In March, interactive fiction pioneer's Emily Short's "Blood & Laurels", a passion project 15 years in the making, was in limbo at Linden Lab, which owns the AI-powered Versu Engine she created it with (as she told Iris then) -- but thanks to some negotiation with the company, in June the two sides agreed to collaborate on publication, and yesterday, the story was featured in The New York Times:
A more novel, even radical, form of digital storytelling with text arrived last month on the iPad in the form of Blood & Laurels by Emily Short, an author of interactive fiction... Blood & Laurels is interesting in its own right but even more so for the promise of what might come after it. Blood & Laurels was written with a software engine called Versu, designed by Ms. Short and Richard Evans, who worked on the artificial intelligence aspects of notable games like Black & White and The Sims 3.
(Evans developed Versu with Emily at Linden Lab.) Here's what the Times' Chris Sullentrop says what it's capable of doing:
Blood & Laurels made me feel more like an improviser than a reader, someone who was asked to perform a role in a troupe, responding to the unpredictable decisions of my fellow actors, who in turn had to adjust to my decisions. Remarkably, when I replayed the game, I didn’t feel that Marcus had become a different character when he decided to, say, betray Artus rather than execute his commands. Instead, it seemed that I was just learning how he might behave differently under the vagaries of circumstance.
Thanks, Ebbe! Play the game for yourself starting here.
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