Telling a truly interactive story requires multiple authors. These authors create sections of the narrative, working together to tell a good story. But giving up the authority of the creator to the users of the narrative system leaves the system open to abuse and derailment. What prevents users from harassing each other or destroying other peoples' stories? What would cause people to put in the effort to create a particularly good story? Where do the story structures that people create instances of come from? Who guides the community of story users?.
Every community must have some social structure to it, if only to have a way of distinguishing who is in and who is not in the community. Specifically, some behaviors are desirable within the context of the community, while others are undesirable and inappropriate. (For example, enriching the experience of other community members is generally desirable, while harassment and obnoxious behavior is usually not.) By shaping the social mores of the community, the system designers can encourage desired behaviors that enrich the stories being told, while preventing degenerate users from ruining the experience for others.
There are a number of ways to structure the social mores of a system to guide the behavior of its members. Perhaps the most important way is through the tool of status. When there is some measure of status that is publicly available, it serves both as a carrot and stick for guiding user behavior. Status can be given out for any behavior that advances the community's larger goals, such as, in this case, creating good stories. Status can equally easily be removed for bad behavior such as harassing other members. .
Status is often meaningless: simply a number or other metric associated with each user's persona. However, people's natural tendencies to want to accumulate external markers of status, no matter what their true worth, can make it a powerful tool.
