What’s more, when asked about the types of projects worthy of more support from Syndicates, the most popular reply by far was ‘Game development’.
In light of such responses, the development of further mini games – championed by the player base and funded by Syndicates, Galactic Hubs or both – is inevitable. The existence of Tokenized Lore means there is a foundation upon which these new stories can be built.
How AI Will Invigorate IP
The emergence of AI tools that can quickly scale up content production (art, videos, fiction) is likely to change the landscape of IP, but rather than shy away from this development, Alien Worlds is well positioned to welcome the onslaught of AI- and community-generated content, a creative tidal wave destined to make the heads of Disney execs spin.
For a start, we have developed our very own AI called Lynx, a Discord-accessible LLM tool trained on the foundational lore. Available in the official Alien Worlds Discord and in over 30 community channels accessible to hundreds of thousands of users, Lynx can be queried as virtual librarian (a sort of Master of the Lore, if you will) and used to generate new story ideas.
To leverage Lynx, all you have to do is type “/” into one of the many channels that make up the AW Discord, select “ai/ lore” and ask your question. If you want Lynx to produce unique story content, hit shift and select “Theorize.”
We are entirely comfortable with users leveraging AI in whatever way they wish to produce original content for canon. Ultimately, it will be up to the community to decide which entries deserve to be immortalized as official Alien Worlds mythology.
Tokenized Lore is here and we want you to be a part of building the first truly community-powered decentralized content franchise. Whether you’re interested in crafting lore, building a game, expanding the utility of Alien Worlds APIs, contributing artwork, or even integrating our NFTs into your own project, we want to hear from you.
Let’s do it together.