Hi everyone, what I want to say might take some time, it’s a bit complex, but I will try to keep it as simple as possible.
Overview:
I want to use IPFS to create an interactive story, which eventually becomes more than just a story, containing elements that are purely text, others involving images, others with sound, others with full sound and video, some elements that can be interacted with in a limited capacity, others more fully interactive like a game, and still others which extend right into your daily life, giving you things you can actually get involved with.
Inspirations and similarities:
In some regards this is like the “choose your own adventure” books which came out in the 1980s, where at the bottom of each page, you could make a choice about what the character in the story does, but of course with the technology we have these days, it takes that concept far further. You could also liken it to the game “Ingress” ( I think that’s the name ), where you use your mobile device on a real world gloabl treasure hunt, but again it takes the concept far further. In part this is also inspired by Isaac Asimov’s Foundation saga, but I won’t get into explaining that connection just yet.
Objectives:
This is all inspired by and related to an academic obsession of mine which I will get onto in a minute, and what I hope to achieve through story, is to get people excited about something, so they might take the time to look behind the scenes, get involved in the study of some of the geekier academic elements, which they might not normally read if it were just a dry academic text, and inspire them to take these principles back into their own lives to make changes to the way they live.
If you ever watched a film like Star Wars or Avatar or The Matrix, and you left the cinema inspired by the story, thinking to yourself “I wanna be a Jedi” or “I wanna be a Pandoran” or “I wanna be like Neo”, and it felt like you could do it, but you didn’t quite know how, or like when you wake from a dream about flying, and it’s on the tip of your tongue as you wake up, like you almost rememeber how to actually fly … that’s where I want my system for story-telling to go beyond, where my story actually gives people a philosophical view of the nature of reality, teaching them essentially this:
- “no matter what it is that you want, IF it is possible, THEN this will be the pathway”
… no guarantee that you succeed of course, but from a philosophical/logical/mathematical perspective, this particular story hook is about linking fantasy to reality via viable hypotheses which are completely congruent with the axiomatic bases of all knowledge.
So what I need to create is a system of story telling, which is integrated with project development in such a way, that the audience can become developers of various aspects of the story themselves, the story can branch and fork in many directions, and both online ( virtual ) and real world ( or augmented reality ) projects and activities can be linked to various story elements.
Thus, the story becomes a journey, not just of the characters in the story, but also for the story developers, collaborators, and audience alike.
I have drawn a few diagrams so far as to how this is achieved, but I am still studying how IPFS and related things function, so that I can get this to work correctly, and so that I don’t make design mistakes at the foundational level which require starting from scratch when the errors are later discovered.
Background:
I’ve had a 30+ year academic obsession with the quantification of ecological and social justice and sustainability via the principles of ecological systems modelling and thermodynamics, as a basis for non-species-biased, non-property/trade/currency-based, and non-hierarchical ( anarchic ) justice economics and politics.
What this means in a nutshell is that we can achieve justice without law or authoritarian enforcement, communal/social politics withouth authoritarian hierarchies of political power, and economic interaction without the necessity of property trade or currency of any kind. All of this is quantified in real scientific units of measurement and meaningful ratios, applied to both the beneficial and deleterious consequences of human actions, and taken from a non-species-biased perspective - and if you didn’t notice it for yourself, the reason why this must be “non-species-baised”, is because the very term “justice” implies a lack of bias, therefore how can you have ecological justice where there is bias towards human interests. This doesn’t mean going back to the stone age and not having technology, quite to the contrary, it just means that we do everything that we do so vastly differently, and for such vastly different reasons, that we end up choosing and developing ever more efficient and sensitive ways of doing things, which do not involve the rampant consumerism, ecological destruction, inefficiency, waste, pollution etc., which arises from the status quo paradigm, and which status quo justifies such insanities as inbuilt obsolesence, unnecessary redundancies, war and destruction for profit, and so on.
This is however quite a complex thing to explain, and what I have discovered through countless conversations over the past 20 years or so, is that people tend not to listen to anything which contradicts their existing beliefs, no matter the evidence presented, and given that most people are either scientifically illiterate or incompetent, it doesn’t even matter if you have a conclusive definitive and irrefutable argument, where no valid ( much less sound ) counter argument is even possible, people willl still refute it. So I decided some time ago that my academic work would have to educate the audience first, completely breaking down their belief system, and rebuilding it … but such a work is complex and time consuming to write, and since my true passion is actually games, cinema and TV ( story telling ), I figured it made sense to do it in a way that I would enjoy, and which would be accessible to a greater audience.
Along with all the above, I have come up with countless inventions, but none of which I have yet developed, primarily because I was just struggling to survive, but now that I am 50 years of age ( turning 51 soon ), I want to see as much of this achieved while I am still on this planet.
So, another thing to mention here, is that along with my vision for alternative justice economics and politics, I want this project to be the starting point for a “project collaboration development and resource allocation framework”, which will be linked to an ethical investment fund ( for interaction with the existing economic paradigm ), and a new blockchain architecture I have designed, along with countless other projects of my own … eventually opening up so that anyone can insert their own project.
Development:
From what I can see, IPFS is the nearest thing that exists already to a part of the technological backbone of what I want to do, and at some stage, either this project would rehouse itself into a new ecosystem, OR it would feedback data into the evolution of IPFS, such that IPFS becomes that part of the backbone … however this future is uncertain, as it would require the licensing of IPFS and other concerns to be congruent with that future. One way or the other, the IPFS ecosystem would benefit, at the very least in the short term.
The starting point I require is what I have been diagramming at the moment, and while I have a rough overview model, it’s just the latest iteration of a very broad overview of the elements of the starting point of this system - however it would be enough to have an in depth conversation with interested parties who want to get involved and help me achieve this vision.
Perhaps it would be possible to use existing publishing system built on top of IPFS already to at least some degree, but it’s unlikely they fulfil all the requirements I have, and so given the tight integration required for the bigger picture, and given all the issues around licensing and intellectual property etc., I think it makes more sense to develop it from scratch ( even if there are components borrowed from suitable licensed open source projects ).
I do not wish to openly publish a detailed plan of what I want to develop, but instead to start a conversation here, in order to hopefully find people who want to get involved in the development, or people who can help point me towards things which might help that development.
For greater detail than this, I need to speak with people one on one, privately, and assess whether or not I think that person is a good fit for my core team, and then set up a private collaboration space, which would include certain agreements regarding intellectual property and so forth. But in those private conversations I could answer with a bit more detail than what I have provided above.
Conclusion:
I think that should do it for now, please feel free to ask anything here, but please understand that I may not be willing to answer in a detailed fashion about anything that goes too far into intellectual property ( in this public forum ).