Guides

Personas & pets

Personas and pets are two ways of representing the characters in your story.

When used effectively, personas and pets can create incredible storytelling moments. Personas are the very thing that makes your experience unique, while pets are a deceptively simple way to add immersive details and surprise your friends.

How it works

When you start or join a story, you are prompted to choose a name and pronoun to refer to your persona. Your persona is the character referred to as “you” in the text that you read. The name and pronoun you choose are how your persona is represented to your friends.

Later, while you’re telling your story, you can summon pets.

By default, your emotes and chats are narrated as actions performed by and dialogue spoken by your persona. Once you summon a pet, however, you can also emote and chat as that pet. Only you can emote and chat as the pets you summon; your friends will need to get their own.

Names

A persona or pet’s name is the word or words you’d use to identify them. This could be their proper name, like “Sam” or “Mr. Jones” It could be a title, like “the Queen of France,” or “Doctor Culver.” Or it could be a descriptive phrase, like “a witch,” or “the hermit.” Or even a part of you, like “my hands,” or “my necklace.”

The way you write your persona or pet’s name affects how it’s displayed in the text:

• Names beginning with “a,” “an,” or “another”

  An appropriate definite article (like “the”) will be substituted after the first time the name appears.

• Names including “I,” “me,” “my,” “mine,” and “myself”

  These will be interpreted as references to your persona, except in cases where “I” or “mine” have another meaning.

Pronouns

Your persona or pet’s pronoun is used to refer to them when who or what is being referred to can be inferred from context. You can choose from a set of common pronouns:

• they/them, he/him, she/her, or it/its

  These pronouns are often used to refer to a single character or object.

• (plural)

  The special plural “pronoun” allows you to create a persona or pet that represents a group of characters. It has the combined effect of assigning the plural pronoun (they), and treating your persona or pet’s name as plural, too.

Who are you?

Personas and pets both have names and pronouns, and you can tell what they both do, say, and feel by chatting and emoting. So how do you choose who (or what) is your persona?

Depending on the kind of story you’re telling and you and your friends’ other storytelling experiences, the answer to this question may be obvious. For example, if you have experience playing roleplaying games, you probably naturally associate personas with player characters in those games. If you play MMOs or other online virtual worlds, you might think of your persona as your avatar.

Here are some tips for what makes a good persona:

• Choose a character you can identify with. After all, you’ll be reading the story from their perspective.

• Choose the character you plan to emote and chat as the most.

• Choose a character that will be present through most of the story.

• Choose a character whose words and actions will drive the plot of the story.

As you gain experience telling stories with Mote, it will start to become apparent to you who your persona should be on your own.

Get creative

When you’re first getting started with personas and pets, it’s natural to stick to the basics by creating personas and pets that represent characters and objects. When you’re ready to explore, try experimenting with some creative persona and pet ideas.

What would it be like to tell a story using these pets? What kind of emotes would work well? What would it be like to use one of these as your persona?

Have fun and play pretend

Personas and pets invite you to tell your story through the words and actions of the characters who inhabit it, and, in the case of personas, to experience the narrative through their perspective. Don’t be afraid to experiment and make mistakes; you’re on your way to discovering new stories and new ways of telling them.