Versu Is Starting To Look Very Interesting

The Guardian have gained such a reputation for typos that their nickname is The Grauniad. Indeed if you type in grauniad.co.uk into a web browser you’ll end up at The Guardian’s website. Linden Lab are so often called Linden Labs that, typing lindenlabs.com into a web browser takes you to … http://lindenlabs.com/ … which is the same website as http://lindenlab.com/ I mean, people just cannot help but call the company Linden Labs.

Which brings us to a Techcrunch article entitled : How Linden Lab Hopes To Find Second Life In Mobile Creative Play aha! They got the name right? Well not quite, there’s a comment telling the author that the company is called Linden Lab, the URL has LindenLabs in it and a google search lists the story with Linden Labs in the headline. Now, is it important that people get the name right? Well not really, people know who they’re talking about, so with that over, let’s move on.

Creatoverse and Patterns have been getting a lot of coverage lately, Inara Pey takes a look at Creatoverse here. However Dio and Versu have been a bit more vague, I mean we know Emily Short is involved in Versu and that it’s interactive fiction. The TechCrunch article puts a bit more meat on the bones, although it’s not exactly clear what’s on the horizon.

Dio is hard to explain apparently, it sounds a bit like Google’s Lively from that article, involving doors to get to other spaces, having an avatar and an inventory. Apparently you can create a MUSH (multi user shared hack) and a hobby space very easily.

Versu …. this is starting to look very interesting.

Versu is a porject that has been created with collaboration by interactive fiction storyteller Emily Short and Richard Evans, who worked on The Sims 3. Now the interesting thing here is that it’s not just a means of telling a story, the story will apparently evolve  as you set motives and behaviours for your characters, so in some ways, it’s your characters who will write the story and, as you’ll be able to have different characters or start again with different behaviour patterns, the story will be different depending upon the characteristics of your character.

This sounds to me, very interesting. The proof will of course be in the pudding, but the concept sounds very appealing.

Linden Lab have of course embraced this concept of shared creative spaces, I would hope to see some interactive storytelling inside Second Life, well we do get that with story readings and such like but I’d like to see some creator tools that bring reading inworld to a new level, notecards don’t cut the mustard so well when it comes to being interactive. However Second Life does offer the opportunity for some vibrant storytelling in a 3D environment, that in itself adds a new angle to the art of storytelling, it’s a shame more authors don’t come onboard with this.

I’m looking forward to seeing Versu in action, although I don’t want to get too excited regarding what is a new product and probably an experimental one at that, but it most definitely does have potential.

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