From the venerable corridors of The Metropolitan Museum of Art to the dynamic storytelling of Hollywood, cryptocurrency is carving a niche for itself. Two pioneering projects, The Met’s Art Links and Incention’s Emergence, underscore the innovative ways crypto is reshaping audience engagement with art and narrative.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has unveiled its inaugural blockchain-fueled venture, Art Links, an imaginative initiative designed to gamify art history. This engaging game encourages players to delve into The Met’s extensive collection, identifying thematic links between various artworks. Players are rewarded with NFT (non-fungible token) badges and tangible perks, including exclusive museum tours and exhibition catalogues. Integrated within the Base platform, the game also offers in-game purchases using cryptocurrency, in addition to complimentary NFTs for participants.
This initiative by The Met represents a unique blend of physical and digital experiences, a hybrid category coined as “Phigital”. The game includes “Web3” as one of four connection types, demonstrating “how artists across time have engaged with core concepts underpinning the blockchain, such as randomization, security, and ledgers,” as elucidated by the developer, TRLab.
In its inaugural week, Art Links garnered close to 20,000 plays, with over 1,600 NFTs claimed. A fresh game is slated to debut every Thursday at 12:01 am ET for the upcoming three months.
While The Met is transforming art appreciation through gamification, Incention and Story Protocol are reimagining franchise storytelling. Their fresh sci-fi venture, Emergence, created in collaboration with The Dark Knight and Foundation creator David S. Goyer, presents a blockchain-powered platform. This allows fans and creators to jointly develop extensive narrative universes.
The project harnesses Story’s blockchain, which recently debuted a developer mainnet, to ensure that all contributions such as characters, worlds, and plotlines are acknowledged and remunerated through smart contracts. Incention’s AI co-pilot, Atlas, plays a crucial role in the creative process, assisting in generating ideas, visual assets, and narratives. The objective is to enable intellectual property owners to invite collaborative storytelling while preserving clear licensing and revenue-sharing models.
This development raises pertinent questions: Does it mark another stride in AI-enhanced productivity that streamlines Hollywood’s interaction with digital content creation? Or will AI-generated contributions diminish the uniqueness and emotional depth that human writers bring to the table?
Regardless, the adoption of such tools by influential institutions like The Met and Hollywood signals the direction we’re heading towards — a world where the boundaries between creator, audience, and collector continue to become indistinct.
While cryptocurrency’s primary applications remain financial, it’s essential to keep an eye out for innovative ways the provenance of a distributed, shared ledger can unlock new experiences and shape culture in the digital era.
