If someone sat me down and presented me with this gorgeous Technicolor dream of a world building-game called Patterns and then asked me what company was responsible for creating it, I could have guessed for hours and never gotten it right.

Now, if there'd been a unicorn penis in the trailer...

It's a little sad how many people immediately thought of Second Life creator Linden Lab the moment they read the term "unicorn penis". The company responsible for the virtual world in which I once found myself dressed in a werewolf costume while sitting on pose balls that made it look like I was having vicious monster sex with a statuesque brunette could never be involved in something so mind-blowingly ambitious and beautiful, yet here we are.


Patterns is a physics-fueled building and exploration game that sounds a great deal like Minecraft on acid. Visitors to the world harvest materials with real-world densities to craft simple shapes into complex structures, structures infused with physics of their own — a wheel will roll, a precariously dangling structure will tumble.

So where is this innovation, creativity and cleanliness coming from? I put credit on the shoulders of Linden Lab CEO Rod Humble, the man that came to the company from working on The Sims franchise and before that, EverQuest. Ironic that the man I deem responsible for Patterns is also the man indirectly responsible for the MMO that once saw me having cybersex as a female Dark Elf in the Lake of Ill Omen local chat.


Patterns is currently in early beta. You can hit up the website to sign up for updates. Perhaps one day we'll meet there, and have sex as triangles.