Metaverse Storytelling – Alice, Dorothy, Wendy – onboarding #xr #metaverse

Looking at the Alice (in Wonderland) vs Dorothy (Wizard of Oz) worlds and possible Metaverse worlds (Wendy from Peter Pan). Onboarding options for storytelling. Folksonomic vs Taxonomic structures. Extended storylines across worlds.

Transcript of lecture with timestamps

The Tale runs as it Pleases the Teller. It’s from Thomas Fuller in around 1650. So today we’re going to talk about telling tales inside the metaverse, the different format the tales come in and why it’s so important, particularly at the onboarding level with the different psychographics that we get that right. Hello. My name is Laurel Papworth. I’m a metaverse mentor, social, virtual world’s consultant, and I like to play MMOs. There you go. So Richard Bartle was the original writer of the very first Mud, which is multi user dungeon. Not that type of dungeon, it’s a game dungeon. [00:00:46.550]

And he wrote a paper or delivered a paper in the mid 2000s saying that there are three types of stories inside virtual worlds, inside virtual spaces where we fully construct the world. And one is from Alice in Wonderland. And one is Dorothy from wizard of Oz. And the third one is the Wendy story, and Wendy is the storyteller. So she’s at a higher level than the other two. [00:01:15.800]

So I’ll focus on the first two. Then we’ll get to Wendy. So when Alice enters into her world, it could be through an augmented layer, it could be a virtual world, it could just be in your imagination. She is a representative of if you’re looking for a different archetype, the Divine Feminine, the world is amorphous, nebulous, numinous, misty, cloudy, and there’s no clear goal, there’s no structure, there’s no way forward. She explores. [00:01:48.200]

In fact, I think the most probable line that represents Alice is, she says, curiouser and curiouser. So she is just there to inhale the world, she’s just there to explore. And that is an experience that some people want when they enter into a virtual space. Dorothy, on the other hand, gets dumped in a world and it has a yellow brick road that goes to the Emerald City. And she’s very clear on her goal. [00:02:16.440]

It’s the Divine Masculine at work. She is moving forward. It’s that Mars energy. If you want the Mars Venus, archetypes Mars going forward. And she is very clear. [00:02:27.880]

Now, both of them have NPCs, non player characters, they collect characters, and there are other similarities between the worlds, but there’s quite a difference in a psychographic between those that enter into a Dorothy world, where they want agency, but they want a guide through that. In fact, it’s quite a classic thing that even in the 2D world, when we join a website, we’re given a wizard to work it through. So there’s a lot of archetypal type words in these kind of stories with Alice in the real world, how would Alice behave? Probably doesn’t read the manual. Just likes to put things together into play or goes off the path

[00:03:16.200]
Anytime we choose to go off the path, we’re going instinctual, we’re going with less with our intellect and more with what could be (intuition), then we’re in the Alice world. It’s critically important when people lob up in your world in your constructed space that they have a choice because there are people who are looking for the skip button all the time in the Dorothy world, and then there are other people who get lost in an Alice world and want to shift back across and look for help files and be given direction again. And Richard Bartle was quite clear on these, right? There are three, but these two, that they are a completely different way of experiencing the world. Now, he aligned them with separate worlds. [00:04:04.880]

So he said Alice was comfortable in an Eve world. Eve Online and the Dorothy psychographics are comfortable in, for instance, World of Warcraft. And I play a lot of World of Warcraft. I’m not so familiar with Eve. And there are definitely a lot of NPCs, a lot of quests, subquest side quests [00:04:24.350]

You are forever being taken through a constructed story with Alice. You’re constructing the story as you go along. Now, I want to bring Wendy in because I think this is where the metaverse is evolving us towards. Wendy is user generated content. So Wendy is the storyteller. [00:04:41.290]

She takes the constructed story, that Dorothy archetype and she takes the unconstructed story, which would be the other story type, and she merges them, she welded them together. So the Wendy world is often a world where players are forming the world themselves. They are given constructs so they can create towns and cities. They have agency over governance, so they’re choosing the rules. Shall we allow swearing or not allow swearing? [00:05:15.630]

Do we allow players to kill other players or do we decide, no, no, players can kill other players. All of those kind of more ethical, entertaining, whatever sort of dilemmas are sorted out by the Wendy construct. The reason why I said that the metaverse is shifting there is because at the moment we do onboarding really poorly in virtual worlds that are not games. So if you try to play a fitness game on your oculus, it’s kind of boring. That on boarding, there’s a button there which says tutorial. [00:05:54.590]

