Based on this article answer my questions. Every month, $55$ million people play Minecraft, often hosting customized versions of collaborative worlds on their own home computers. The rules, formats, stories, and $$mods$$ that these communities create are invite$-$only, and if you are lucky enough to receive an invitation, you will likely be talking, chatting, trolling with them on Discord, along with $130$ million other users. If you want to learn the stories from these communities you can watch them live on Twitch, where a million people are watching at any given point in time. There are millions of stories created by collectives, hordes, bands, tribes, teams and pods that you may never know about or be able to follow. There are $1\mathrm{.}8$ billion gamers around the world who are probably ok with that.

These new formats are popular because they meet a deep psychological need: the basic human drive to interact with other people through stories. I call this new way of telling stories $$decentralized storytelling.$$

Decentralized storytelling only seems new. Although these forms make use of $21$st century technologies, many of these techniques have a precedent in much older storytelling traditions. My thinking on this method for communicating through time is heavily informed by my native tradition $($I am Seneca$-$Cayuga, Haudenosaunee, a $$Native New Yorker$$ lol$).$ My community has practiced decentralized storytelling for generations.

To those of us schooled in $20$th century forms of storytelling $$ writing, film, radio, television $$ these new decentralized forms may not be recognizable as stories at all. Unlike publishing, radio, film, and television, which broadcast from a single source to an audience of many, decentralized storytelling networks are peer$-$to$-$peer; they emerge from the collective space of audience participation.

Communities organize around collective stories.

Decentralized storytelling requires navigating your human experience within a story$-$space. The architects of the story$-$space were your ancestors; it is a place in which your great$-$great$-$great$-$great$-$great$-$grandchildren will be born. It is a mind space, a physical space, and, for some, a game. It is a process of making and unmaking that cannot be sustained except in collaboration with the past and future, securing a connection with those living seven generations from now, listening to their experiences, and making stories that will be able to reach them where they are.

Decentralized storytelling requires navigating your human experience within a story$-$space.

In what follows, I will try to give you a map of the story$-$space. You can look at this map while you are strolling through the $21$st century landscape, so you will know when you have stumbled upon one.

How can you tell if you are in a decentralized story$-$space?

Can it be embodied in multiple media?

One good indication you$$re dealing with a decentralized narrative is that it$$s distributed across multiple media. Consider big mainstream franchises like X$-$Men or Star Wars, for which there are movies, comics, novelizations, video games, and toys. Each entry to these fictional universes introduces new elements that push the narrative in different directions and force the canon to expand.

A Timeline of Homestuck from A$1$ to A$5$

Of course, these stories still fall under the jurisdiction of their corporate custodians. A more decentralized story$-$space might be the Homestuck universe, the sprawling, $8,000-$page saga about $$a boy and his friends and a game they play together.$$ It began as a webcomic but has also been developed in animated videos, and a game. When he created the series, Andrew Husse made everything in MS Paint $$ easy$-$to$-$use software that ships with Windows $$ and drew the characters in a rudimentary fashion. This made it easy for fans to replicate the characters on their own computers, and the Homestuck world flourishes as fanfic. With its multiverses and alternate timelines, the material that fans generate can be incorporated back into the canon $($even the chat logs on Husse$$s MS Paint Adventures is considered canon$).$ It promotes radical inclusivity on every level; fans don$$t feel like they need permission to enter into it and interact.

Does it take a long time to tell?

Next time you meet a Homestuck fan, ask them to summarize the story. If you$$re not met with dismissive laughter, odds are you are in for several hours of confusion as they try to relate a profoundly convoluted plot that is still being written.

A decentralized story is open, which means there is a sense in which it is an ongoing performance, happening in real time. Not so with centralized stories; even those that take place in real time: Run Lola Run, My Dinner With Andre, and Dog Day Afternoon still take place in a scripted memory$-$space.

Decentralized stories happen in real time because they are mapped to real life. Following a news story on Twitter, for example, is a decentralized narrative unfolding in re