Games within games: Tringo in Second Life

As we all know by now, Second Life is less of a game and more of a virtual world with its own economy. Of course, inhabitants in a virtual world need virtual pastimes. A quick scan of today’s advertised events demonstrates that ‘Tringo’ and ‘Slingo’ are both more popular than ever.

Second Life events

While Slingo (imagine a slot machine merged with bingo) has long been a popular game on the internet, Tringo seems to be more specific to Second Life.

So what is it? Well, earlier today, Wired reported on the background and popularity of Tringo, which is an unlikely cross-breed of bingo and tetris. I won’t try to cover it in detail here (perhaps because I’m busy playing it in another window? I’ll let you guess) but there are plenty of excellent coverage of the game out there already. If you don’t fancy trying it in Second Life, you can always play it on the publisher’s website instead.

There are plenty of other games in Second Life besides Tringo. In fact, Linden Labs hosts an annual contest to develop compelling in-game games. (2005 winners, 2006 winners).

It will take some time before any of them overtake the *ingo games for raw popularity in Second Life though. As a sign of its success, and another excellent example of a real world crossover, I notice that Tringo has become a GameBoy Advance title too.

4 thoughts on “Games within games: Tringo in Second Life

  1. Tringo is coming to interactive TV. Tune to Sky channel 842 at 5pm for 1 week from 29-Jan-07 or from 8pm for the week of 5-Feb-07

  2. I have a bog on our site that we wrote ourselves, but are on the verge of changing to a wordpress blog. There is no need to publish this on your site, but if you could explain what a trackback is and how you use it, I’d be grateful. I assumed that it is a coded url that I would put in an article if I wanted to link to your article, but when I click on trackback on anyone’s site, it doesn’t go anywhere; just like yours, it simply refreshes the page. WordPress’ explanation is really poor – can you help? Thanks, Kennie

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