Just over a year ago (February 2012), we discovered that Linden Lab had acquired experimental game studio Little Text People, a venture set up by Artificial Intelligence specialist Richard Evans and Interactive Fiction author Emily Short. The day after the purchase, Linden CEO Rod Humble left comments on the New World Notes blog which indicated the company was developing new products that had nothing to do with Second Life®. Rumours had been circulating the previous year that Linden were interested in developing text adventures, although a tweet by Humble in September 2011 had appeared to deny this.
Twelve months later, Linden have launched first ‘dio’ (at
the end of January) and then ‘Versu’ (in the middle of February), and we have
not one but two new products based around the text adventure genre, the first a
web-based platform and the second an iOS app. Neither are in any way related to
SL, and if it wasn’t for the banner ads for Versu recently added to the SL
website, you could be forgiven for having completely failed to notice these new
companions to our beloved digital world in its parent’s product portfolio;
nothing about these launches has so far (at the time of writing) been announced
on the SL site. This does though add some possible light to the sudden flurry
of posts since the start of the year in the ‘Featured News’ section of the SL
dashboard: perhaps Linden are hoping new users of these two products might pay
SL a visit and want their engagement with the community to appear a little more,
well, in existence.
Dating back to 1975, text adventures started out as games
where descriptions of locations were given in text and you were able to move
around and do things by typing in simple instructions such as ‘Go north’ and
‘Get sword’ and ‘Kill troll’. In the very first text adventure, for example (‘Colossal
Cave Adventure’, written by Will Crowther), players were greeted with the
following at the start of the game:
You are standing at the end of a
road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream
flows out of the building and down a gully.
Typing, ‘Go in’ then gave this update:
You are inside a building, a well
house for a large spring. There are some keys on the ground here. There is a
shiny brass lamp nearby.
Games were eventually completed by using objects found such
as the keys and the lamp to solve problems encountered. A darkened room, for
example, might yield no secrets without that shiny brass lamp lit, but you
might have to source oil and matches elsewhere before you could do that.
Text adventures were popular in the very early days of home
computing, with titles such as the 1982 adaptation of Tolkien’s The Hobbit achieving over a million
sales in the UK. As the graphical capabilities of those machines developed,
however, the more immediate appeal of arcade style games swiftly pushed
adventures out of the mainstream market. But a small and dedicated community of
writers and players remained loyal to the genre and new games have continued to
be created ever since. Whilst they might be more difficult to get into initially
than a game of Space Invaders, text adventures can be very immersive once
you’ve got your head around them and the pleasure at solving a complex problem is
immense.
Two key developments in adventures as the memory capacity of
computers grew were the addition of pictures to location descriptions in some
games (though these were still considered ‘text adventures’ since the medium of
interaction remained text) and a greater focus on the quality of writing. The
text descriptions in very early games were necessarily short and functional
since anything more indulgent would have quickly filled up memory; as this
ceased to be a limiting factor, however, more lengthy and literate narratives
could be created. Over time, the term ‘interactive fiction’ became adopted to
reflect this shift towards more immersive writing. Today, the term ‘text
adventure’ is often used to refer to games where the focus is on solving
puzzles and moving around an environment, and the term ‘interactive fiction’
used to refer to games where the focus is on narrative. This is a useful distinction
for the exploration of Linden’s new products, since dio would appear to be
built around the text adventure approach and Versu is very much a platform for
interactive fiction.
In fact, one of the first adventures to be found at dio (www.dio.com),
which you access via the web and can log into using your Facebook account, is
an implementation of none other than Will Crowther‘s Colossal Cave Adventure (https://www.dio.com/places/colossal-cave). The dio
approach, however, does not require anything to be typed in: instead, the
options available to you in any given location are arranged down the left hand
side of the screen like the navigation buttons of a turn-of-the-century web
page. The location text, pictures and messages display in a frame in the middle
of the screen and there is space to the right of this for visitors to leave
their comments. For me, the photographic illustrations instantly cheapened the feel
of the Colossal Cave Adventure, but then text adventure enthusiasts always did
argue that graphics ruined the visuals. Moreover, the arrangement of text and
pictures on some of the dio titles feels a little ‘scrapbook’. Still, it’s
early days. The first blogs were hardly works of art either.
But it’s not just adventure games that can be created using
dio. A text description of a place could be a real place or an historic place
or a remembered place or a hypothetical place. A teacher could create a
Victorian street of shops for pupils to explore. Distant relatives could create
‘tourable’ versions of their homes to show off. Holiday photos of places
visited could be linked together as an album of pictures and jotted down
memories. And so on. In a sense, dio kind of does for text adventures what SL
did for first person shooter games: it takes a way of exploring an environment
and broadens this beyond merely ‘game’. dio ‘places’ are not just restricted to
spatial environments either: suggestions made on the site for content include
hobbies and interests, such as dios that show off any collections you might
have (think places on a shelf). This, therefore, is Linden’s ‘Pinterest
Product’, a new way for linking pictures and text that challenges the dominance
of the blog and Facebook format: items linked conceptually rather than
chronologically. At a simplistic level, it could just be used as a website
creation tool.
Versu (www.versu.com), on the
other hand, is only a dedicated interactive fiction platform, the obvious
outcome of the purchase of Little Text People. Currently only available as an
app for Apple devices, the download comes with three free stories and a fourth
available to purchase – all written by award winning interactive fiction writer
Emily Short. No doubt, the range of titles for sale will grow over time, especially
once users are able to generate their own content. Currently this isn’t an
option, although there are plans to introduce it in the future.
The Short stories are a collection of nineteenth century tales,
the freebies consisting of ‘An Introduction to Society’, a Versu tutorial that
follows schoolgirl Lucy taking instruction from her grandmama on how to behave
in polite society, ‘The Unwelcome Proposal’, an adaption of Mr Collins’
proposal to Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, and ‘The House on the
Cliff’, a mystery story taking place on an apparently empty estate following a horse
and carriage accident. On entering a story, the reader is given a choice of
characters to play and narrative is presented from that person’s perspective from
that point onwards.
As with dio, there is no text input for the Versu stories
and your options are made available via menus. Don’t mistake this for a simple
system, however: the options available are numerous. When Lucy takes tea with
her grandmama, for example, these include stirring her tea, sipping it,
slurping it, checking the level in the teapot, pouring out a cup for Grandmama,
spilling a cup on Grandmama and many more besides. The response of other
characters to your actions will depend upon a number of factors, including
their personality, abilities and mood. And all of this complexity is
gift-wrapped in Short’s sumptuous narrative and accompanied by beautiful line
art illustrations. Overall, they brilliantly showcase Versu as a reading
experience and set a high standard for future authors to live up to. I hope
there will be more titles available soon.
Blogoshpere comment on dio and Versu at the time of writing
is sparse, since they are both still very recent releases. Some initial
disappointment has been expressed that two products which appear at face value
to do a similar thing are not compatible with each other. dio and Versu,
however, are conceptually different things and targeted at different audiences.
They both have immense potential as content platforms and of course both will
succeed or fail depending on the content created for them. I used to write text
adventures many years ago and I like both of these products. I have two new
toys to play with, therefore, which take me back to a way of thinking about
stories that I haven’t entertained for a long time. That they both come from
Linden – the company responsible for the product that has perhaps most engaged
my imagination and creativity over the last ten years – is just the icing on
the cake.
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