Glad you think so too!

If only it were "my team" - I'm not cool enough to work on this kind of project at Linden Lab, though it would be nice! I did get to meet Emily Short though.

Interesting point about creating the story as you read it, instead of just messing around within the confines of someone else's story. It's a cool idea, which brings to mind Sleep Is Death, for one thing. And I'd imagine Versu would be well-suited to stories that don't focus on the player character, though both should be possible.

One idea Ryan and I are exploring in That Dragon, Cancer is the idea of using accessibility as a challenge axis itself. As you go, you essentially teach the audience to deal with more and more challenging content. At that point, you can essentially apply all the usual tools of building a difficulty ramp.

Ha, great idea! I'm really curious to see if it works out. Also, your project looks really intriguing! Is that all development art from the game? I can definitely see the Geo A Day influence.

Versu is an interactive storytelling platform just released today by Linden Lab:
http://www.versu.com/

Basically, I see it as Chris Crawford's Storytron, except done right. It's a collaboration between IF author Emily Short and AI programmer Richard Evans, combining written stories with sophisticated character and drama AI. Currently it's basically interactive Jane Austen novels (seriously!), but it can encompass any genre of fiction, and more stories (and the tools for making them) are on the way.

You can read Emily Short's description of it here:
http://emshort.wordpress.com/2013/02/14/introducing-versu/

Also an article with some quotes from the Linden Lab CEO Rod Humble here:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/186262/Linden_Labs_Versu_wants_to_make_hobbyists_storytelling_superstars.php

I first came across this when it was demoed at GDC (before LittleTextPeople was acquired by Linden Lab) and I've been eagerly waiting for it to come out. Unfortunately, right now it's only available for iPad, and I don't have one. But it sounds like it will be coming out for other platforms eventually.

I recently started working at Linden Lab myself, and this project is a big reason why. Can you imagine something more revolutionary being done right now? I wasn't sure if I should post about it, but God at Play's enthusiasm for it pushed me over the edge.

So, here we have interactive experiences fueled on storytelling, not gameplay. What do you think?

The artist does have a moral obligation to reach out. Especially now, with civilization at an all time low and faced with  the destruction of the planet as a habitable environment.
But some things are just too complex, too nuanced. They can only be explored in forms that are difficult too penetrate for most.

Lately, however, because of the urgency mentioned above, I tend to regard the latter as somewhat decadent. We have some serious problems to deal with. And no time to lose. It is urgent that we get some beauty to the masses. Some is better than none.

This is the source of my urgency as well. Aside from my own lifetime ticking away...

[I think it could lend itself very naturally to a visual representation]

I finally understand how functional programming can work for real-time interactive graphical applications! There's a new functional language called Elm that compiles to HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for making websites and games.

The way it works is called functional reactive programming, which basically means it recalculates the state of the virtual world whenever input values (keyboard, mouse, timers) change, and the graphical representation is calculated from the state of the virtual world so that updates too. All the code for the game basically describes the way this data flows and is transformed (through lots and lots of nested functions). As a result, I think it could lend itself very naturally to a visual representation. It's basically just a big tree, a network of data flowing and combining, and if you see this structure you see the entire program.

This could be great for both R-mode readability and building with functional (no pun intended) pieces in real time.

You can see a number of simple examples, including a detailed explanation of the code behind Pong.

Not exactly the prettiest code at first glance (probably more confusing than the kind of programming we're used to). I think the real potential here is in making it visual. We all know how Scratch looks, trying to make normal code visual. I think functional programming would actually look better in visual form than in text.

And in the long run, I bet functional programming would be much more amenable to programming by demonstration - that is, expressing general logic through specific examples.

I've just discovered another awesome Bret Victor project, this time it's the most artist-friendly visual programming system I've ever seen, Substroke.



It's mostly an academic thing, though I think he's made some sort of prototype of it. As it stands, it's still pretty arcane, but it's a big step in the right direction.

I really think "programming via visual storyboards a la comics" is the way to go. Like this. Maybe supplemented with a natural-ish language "script" that it translates to, where you can edit at either level.

Latest blog post by The Astronauts talks about this: Why we can’t feel and play at the same time

Yes, it's very interesting! It's nice to see these ideas of ours becoming more concrete as we make more games and find research that supports them...

I just found this, also. Glad you guys already picked it up. I found a few other nice articles from there, including these:
http://betterbyyouasking.com/2012/10/23/the-graveyard/
http://publicinterface.blogspot.com/2012/02/to-moon-tragedy-and-video-games.html
http://www.kotaku.com.au/2012/04/its-the-gameplay-stupid-shadow-of-the-colossus/

I laughed with both eyes.

I'll try to keep that rating scale in mind next time I read a review!

Sounds like the board game Diplomacy. Have you played it?

I just read the old book Mindstorms, by Seymour Papert, after Bret Victor recommended it so highly in his article Learnable Programming.

It's a good one - got me inspired about education again. Still trying to figure out how to actually apply these ideas and the example of Logo to a game-making tool...

I just played the latest Alpha (version 3) and I had a much more compelling experience this time. No rough edges distracted me, and I felt like I was playing and thinking the way I was "supposed" to. I'm guessing it would also be a lot more interesting with a real human to play with, instead of just a simulation.

Wow, that is pretty awesome, thanks for putting together those example diagrams for us!

I like the bright colors - I can almost see the nice bouncy easing curves on those nodes shrinking and growing and sliding and locking together. Do the colors have significance in your diagrams? (representing data types, maybe?)

I'm still digesting how it all would work, but this is already inspiring. I wonder how we could add visualization of data and dynamics (as Bret Victor suggests in Learnable Programming) in addition to your visualization of structure...