I watched this unfold in realtime in 2013-14, and I still think it was one of the most exciting and then disappointing developments in interactive narrative.
In 2013, Linden Lab (the studio who made the MMO Second Life) were trying to branch out, and they hired Richard Evans and Em Short to work on an experimental narrative project. I’m not quite sure what the original brief was, but this led to the first prototypes of Versu, an agent-based interactive narrative system.
The promise was that the system would allow the player to take any action at any moment (eg. try to romance the villain, burn down the manor, get drunk instead of solving the mystery etc) because its actions were modular and based on situations, not based on designer expectations of how a scene would unfold. Having seen the prototypes in action I think these promises were slightly overblown (one problem is that because every action is modular it is difficult for the action to respond to the content of the moment, so the action “Thank him → ‘You’re welcome!’” hits very differently if you’re thanking someone for patting you on the shoulder or thanking someone for saving your life), but it’s definitely a level of meaningful agency that is lacking in almost all games. And since all NPCs are also taking actions to pursue their own goals, the idea was that this would lead to scenes with unpredictable emergent outcomes that still satisfied narrative requirements. They also promised that NPC agents would act independently and logically; one article described it as the first game where Darth Vader and Buffy the Vampire Slayer could be placed in an elevator and have something to say to each other.
So Short and Evans work on some prototypes inspired by Jane Austen novels (see this showcase, from 1h10m), then moved on to some more fleshed out small games (see the slide here at 9:38) and finally worked on their largest game, Blood & Laurels.
However, around this time Linden Lab had a change of leadership, and decided to pull the plug on the project. All told I believe the Versu project lasted about a year, which is an astonishingly small amount of time for such an impressive and ambitious project.
Although their funding was pulled, Short and Evans managed to convince Linden to at least release Blood & Laurels, since it was pretty much done, so it was released in mid 2014 on the App Store. However, they didn’t pay anyone to maintain it, so when it was made unplayable due to an App Store update a few months later it could not be salvaged. It has since been removed from the App Store.
(Worth pointing out that Em, at least, has no hard feelings against Linden; she seems to think that she and Richard got lucky having Linden even hire them to begin with, and it was Linden’s choice whether to continue investing.)
I believe it is possible to play Blood & Laurels in one, perhaps two places on earth right now: 1) I believe that the French national library requires all media of any form to be archived along with a device that can definitely run it, so that anyone can play any form of media that has ever been released for this very reason. So if they did a thorough job, it may be possible to go to Paris and play it there. (If anyone reading this lives in Paris, it would be wonderful if you could investigate!) 2) I heard a rumour that some guy somewhere has an iPad that is compatible with the game that he never installed updates on, and sometimes lets people play on there. It is insane that these are the only options available. I think this is still an extremely relevant question today, given we just had the Stop Killing Games hearings.
I do have some good news: someone recently uploaded a complete playthrough of the game on Youtube, so at least we can watch along and try to get a feel for how the system felt during play.
If you are interested in learning more about the system I recommend reading through the documentation that Em has preserved on versu dot com (I can’t post the link as I’m a new user), or reading blog posts she made about it on her blog emshort.blog.
I personally think that the promises made about the system were a little exaggerated (or perhaps I let the fantasy of “do anything be anyone” go to my head a bit), but that it was still an extremely interesting system that could have developed into a rich and fascinating lineup of narrative titles. It needed a bit more time to cook, and the Versu projects could have done with more polish in terms of art assets. And from a business perspective, it was always going to be difficult to stand out on mobile because those stores are awful. But this was an astonishing, cutting edge bit of tech that was lost before it could fully mature, and has now been drowned out in the unsatisfactory wave of LLM-generated narrative games which lack a feeling of true agency, pacing or craft.
Incidentally I have been emailing Linden Lab for almost a year trying to get them to sell me the rights to Blood & Laurels and to the Versu system, so we’ll see if that comes to anything. If anyone would be interested in pooling our collective resources, please email me: jamie at clockworkbird dot net.
