Linden Lab, the makers of shared creative spaces including Second Life®, PatternsTM, CreatorverseTM, and dioTM, today announced the launch of Versu, a new character-driven interactive fiction platform that immerses readers in living stories. Versu is available for free today for iPad on the App Store. Versions for Android devices will be released soon.
A product of Linden Lab’s acquisition of LittleTextPeople earlier this year, Versu provides unique narrative experiences in which the reader is an integral part of character-driven interactive stories. In Versu, you take on a character with distinct preferences, concerns, and desires, as you explore and change a story through your decisions and interactions with other characters. The characters you encounter are endowed with sophisticated artificial intelligence and have their own unique personalities, motivations, and emotional reactions as you interact with them. The decisions you make and how you treat other characters define your character in the story and influence the narrative, giving each title the potential for many unique experiences to explore. In the future, the tool set used to build these immersive stories will be made available to users, enabling readers to insert their own characters and scenes into the narratives they explore.
It’s the early 1600’s, the plague is in town (again), business could be better, and Shakespeare’s gearing up for a new play at the Globe. You’ve got a dinner invitation from an old acquaintance, whose lively and ribald tales stand to brighten things up .