The crypto community railed Coinbase for episode 1 of Run The Chain.

The video and reactions can be found on their tweet:

People are calling it cringe and delighting in their own dunks, but the actual issue is that it’s just hard to follow.

It further strengthens my perspective that the gamefi/metaverse space refuses to invest in professional storytelling.

I’m usually a prick about the lack of Storytelling skill in the Crypto/NFT space, but Coinbase and Yuga Labs tried to take a risk and go beyond marketing. I respect that.

I also wrote a post about BAYC as the outlier in NFT storytelling, but I can only assume that there were too many cooks in on this one.

In short, it suffered from over-writing:

Too Many Goals

• Get folks to the Coinbase NFT platform, plug BAYC
• Create an episodic series for new audiences to enjoy and anticipate
• Define everyone as a degen trader/audience
• Explain Web3

There are other goals, but it all goes to the same place: I don’t know what’s important in this story.

When you click play on the video, you’ll hear a quote:

“A great man once said, I wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would have me as a member. (underground fighter blasts is opponent) But I’m not that man, and this is not that kinda club.”

Lemme TRY to translate this to simpler words:

“I admire someone who doesn’t want to belong to the clubs that I belong to (?), but I’m just not the person who thinks I don’t belong, and I was not talking about this club to begin with(?)”

Structurally: A contradiction contradicted, and based on the double contradiction, making the whole quote moot from the start…I think.

As a viewer, we’re trying to keep up with the monologue while highly stimulating visuals are stealing the show.

Writers fall so deep into the process they forget what it’s like to hear it for the first time.

Let’s walk through the first minute to track every piece of info as a viewer:

1. Because of the ‘club quote’ we can only assume we’re starting a story about this fighter in a bare knuckle fight club because his voice over (V.O.) is narrating.
2. He’s fighting to get out of student loans(?), but possibly not. The writers may have thought this was a small note to relate to us, but we hear it as VERY important because it’s in the first 30 seconds.
3. Then, he looks at his watch, and he (we) sees the Apecoin logo, followed by “Apecoin is key”…followed by “presented by Coinbase”.
4. We see/hear the perspective shift from our Boxer V.O., to a female V.O. introducing someone. We can only assume that we’re going to hear from someone other than the fighter, because (as much as we’d love to break the stereotype of ‘bare knuckle fighters can’t be professors’) we don’t associate the fighter as a professor.
5. However, Professor Rifkin DOES return as the same voice we heard from the fighter, so now we add unintended questions: Are we hearing from these characters in the past, present, or future? Is this actually all a talk show looking back on the past?
6. Then we Jump out of this reality entirely, as the interviewer tells us we’re watching today’s episode and asks Professor Rifkin: “What’s the Web3 alpha?” Which is strange because 20 seconds ago, we knew him as someone who fights to pay the bills.
7. Then we find out that Professor Rifkin, the bare knuckle fighter, who doesn’t belong the the clubs that he doesn’t belong to, is actually the host of this show. We have yet to see the setting of the show, and he begins educating us on the state of web2.

We’re one minute into this video.

We’re officially too confused to trust the storyteller with any new info because we have no strands of consistency thus far.

If I was asked for constructive feedback to the writing/production team, I would start here:

We Need One Story, One Voice, Giving Us One Piece Of Info At A Time

I learned story structure through theater, which means that the audience reaction is right there in front of you in real time. You cannot hide from (or ignore) an audience’s confusion.

The beauty of story, is that it’s the same exact construct in every medium. Because a viewer’s capacity for story structure is the same in the theater as it is watching TV or gaming.

Great writers know that, when beginning a story, a human being can only process one piece of info at a time:

• Visuals and dialogue compete for our focus, as we’re anxious to understand anything and everything at the top of a story. We want to LEARN the rules and world, instead of piling up questions. This is why most great movies begin with our protagonist in action, without dialogue.
• When we become more comfortable with the context of the story, we can absorb more information.
• V.O. narration is a trap for most writers. It’s just WAY more complicated to than we think. Viewers intrinsically assume that the voice comes from the protagonist, in the present tense, commenting on the past, which is what we’re seeing right now.
• It’s in our DNA to subconsciously expect that the narrator will make the final action/resolve regarding the conflict in this past story, in the present…it’s complicated.
• V.O.’s at the start of a story are generally commenting on another character, as if the other character is the protagonist (Watch Braveheart or Shawshank Redemption). There are many exceptions to this (and all “rules”), but the writer HAS to be aware of the assumptions that viewers make.
• Changing the time/place/context of the V.O. in the first minute will NEVER work. This is a simple fact. Your viewer will have way too many questions and never define what those questions, so it becomes unwanted baggage as the story unfolds.

As a writer/teacher, I hear writers defend their choices with “Traditional structure doesn’t apply to my style”. And then I hear examples of how these rules are broken by the pros. I’m sorry, but you’re just not yet strong or experienced enough to violate the classic storytelling assumptions of your audience.

Human beings are supremely sensitive to the rails of story, it’s thousands of years old. It’s in our bones. When we don’t get your story, it’s simply your fault.

I think the overall problem is that marketing was competing with Fictional Storytelling, and too much was jammed in to check the boxes.

The animation and production value were truly beautiful, but it’s all wasted on too many cooks in the kitchen.

I’d love to hear your thoughts if you have a different opinion.

Original Content, Copywright© ProofofBeans 2022. Similar Version first published on Medium

Cover Image: Anastasia Lashkevich on Pexels

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