And when you click the button, you don’t get a story about how you’re fighting dragons and you need to smash something to the beat because that’ll help you fight dragons. You just get told, click here to do this. Click on this beat, click on this beat. And it’s all technically implemented. This has a lot to do with the fact that there’s massive investment in technical infrastructure in social virtual worlds and not much in my area, the areas that I know about, which are social psychology, anthropology, the soft skills, storytelling, law, gamification, that kind of stuff, it’s at the moment still very much like a technical wizard. [00:06:43.450]

You go in and you click here, click here, click here. You’ve done it. Now you can go do whatever you want to do. If you ever go into virtual chat and you see people just standing around and they’re not sure what to do their Dorothy is in an honest world. If you ever go into a world and people are trying to break or change the rules and as somebody who’s had to work as a developer game moderator with virtual worlds, I see this all the time with my members. [00:07:16.840]

I know who the naughty ones are and they’re pushing the boundaries. They want to shift a Dorothy world and make it more an Alice world where they can explore the bits they want to explore without being structured in. If we do move towards a windy environment, we need a lot more integration. So we need the gamification to move across from in world to augmented to cross reality to the different areas. I would fully expect that after you’ve done something in world that you are then offered opportunities to continue with what we call extended storylines through into the shopping virtual shopping spaces or the virtual fitness spaces or whatever else you’re doing so that you continue the storyline as you go. [00:08:08.760]

At the moment that would not be possible because if you look at the number of quests there are in massive worlds and the number of writers, we’re talking hundreds here, possibly even thousands of writers for one world. But as algorithmic storytelling takes over, we’ll be able to seamlessly blend that storytelling across the metaverse. You’ll be able to continue your story into extended worlds. I just want to clarify a little bit on the archetype. So if you’re not comfortable with the lost girls one or the divine feminine, divine masculine and mixed, the more technical so feminine masculine merged, the more technical amongst us might like to split between taxonomic and folksonomic. [00:09:01.540]

And it’s been over a decade since I’ve given this lecture, so just bear with me for a moment. We need with taxonomic and if you don’t know what taxonomic is, it’s a categorization system, but it means it belongs here, not there. So it’s the animal mineral vegetable dilemma. Which one does it belong to? It can’t belong to all three. [00:09:24.490]

And if you’ve ever been stuck with whether a tomato should be a fruit or vegetable and then you’re like, who cares, I’m just going to eat it. You know exactly what we’re talking about. So with the Dewey decimal system, it’s from the analog world. A book on Napoleon Bonaparte belongs on this shelf and it doesn’t belong in the war section. It belongs in the biography section. [00:09:43.870]

It doesn’t belong in the French section. It belongs in the biography section. It can only belong in one. That’s an analogue categorization taxonomic world with a folksonomic world, the one we’re shifting towards, where we’re moving into the digital space fully, we are looking at free tagging. So a piece of content online can be tagged Napoleon Bonaparte, France, history, biography, that dude, whatever you want to tag it as so you can find it later, you can tag it. [00:10:16.380]

That’s what free tagging does. So while the choice between it looks like a dichotomy. A choice between an Alice and the Dorothy world is quite analogue. As users create their own stories and participate in the stories. We’re going to be shifting across to a more merged and multi level storytelling experience. [00:10:47.350]

If you haven’t read the papers by Richard Bartle, who’s a lecturer in Essex University, I think I have some students there. Hi. I suggest that you go and have a look at his work. I will be putting the links into my resources section. Also try and work your way through the world and understand those two concepts. [00:11:12.010]

Where do you go where you might see a Dorothy experience, for instance, orientation at a university. Where might you go where you have an artist experience? And it could be walking off the beaten track, out in the bush, out in the forest or somewhere else. Because as we go through this series, I’m going to bring you gamification and other elements and it’s really useful to understand that humans are going to human and while the tech evolves, the way we choose to experience our world through that technology doesn’t change an awful lot. I hope you found that useful. [00:11:54.070]

Not sure what my next session is going to be on. If you have any ideas, please let me know. I’d be very happy to take them on board and more than likely do them. And I’ll see you in the next session. Thank you.

RESOURCES:

https://www.academia.edu/13016430/Alice_and_Dorothy_Play_Together

https://mud.co.uk/richard/IMGDC2009.pdf

https://www.engadget.com/2009-04-23-bartle-asks-if-well-ever-see-a-dorothy-alice-and-wendy-mmo.html

https://essex.academia.edu/RichardBartle