Linden’s adventure products: dio and Versu

The second of two articles this month for AVENUE magazine.



Just over a year ago (February 2012), we discovered that Linden Lab had acquired experimental game studio Little Text People, a venture set up by Artificial Intelligence specialist Richard Evans and Interactive Fiction author Emily Short. The day after the purchase, Linden CEO Rod Humble left comments on the New World Notes blog which indicated the company was developing new products that had nothing to do with Second Life®. Rumours had been circulating the previous year that Linden were interested in developing text adventures, although a tweet by Humble in September 2011 had appeared to deny this.

Fatal Crosspost: Coming soon to a conversation near you

The first of two articles this month for AVENUE magazine.

Asimov once wrote of his pride in coining the word ‘robotics’, a term now commonly used to describe – and this can surely come as no surprise – anything pertaining to the technology or use of robots. It might seem odd that an author of literally hundreds of books should have ranked so highly the invention of a single word – one which, let’s face it, would probably have made its way into our language in any case – in his audit of personal achievement; I’m totally with him on this, however. After nearly seven years of life in the metaverse and approximately half a million words committed in some shape or form to the subject, the marriage of just two of them delights me as one of my favourite creations: I invented the term ‘fatal crosspost’.