Gestalt

Throughout history, people have been telling stories. When we look at ancestral traditions, we find that in many civilizations, the spoken word was used. Many civilizations had grios, spoken word historians, and bards tasked with recording the history, the mythos, and the culture of their communities. As a side effect of language, it is no coincidence that each speaker told the same story differently. It is in this sense that each oral historian acts as a framing device for the history they're tasked with preserving. As they learn a song or story, they learn the narrative structure, the highs and lows, and add their own selves to the story before passing it on to the audience, or an apprentice.

Fast forwarding to today, we have an excess of ways to preserve information, to the point that many believe that we have too much information, but not enough context to drive insight and understanding. And when we look at how literature has changed over time, the innovations in the literary industry seem to have stopped once the centralized entity that owns the e-ink IP put profit over prose. As such, text and literature has not progressed the way that the internet has: free, interconnected, and additive.

Gestalt fixes this. Gestalt is a protocol for people to tokenize their experiences in hypertextual works, starting with interactive fiction. With interactive fiction (think Bandersnatch, with a CLI), writers are able to create branching storylines for their audience. Audience members will be able to save the important details of their works onto the NFT, like a memory card or pseudonymous cookie. The audience will be able to engage with the work, save and load their progress, and selectively choose how they engage with works that build off of their previous stories.

Eventually, Gestalt will support web3-native works, and build off of the stories we see occurring on-chain. With the Graph, authors will be able to better track what actions and paths matter the most to their audience, and strengthen the social bond over time. In the future, the Gestalt protocol lay on top of Zora, mint WIPs to IPFS, and when the tome is complete, allow Authors and the audience to mint the work and their paths onto Arweave. The whole is different from the sum of its parts.

This project uses scaffold-eth as a testing ground for pre-pretty features. It is intended to use Subgraph and Zora to read and and write metadata from tokens, respectively. , and Vorple to generate the metadata used to make each token a 1/1 gestalt of their transcript/save progress in-game.