He started programming, and pretty soon he’d created Tringo — an intriguing fusion of bingo and Tetris. As with Tetris, you have to take an oncoming stream of oddly shaped blocks and fit them together so they disappear. The difference is that in Tringo, you lay down the bricks one by one on a bingo-like grid, and amass points when you make larger masses of bricks vanish. Quirk designed Tringo as a group game: Second Life players would show up at someone’s house, sit in a floating Tringo chair with a Tringo card in front of them, and compete to see who could get the biggest score.

In essence, Quirk had created one of gaming’s most hallowed properties: A “casual” game that can be learned in a few minutes, but never entirely mastered. “The concept is so simple,” Quirk said in March, “that people can pick it up real quick and be winning after even only two or three games.” Tringo also cleverly updates the intricacy of Tetris: Whereas Tetris had five different shapes of bricks, Tringo has nine, allowing for ever-more-subtle playing strategies.

But not too subtle. Quirk perfectly nailed the game designer’s greatest challenge — balancing complexity and frustration. It hit Second Life like a gorgeous new narcotic, and within a few months Second Lifers were thoroughly addicted. Quirk sold more than 200 copies of the game to players who would host multiplayer tournaments in their virtual mansions, with players putting in a gambling stake, and the highest scorer taking the kitty. You’d log into Second Life, check the “events” board, and see swaths of Tringo events — the single most popular pastime in all of Second Life.

Indeed, maybe a little too popular. “People started to complain that Tringo was harming the culture,” says Wagner James Au, the writer who has reported on Second Life as an “embedded” journalist for the last three years. “They felt it was ruining the social nature of the game. People were just showing up to play. They weren’t socializing or buying stuff any more.”

In essence, it was classic libel against video games: That they encourage isolation, with each player staring glassy-eyed at the evil, hypnotic screen. The irony here, of course, is that these complaints were coming from players who themselves were spending hours staring at their own computer screens while they played Second Life. Dig it: People were complaining that a game was ruining the quality of virtual life inside a game.

Of course, this said as much about the nature of Second Life as about Tringo. Second Lifers do not regard their world as a game: It’s a social environment, a chat room on steroids — a platform for an alternate life.

I had to see this for myself. So I logged into Second Life and Au took me to a Tringo match. I had to admit, it certainly looked pretty creepy: Dozens of us virtual avatars, parked staring in front of our Tringo cards, floating in seats suspended in midair. But as I played, I realized that the critics were wrong: This was just like a 1980s arcade. Sure, we were focused on our game — but people were also chatting amongst one another, complaining about their bad luck, talking trash, cheering one another on. “I met one of my best friends here while playing. He started out by telling me I really sucked at this game,” said “Melissa Kamloops,” the host of the Tringo match.

But things get weirder yet. This month, the rest of the world will be able to find out just how addictive Tringo can be — because the game is migrating outside of Second Life and joining the real world. Sean Ryan, head of the gaming company Donnerwood Media, found out about Tringo last year and loved it. (“I thought, this is really compelling. It’s hard to make games that are different — this one’s not a clone,” he told me.) So he signed a deal to license the game as a Game Boy Advance cartridge, which hit stores this month.

The virtual has taken on flesh, and now thousands of kids worldwide will replicate the Second Life libel — their parents will accuse them of staring, in isolation, at the screen, just as they did with Tetris so many years ago. History doesn’t just repeat itself, apparently: It remixes like a DJ.

But perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Tringo’s already-kooky history, though, is that it shows a new way for games to be born. Many of today’s best online games are moddable, which means players can reshape reality into something new. So why don’t we actively encourage them to create new casual games? An online environment is a terrific prototyping lab: You can quickly make something, hand out copies to other players, and discover immediately whether your invention is any good.

Indeed, Second Life is now holding competitions to create games inside the game. One entrant created a 3-D version of Lemmings; another did a cool version of marbles. There’s even a group of Second Lifers who modded their neighborhood into a first-person shooter. Imagine if World of Warcraft gave its 6 million-plus players the scripting tools to create new things to do inside the world.

Games inside games; worlds inside worlds. We’ve finally entered the Matrix, it seems — and it’s a hell of a lot of fun.