On-chain Collaborative World Building: Exploring the Sentences Tool

On-chain game design media has various functions and limitations, one notable feature being a strong emphasis on collective decision-making. Through the exploration of prototype systems, we propose an innovative tool called Sentences. It is an on-chain collaborative world-building tool, with a structure that revolves around the original structure of merely adding branching narratives. Sentences is built using MUD, providing a lightweight environment for collective narrative generation. Each time a new game is launched, Sentences generates an entirely new world, which players then enrich by gradually adding legends.

Design Motivation

In autonomous world spaces, new projects often require collective "world-building" when they are born. This process involves constructing a shared lore system and determining players' experiences within the world. This practice is usually informal and unstructured, but it can also be supported through ordered prompts and exercises to help participants shape the structure and coherence of the world.

These exercises themselves constitute a world. They establish an information system among the narrators and formulate a set of rules that promote the development of narratives. This set of rules forms the foundation of the world, creating a space full of possibilities for the birth of new ideas. The choice of exercises inevitably influences the narratives created: a set of questions will assume a space of potential answers; a hint in a certain direction may limit exploration in other directions.

Therefore, Sentences can be seen as a "world-building world", a raw sandbox for collaborative knowledge generation. It is intentionally designed to be simple and constrained, aimed at serving as an experimental platform for testing new ideas. In the world of Sentences, there are no other forms of interaction or contribution aside from expanding the narrative. The world here is constructed linearly but can branch out in multiple directions from the initial seed.

Core Mechanism

When players load the Sentences client, if there is no ongoing world, the system will provide the option to generate a new world. Once generated, players will receive a prompt guiding them to use the core mechanics to develop the story. Example prompts may include:

• "This society values nature the most"
• "This civilization completely relies on horizontal"
• "This group is built on money"

Once the world is generated, it enters an active state. The author has a fixed time (set to 20 blocks, at a regular pace) to propose new supplementary content for the story. After the time ends, it enters the second phase where participants vote for the most popular proposal. After the voting ends, the proposal with the most votes will be incorporated into the story, and then the process will start over.

If no proposals are made within the specified time, that world will perish. However, this demise is not permanent: the world is simply archived into a collection of other perished worlds. Since all proposals and votes are recorded on-chain, each world retains a complete history of possible developmental directions, and these "demise" branches represent a set of potential parallel universes.

Technical Implementation

The state of the narrative is managed by two interconnected systems: one responsible for the generation of new narratives, and the other handling time, voting, and proposals for new content.

The initialization of the new story is completed by randomly selecting sentences from a list of prompts encoded in the system. These prompts are generated using a simple replacement syntax script. In future versions, this script may be replicated in the contract to provide a more diverse starting point.

After the story is initialized, the initial prompt is added to the chain, and a new proposal period begins. This cycle lasts for n blocks (approximately one second per block), defined by the periodEndsBlock variable, which is set at the beginning of each new proposal period.

During the proposal period, participants put forward new narrative entries and vote to decide on the selected expansion. The proposal and voting process is handled by a specialized system that verifies the timing of these contributions based on the periodEndsBlock variable. Each proposal points to a "parent" (the proposal it responds to), and successful proposals form a linked list.

At the end of the proposal period, the system counts the votes for each proposal. In the event of a tie, a proposal is randomly selected. If no proposals are submitted, the story ends and is archived, allowing players to choose to generate a new story next.

Application Scenarios

Sentences are most suitable for environments with 10-50 participants, who may or may not know each other, but gather together in the spirit of creating prototype legends. For example, events can be organized on social platforms with the goal of generating five new worlds within an hour.

As an independent tool, Sentences may not be particularly captivating; it functions more as a tool than a complete world. However, as a modular component, the narrative generation mechanism of Sentences can integrate well into more complex role-playing games, dynamically weaving the game structure throughout the gameplay. Its voting mechanism can also be used to support the integration of generated content within player-generated prompts.

A limitation of the current version is the specificity of the initial prompts. Although this can be adjusted for different deployments, further expanding the game's prompt generation mechanism to align more with the openness of the narrative section would be an interesting development direction.

Source of Inspiration

The form of Sentences is inspired by text adventure games, improvisation, legends, and tabletop role-playing games. During the development process, we referenced some specific projects, including Max Kreminski's Epitaph (a fantasy narrative generation game) and Kate Compton's Tracery alternative grammar tool. These projects utilize simple randomness and modular methods to create complex branching narratives, and we are particularly interested in the potential application of these basic elements in collective scenarios.

Although Sentences is primarily aimed at building for the world, it can also be applied to other constrained collaborative writing scenarios, demonstrating a wide range of application prospects.

Future Outlook

A clear direction for the expansion of Sentences is to allow the creators of the world to set specific rules that determine how new sentences are added to the narrative. For example, these rules could modify the voting system to require a certain number of players to participate in order to advance the narrative, or adjust the voting time to change the pace of narrative development. In this way, Sentences not only becomes a tool for world prototyping but can also serve as a platform for prototyping specific storytelling styles and dialogue structures.

Another interesting direction of development is to generate parallel worlds from the "dead" branches of the current world. The best way to implement this mechanism may be to generate a new "New World" contract that includes pointers to the old branches, rather than generating a new world from scratch.

Through these potential expansions and improvements, Sentences is expected to become a more powerful and flexible collaborative world-building tool, providing creators and game designers with more possibilities.