The following articles cover various aspects of the Versu, from the logic language and coding tools to social modeling and game design.

Versu: Conversation Implementation by Emily Short

Any platform focused on social interaction needs strong conversation handling. The following article goes into a certain amount of technical detail about what the system does and how it works, and Richard kindly agreed to write about the sections on which he had the most design influence.

Versu: Content Structure by Emily Short

Behind the scenes of a particular gameplay experience, Versu content comes in three forms: genre files, which specify a lot of details about behavior in a particular social milieu; story files, which provide an extrinsic narrative arc; and character files, which specify individual behaviors and personal character arcs.

The AI Architecture of Versu by Richard Evans and Emily Short

Presented at Imperial College, London, this article gives a general overview of how Versu’s Non-Player Characters are programmed with abstract, context-specific and universal motivations, emotions, beliefs, and more.

Computer Models of Constitutive Social Practice by Richard Evans

This paper describes a computer implementation of the Game of Giving and Asking for Reasons, as described in Making It Explicit. First, I rehearse the distinction between regulative and constitutive views of social practice. It is note- worthy that much multi-agent AI research has been based on the regulative view, despite the philosophical attractions of the constitutive view. Then I distinguish between two sub-types of constitutive interpretation, divided by whether or not intentionality itself is viewed as a bundle of capacities that is constituted by participation in practices. Then I describe a detailed model of the Game of Giving and Asking for Reasons, as a first step in the project of showing how intentionality itself can be realised in a set of practices. I describe the technical points at which I was forced to deviate from Brandom’s original description.

Praxis: A Logic-Based DSL for Modeling Social Practices by Richard Evans

A slide show from a talk given by Richard Evans about Praxis and Versu, and how code is turned into simulation in Versu stories.

Prompter: A Domain-Specific Language for Versu by Graham Nelson

In this paper, Graham Nelson gives a concise summary of his Prompter language, written for Versu, which adds a number of tools for those wishing to author games for Versu, including intuitive parsing and a plot visualizer.