A Home For Every Hero: The Writers’ Perspective
By Gutsy Media
Wildcard is a video game in development that aims to approach world building in a way that allows players and fans to feel a strong sense of belonging, crave more opportunities to compete in-game, get as excited by being spectators as they are by playing, and explore the lore within the Wildcard universe. Wildcard wants this expansive universe to thrive on diversity—users will discover a vast and deeply rich variety of planets, cultures, characters, histories, and relationships. The Wildcard team, at its heart, is making space for a vibrant community to experience a satisfying sense of belonging within its universe.
In the ideal iteration of such a participatory culture, the community is international, multicultural, inclusive and ever-evolving. But all too often it becomes divisive, overly aggressive, and exclusionary. To avoid creating conditions for toxic fandom to form around Wildcard, the team is being intentional in its approach to developing its universe, characters, lore, and game play—in essence, using the tools of world-building to craft a universe that inspires fun, engages players in spirited competition, and encourages a reciprocal relationship with its current and growing international community of fans and enthusiasts.
With this in mind, Gutsy Media invited two writers with world building practices, Tony Patrick and Ali Weinsten, to help process Gutsy Media and Harmony Labs’ audience storyscapes research for Wildcard into creative briefs that offer a clear set of narrative development guidelines to support Wildcard’s ongoing narrative development process.
“Often in the creative development process, writing for specific audiences is a guessing game. I’m a TV writer and we writers may have rudimentary audience insights to guide us in navigating the directives from studio executives, but, generally, we’re relying entirely on our personal perspectives, and those of our collaborators, to shape a fictional world, characters, relationships, conflicts and resolutions. When Mary Ann Marino [from Gutsy Media] brought Tony Patrick and I onto the Wildcard narrative development project, I’d say we were met with the opposite situation,” says Ali Weinstsein. “The research Gutsy and Harmony Labs shared with us offered a roadmap to a full spectrum of various audiences’ media appetites through the prism of each audience’s values sets. We understood what kinds of worlds they’re drawn to, what heroes and antagonists look like in the stories they prefer, and how conflicts spark and get resolved, or not, between them. Far from being prescriptive, as one might expect receiving all of these deep and complex audience insights, the research, instead, opened up a whole new path of creativity and exploration for me as a writer. It allowed me to offer more specific, diverse, and norm-challenging recommendations for the worlds and characters of the Wildcard universe,” she went on.
Tony Patrick added, “In my world building practice, generating a collective vision is one of the main objectives of the work. We eventually discover new lenses and perspectives through our participatory design process. Harmony’s research, however, offers a rare, yet widely needed, opportunity for writers; to utilize this ‘audience map’ of varying value-based archetypes as a starting point for generating characters and narratives for a wider spectrum of impact. This includes demographics that recognize philosophies and values that may be in contrast to your own. They’ve created an emergent, empathetic canvas to fashion worlds from.”
Ali went on, “Archetypes are an age-old methodology for us to relate to ourselves and others—why do you think we love personality quizzes and astrology so much? Working with the research provided by Gutsy Media & Harmony was like that, but far more incisive and deep. As we dove further into each audience segment together, my understanding of which character related to a segment the most, actually changed. Going far beyond the usual assumptions made about each character type, the storyscape research allowed us, as writers, to challenge our own assumptions about what we and specific audience members might be drawn to. This led to hours long, often philosophical, conversations about why we create any content without this information! Most writers assume ‘data’ will limit their creativity or interrupt their instincts. If anything, it was the opposite. Understanding each audience segment through the prism of values sets gave us the space to sit with our preconceived notions and then push past them, creating characters and worlds that surprised us and had unique depth. It was like a playful surprise, one that helped diverse characters, with a lot of nuance, emerge from our process and entice us to keep playing, digging deeper, getting surprised and offering ideas for a world no one has built yet.”
