very early games were necessarily short and functional since anything more indulgent would have quickly filled up memory; as this ceased to be a limiting factor, however, more lengthy and literate narratives could be created. Over time, the term ‘interactive fiction’ was adopted to reflect this shift towards more immersive writing. Today, the term ‘text adventure’ is often used to refer to games where the focus is on solving puzzles and moving around an environment, and the term ‘interactive fiction’ used to refer to games where the focus is on narrative. This is a useful distinction for the exploration of Linden Lab’s new products, since dio would appear to be built around the text adventure approach, and Versu is very much a platform for interactive fiction. In fact, one of the first adventures to be found at dio (www.dio.com), which you access via the web and can log into using your Facebook account, is an implementation of none other than Will Crowther‘s Colossal Cave Adventure (https://www. dio.com/places/colossal-cave). The dio approach, however, does not require anything to be typed in. The options available to you in any given location are arranged down the left hand side of the screen like the navigation buttons of a turn-of-the-century web page. The location text, pictures and messages display in a frame in the middle of the screen, and there is space to the right of this for visitors to leave their comments. For me, the photographic illustrations instantly cheapened the feel of the Colossal Cave Adventure, 226
but text adventure enthusiasts always did argue that graphics ruined the visuals. Moreover, the arrangement of text and pictures on some of the dio titles gives a bit of a ‘scrapbook’ feeling. Still, it is early. The first blogs were hardly works of art, either. But it’s not just adventure games that can be created using dio. A text description of a place could be a real place or an historic place or a remembered place or a hypothetical place. A teacher could create a Victorian street of shops for pupils to explore. Distant relatives could create ‘tourable’ versions of their homes to display. Holiday photos could be linked together as an album of pictures and jotted down memories. In a sense, dio does for text adventures what SL® did for first person shooter games: it takes a way of exploring an environment and broadens this beyond merely ‘game’. dio locations are not just restricted to spatial environments; suggestions made on the site for content include hobbies and interests, such as dios that show off any collections you might have (think places on a shelf). This, therefore, is Linden Labs’ ‘Pinterest Product’, a new way for linking pictures and text that challenges the dominance of the blog and Facebook format - items linked conceptually rather than chronologically. At a simplistic level, it could just be used as a website creation tool. Versu (www.versu.com), on the other hand, is only a dedicated interactive fiction platform, the obvious outcome of the purchase