Second Life Creator Acquires LittleTextPeople

Linden Lab, makers of Second Life, has been kind of quiet for a while. They broke that silence today with an acquisition and announcement of new products.

Linden Lab announced their acquisition of LittleTextPeople, a game development studio that specializes in writing, programming and designing next-generation interactive fiction.

Linden Lab is going to break from its one-trick-pony Second Life this year with several stand-alone products that will use LittleTextPeople’s technology in various ways.

“It’s an exciting time to join Linden Lab as they prepare to roll out entirely new types of social experiences and products,” said Emily Short, Chief Textual Officer of LittleTextPeople. “We look forward to building tools and technology that will allow people to create their own stories in interactive mediums that have never existed before.”

If you’re like me and wondering what LittleTextPeople is, the company explains itself:

LittleTextPeople explores the gameplay possibilities of nuanced social interaction. The company’s core technology is a simulator able to model social practices and individual personalities. Combine the simulations with the expressive freedom of fiction and the result is gameplay that more closely resembles the rich emotional dialogue of a novel, rather than a fight scene in an action movie.

From that, it seems like taking interactive fiction to the next level. I almost want this to turn into digital choose-your-own adventure novels. In all reality, it probably will be more like the visual novel genre that is popular in Asian countries, especially Japan.

“LittleTextPeople brings a depth and breadth of AI and interactive story development expertise that is a great fit for Linden Lab as we launch multiple new products,” said Rod Humble, CEO of Linden Lab. “The result of this investment will be a new type of digital entertainment that modernizes the novel as a shared story-telling experience.”

It sounds like Linden Lab is ready to step out of the shadow of Second Life. It was technically one of the first MMOs, but its problem is that it wasn’t really a game. It was more of a space for people to interact with each other. It looks like Linden Lab wants to change that with whatever they have got cooking with LittleTextPeople.

I for one can’t wait to see what this interactive fiction partnership produces.

For those who don’t know much about Second Life and what it does, check out this video:

There are 4 Comments. Add Yours.

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Dana Paxson
February 17, 2012 at 11:06 am

This looks quite cool. I built a model SL underground-city setting that was designed to illustrate the speculative fiction I write. It could make a nice framework for one of the interactive games under consideration. It could be moved from SL to the new game framework – where it is now, there’s not enough traffic. Playing a game in it would be great fun.

Best wishes on the new venture!

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Yoli Difference
February 18, 2012 at 1:38 pm

Beautiful presentation and it runs smoothly. However, the time for entertainment is immense as compared to the time for education, training, academic networks, libraries, research labs, historic places and grass root movements are also featured. Not to mention the capabilities of construction and Machinima production that promote creativity and enrich the frontiers of designers, architects artists and learning environments. As an educator, I would love to see a more balanced presentation in which human enrichment and personal growth is one of objectives of this presentation in particular and of Second Life in general.

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SL enthusiast
February 20, 2012 at 5:04 am

Possibly this acquisition helps Linden Lab start to create game content of their own in Second Life, hopefully an expanding series of stories and games to attract people.

From the beginning, Linden wanted to keep SL pure and let users create all content, but many, many potential users who tried SL could not find anything compelling to do, and more importantly, they left content creators to try to develop their own critical mass of users with no “sanction” or support from Linden. Neither developers nor users could count on a given build persisting. Many, many developers worked hard to create destinations, role-playing scenarios, and so on, but it never seemed so solidly rooted that people could depend on the long term persistence or count on being able to build on all the investment of time, energy, relationships, etc that they would invest. It could be gone tomorrow, and in a lot of cases, that’s just what happened. Once again, too much freedom of choice has proven to be a liability rather than an asset.

Meanwhile, certain MMORPG’s have becomes massively popular and SL missed most of that wave. It would seem that Linden should try to create such a framework, and have it be “sanctioned” by the company, as an experiment, at least, to see if new users feel better about having a real framework to experience. It’s a subtle thing.

Maybe I am reading too much into this, but that’s my first impression. I do hope it goes well and keeps Second Life growing and diversifying.

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Mark M
February 21, 2012 at 1:52 pm

I’ve been living and working in SL for years and have a vibrant social life there. I hope Linden Lab’s new interests don’t take them away from Second Life. LL support for SL has been inconsistent and I’m afraid their newer products might weaken an already tentative grip on SL quality of life.