by dmstfctn, Eva Jäger, Alasdair Milne

In the IRL world—or ‘groundworld’ [1] —consensus narratives are fracturing. The Trad Web (the entrenched social networks of Web2) in particular is ineffective at delivering protocols for both ground truthing on one hand, and healthy contestation on the other. Commentary on once verifiable events has become adversarial, with events themselves (transactions, exchanges, altercations) often difficult to verify. Here, the most fundamental record keeping becomes centralized through ‘captured’ topdown infrastructure that resembles a surveillance architecture. The capacity to verify and contest becomes attached to hierarchy, access, and control.

While Autonomous Worlds are in their nascency, and susceptible to becoming siloed gameworlds for niche communities, they possess a wider potential as generative infrastructure for a new kind of commons––a public resource with a tangible benefit. [2] Here, we propose that decentralized narratives [3] are the essential public resource produced by Autonomous Worlds and explore the potential for Autonomous Worlds to act as a commons geared to bring this resource and its public value into the groundworld.

Autonomous Worlds can offer the ingredients and World weaving potential to become what we term an ‘autonomous knowledge commons’, afforded by its involuntary relationship of collective infrastructure ownership. [4] Here we take the core features of an autonomous knowledge commons to be noncentralized yet formalized access to both the means of narrative creation, linked to a permanent record of events, alongside the right to redeploy, or reseed, the results elsewhere. Building on gubsheep’s proposal that crypto-native games operate as sandboxes or ‘microcosms of the integrated digital worlds of the future,’ [5] we suggest that building an autonomous knowledge commons might offer a way to export procedures or knowledge back into the groundworld in the form of narrative. With this in mind, an autonomous knowledge commons could be a space to experiment with new ways of building both consensus reality that have been lost in the groundworld, and shared narratives drawn from the emergent, permanent canon afforded by on-chain games.

So, what would be necessary to fortify the propensity of Autonomous Worlds to become autonomous knowledge commons? Here, we will propose a new ‘modding’ superstructure: a ‘Large Lore Model’ (LLoreM) plug-in that facilitates collective and decentralized narrative-building and explicitly links to the on-chain record. The LLoreM offers an interface which maintains a link to interobjective realities [6] whilst communicating with the intersubjective groundworld. In other words, a LLoreM enable a commonly built consensus reality that is nonetheless collectively generated and governed. [7] The LLoreM could be prototypical scaffolding for stewarding a shift from worlding wilderness to mission-driven commons.

Lore Generation

Having established the potential of Autonomous Worlds to become autonomous knowledge commons, given the right infrastructure, we look to define lore and ‘lore generation’ in concrete terms by using a procedural spoken language game, I Went To the Shop, as an example. From there, we will consider how to hardcode this process of lore generation into a viable tool (LLoreM) that combines the value of player lore generation with the unique affordances of on-chain games, considering the implications of such a tool in comparison to legacy Web2 lore-recording.

In the **I Went To the Shop **memory game, commonly played by kids to pass the time on road trips, we find a temporary World created through a shared narrative of a trip to the shop. The rules of the game require that players repeat the phrase: ‘Today I went to the shop and I bought…’ appending it each time with a new item purchased. The first item added must begin with the first letter of the alphabet and each subsequent item must begin with the next letter. So after three rounds the phrase might be: ‘Today I went to the shop and I bought an apple, bubblegum, and a cold beer.’ Gameplay emerges through the balance between adding items that one player can remember and items to throw off another players’ memory. Players must keep a level of engagement and entertainment by listing uncommon, surreal, or offensive items. Even while the narrative produced is held in common, its texture is contingent on the particular circumstances of individual players: in-jokes, shared language (US english offers the sensible zucchini for Z, whilst in UK english you might buy a zebra), and––in the case of bored kids in a car––a desire to get a reaction from the adult driving might all play into these choices.

Here we take lore to be the decentralized, accrued narrative. Lore generation is the general concept to describe procedures (within the World of a game or otherwise) which produce this decentralized narrative. A reified tool built for this purpose could be called a lore generator. Lore generation is important because it acts as a means of creating knowledge-claims in a suspended context, contestable later as necessary. It gamifies the production of narrative, holding it as something common and mutually constructed between players, like a jovial list of commodities bought at the shop.

But at the end of the I Went To the Shop **game, the ‘ledger’ of ingredients has no record and is lost. Similarly, the shared experience of the players is lost, along with the emergent narrative. Further, even if some player recorded the ledger (even a trustworthy elder figure) or an on-chain version collected the list of ingredients introduced via its Digital Physics into its canon (creating a hard diegetic boundary through digital consensus), there is no mutually agreed protocol for recording and verifying the emergent narrative. In order to transform this narrative into lore then, we need a system—and interface—that is collectively agreed upon. We will now turn to a prototypical LLoreM that could be used to produce a dual ledger capable of recording and verifying a lore-claim alongside an immutable record.

Large Lore Models (LLoreM)