The Alphaville Herald

Tringo Star

by Alphaville Herald on 04/03/05 at 9:36 am

Congratulations to SL resident Kermitt Quirk, inventor of Tringo, the game that’s swept Second Life over the last several months. After developing the game on his time off, Kermitt found Tringo becoming one of the grid’s most popular pastimes. Now it’s about to hit RL, as Kermitt has cut a licensing deal with SF’s Donnerwood Media, which plans to develop the game for cell phones and the Web.

Clickable Culture blogs the story here, complete with a clickable link to the Wall Street Journal report, and Linden Lab provides more detail in the current edition of the SL newsletter.

Will this lead to a flood of in-world game development? There’s already quite a bit of it, according to Pirate Cotton’s Game SLave, a wiki listing all the in-world games SL has to offer. But none have proved as popular (or as annoying to the non-fan, judging from recent forum traffic) as Tringo, which is perhaps not surprising. By combining one of the most addictive computer games (Tetris) with one of the most addicitive of RL (Bingo), Kermitt has managed to create a seemingly perfect game for a virtual world that closely mimics our real one.

Which leads us to the only possible conclusion: Forty years from now, if LL is lucky, Second Life will be filled with blue-haired-old-lady avatars hunched over their Tringo cards muttering over how damn hard it is to fit that “S” shape into the grid and weren’t things better back in the 1.5 days anyhow…