Thoughts on Linden Labs' Versu engine
I'm genuinely surprised that Linden seem to have an even-greater overlap with my goals/philosophy than I was aware of. They have a similar dream behind their work on Second Life as I do for Peri (they're just confused about how to get there, as far as I can tell); and now, this project is a surprisingly fresh take on ludonarrative construction.
I haven't gotten a chance to play with any Versu stories yet (no iPad), so this is just based off what can be seen in the video above, and on the Versu website.
Versu is, at its face, a ludonovel engine: a program to tell effective second-person stories, using choice-prompts and other interactivity to create the illusion of self-determination, as you work toward one of a finite number of pre-composed conclusions.
However, Versu goes further by embedding complex character-personality AI, in the style of Emily Short's later works. Your choices are taken by the interpreter as merely a particular agent's decisions; you get to pick at the start of each session which agent to "take over" in this manner, with the rest assuming their pre-programmed AI personalities.
The player, "piloting" a character-agent with its own personality as they are, can only do what the agent would otherwise consider doing. The player will only get presented with options where the character's AI would have made been making a choice in the same situation. So, in effect, the player "becomes" the AI algorithm for that agent.
The games implemented so far in Versu seem to suggest that each ludonovel's end-state will be mostly determined by what attitude or beliefs each other AI agent can be induced to have through the player's chosen avatar's interactions with them. And since every character must be programmed with an AI-personality (because there is no character guaranteed to be the player's avatar), there's potential here, then, for interesting new forms of interaction.
For example, each story could start by showing the player an initial run-through of the narrative logic, in which none of the characters were controlled by the player. An automation, one line of strict narrative flow, to show the consequences of leaving things to their defaults. Only after this prognostication has been dealt would the player be allowed to pick at the weave of the story's timeline to their own end.
Alternately, much as a Versu story may have multiple endings, emergent from the simulated interplay, a story may also have inevitable conclusions, for at least some of the characters. Othello, mad with grief, can only kill. If you play as Othello, there will come a threshold where identification ends, and depersonalization begins; where no further choices are presented, and the second-person illusion disintegrates.
If the engine knows enough to start phrasing the narrative in the third person at that point, I'll be in love.
