20080913

Harpo and C°

R-POW stands for Recreational Persistent Online World.

Anyone who's been gravitating around MMO*, MUDs, MUSHes long enough has come to hate the MMOG/MMORPG acronyms with a passion, for a number of all very good reasons:
  • Massive(ly) Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games is not a mouthful, it's the after-action of competitive eating (think what comes just after a bulimia attack).

  • The Massive(ly) is an abomination to grammar, and we look retarded enough spending our lives playing games way past our prime as it is.

  • The whole Game thing irks bearded academics and self-important hiveminds alike, not such a bad thing in itself, but kind of gets in the way of level-headed debate.

  • Also, everybody thinks of WoW when you invoke MMO* (or Everquest, back last century) which further skews the discussion when you're talking about POWs-without-elves.
Hence my coining (?) R-POW — pronounced Harpo.
Persistent Online Worlds is self-explanatory, and while the multiplayer angle is only implicit, it's also obvious from a craft/business perspective: there's little benefit in creating a persistent universe on the intarwebs if it's not to share the experience, and the more the merrier.

R-POW encompass the  games, but also social/business experimental worlds such as Second Life, as long as the users are expected to enter and stay in the world on their own volition and for the purpose of entertainment/fun/recreation. This remains true even if the experience actually sucks goats, is a painful grindfest, and a fraction of the population really aims at making a buck by farming gold, and is not there for fun and giggles.

E-POW (pronounced Hippo, obviously), are Educational, and can include many forms of Serious Games, such as those meant to raise awareness about political or social issues, teach history to kids and whatnot, as long as they fit the POW part of the bill and aren't just a Civ-like edutainment tool.

T-POW (teapot, pronounced Colbert-style), are Training POWs, typically military or specialty simulations meant to teach and hone practical skills (as opposed to support general education/information/debate on select issues). They can also include simulations designed to help businesses evaluate employees or build team spirit. Generally speaking, they differ from E-POW by being purposefully designed for a select audience and heavily goal-oriented.

With that out of the way, expect to see me maliciously sparkle future articles with both *-POW and MMO*, for variety's sake…

20080905

Fall update.

It has been a while…

And the drought is not over yet, I'm afraid: although there are quite a few notes piling up in my hard drive, I still am not the blogger for real, having sort of a block on pushing half-baked content in the open.

Namely, I've been goofing around with articles for the other blog, and reading like crazy, once again faced with the limitation of running a single instance on a linear 1 s/s time.


That said, I do sleep, and even dream. Thanks to one of the daily reads (I suspect), I woke up today with the vivid (albeit quickly vanishing) impression of a "perfect moment" kind of evening.


There was duck on the menu, but that's not key: I had the unrealistic privilege of sitting at the same table as Glenn Gould, Neal Stephenson and Will Wright, while Scott Adams was stuck in the elevator with Ayn Rand, to everyone else's relief (unfortunately, Charles Stross had missed his plane).


Unrelated, but the first episode of The Shield season 7 is out…


PS: Yeah, flight schedules are an insurmontable obstacle in my dreams, when death isn't, go figure…