Weinstein also brought her climate storytelling expertise to the process. While the team was thinking of ways to invent new intergalactic locales, without abandoning the Earth that we currently know, the writers worked to create a story that is authentic to actual human history while imagining a future for Earth that implies positive change between now and Wildcard’s imagined time frame,” Mary Ann Marino added, “There was some future shaping going on for us. If the Earth of the Wildcard Universe, far in the future, has overcome its current climate challenges, that implies, for audiences, that human ingenuity and progressive ideas prevailed. We got better. But audiences have to put this together themselves because in Wildcard, audiences are thrust into an imagined fictional future in an imagined cosmos. It just happens to also encompass a future version of Earth.”
The work that the writing team did together, under Mary Ann’s guidance, has yielded an updated origin story in which the histories of several ‘houses’ are embedded and intertwined. The ‘Champions’ in the gamescape are each aligned with a specific house as are the ‘Summons’ who form the teams aligned with each champion in this player vs. player (PvP), CCG (collectible card game), multi-player, online arena battler (MOBA).
The Wildcard Alliance currently has a Discord server with ~45K members and many of them are actively engaged with the developers in chat rooms, playtests, AMAs and various other events. The current community is made up of users from around the world with a heavy concentration from North America, Southeast, East Asia and West Africa. What has evolved is an ongoing dialogue between the game developers and their growing community such that the narrative can be shared early, discussed, tested and influenced by the reciprocal relationship between users and developers as the project evolves.
As part of The Wildcard Alliance’s exploration of blockchain technology’s promise to democratize user experiences, Wildcard released digital assets, Wildpasses, in Spring 2023. This digital merchandise will function alongside the core game and, within Wildcard’s vision (see The Wildpaper Lite), promises ongoing opportunity for Wildpass holders in the Wildcard Universe as it grows and evolves (think a gaming ‘Battlepass’ with added features). There was a limit to the number of these unique digital assets released; 4,444 (there will never be any more of them) and they come in eight colors. The Wildpasses signify an early commitment to Wildcard and its promise as both a game and a community.
Each Wildpass color corresponds with a location around the audience map shown earlier.
The Wildcard community has been given the opportunity to take a quiz in order to find out which color they’re most aligned to. The quiz is based on Harmony’s publicly available opt-in audience quiz. The results are shared with the users along with a short description of the attributes most closely associated with their color. The description is infused with concepts from the Wildcard universe.
As of this writing, the game is in its Alpha development phase with ~35 publicly released characters and a core game loop which can be played by the community in private playtests. Wildcard’s community managers and game developers encourage a robust and regular feedback loop so that the game itself can be influenced and enhanced by insights from real users. Inviting players into the game development process this way is not unusual, many game developers opt for allowing early access in order build a loyal audience early and to glean useful learnings from players as the developers hone their games.
Currently, Gutsy Media has ambitions to launch a narrative testing process which will invite ~200 international volunteers from Wildcard’s Discord Community to participate in ongoing narrative testing focus groups. Each of these volunteers has opted in and taken a survey Wildcard refers to as the What Color Are You? quiz so they and the Wildcard team understand in which audience segment each volunteer typically resides.
In addition to developing, testing and honing narratives that are engaging for Wildcard’s users, the team hopes to begin laying the foundation for an ongoing process of collaboration and connection between users within this large and growing Community. The hope is that, in doing this work in collaboration with the Wildcard community in these early stages of the project’s development, the Wildcard team is creating the conditions for a healthy fandom to evolve as more users come onboard. Gutsy Media believes that this approach to developing the narrative and lore can offer a template for other games, shows and movies to develop content in a way that brings audiences into new dimensions of understanding and consideration - ones that go beyond the limited storyscapes the entertainment industry is currently serving up to them. If Gutsy succeeds, by the time the game is publicly launched, the Wildcard society will be established as one that is built atop one of Wildcard’s three key pillars; that of Community. Wildcard aspires for theirs to be a community that is diverse, collaborative, and made up of people who are open to consider each individual’s specific nature with respect and, hopefully, curiosity.
More about the research process conducted by Gutsy Media & Harmony Labs.
Interest piqued? Dive into Harmony Labs’ & Gutsy Media’s A Home for Every Hero toolkit.
If you’d like to learn more about the work we do at Gutsy Media, contact us!
Julie Hermelin & Mary Ann Marino
Gutsy Media & Wake Up & Vote
julie@gutsymedia.com, maryann@gutsymedia.com