Rumours are currently abound (perhaps substantiated by the
time you read this) that Linden Labs® have New Stuff up their sleeve. But not Second Life® New Stuff.
It was a post on New World Notes that
first alerted me to this. The
interpretation there was that potential new products could include some sort of
prim building game (inspired by the popularity of Minecraft), a fashion app for
social networks and an interactive fiction product following the Lab’s
acquisition of Little Text People in February.
Little Text People, I’m given to understand, is an experimental game
studio (set up by artificial intelligence specialist Richard Evans and
interactive fiction writer Emily Short) that is “exploring the emotional
possibilities of interactive fiction”.
I’m not entirely certain what that means, but on face value it does seem
compatible with Linden CEO Rod Humble’s December statement on creating
artificial life in SL, about which I mused in these very pages a couple of
months ago. I have a history with
interactive fiction. The genre has its
origins in 1980s ‘adventure games’: text only games you would load into your
8-bit computer and type commands into.
You’d start off in a location described to you by the computer (eg, ‘You
are in a cave; everything is black’) and your subsequent instructions (eg,
‘Turn on my torch’ would be interpreted to give text responses (eg, ‘You turn
on your torch and see a sleeping vampire’).
So long as you typed your commands correctly, that is, and used words
that were in the computer program’s vocabulary – which, as you can imagine for
a machine with less that 50k memory (that’s kilobytes,
those tiny little things that came before megabytes), was not particularly
large. I wrote three adventure games and
they are each of them offspring of my writer’s mind that I am especially fond
of. I always liked the idea that a
reader should have to actively do something in order to discover the next
little bit of a story. I’m excited,
therefore, to see what comes out of this new Linden partnership.
