Versu—A Simulationist Storytelling System

Versu is a text-based simulationist interactive drama. Because it uses autonomous agents, the drama is highly replayable: you can play the same story from multiple perspectives, or assign different characters to the various roles. The architecture relies on the notion of a social practice to achieve coordination between the independent autonomous agents. A social practice describes a recurring social situation, and is a successor to the Schankian script. Social practices are implemented as reactive joint plans, providing affordances to the agents who participate in them. The practices never control the agents directly; they merely provide suggestions. It is always the individual agent who decides what to do, using utility-based reactive action selection.