Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Words that annoy me

I made a list of words which MMO bloggers use that make me feel dumber just for reading them. I will assign them "dumbpoints" which is a word I made up to express how much dumber I think a person is for using these words in a serious context, along with a short definition of what they really mean.

Content -- 2 dumbpoints. The cutscenes that you need to watch before you're allowed to complain that you're bored with an MMO.

Casuals -- 4 dumbpoints. Term which can be adapted to refer to any group of players of an MMO who are not currently in a world first raid.

Dancing -- 8 dumbpoints. Term describing what players do in any action video game ever made, but hate doing in MMOs.

Themepark -- 10 dumbpoints. Term used to indicate that an MMO is designed for kids who need to be told what to do and are entertained only by Content [see above].

Sandbox -- 6 dumbpoints. Term used to indicate that a game is a proper MMO for intelligent adults.

Free2play -- 14 dumbpoints. Everyone seems to use this nonsense term these days. Is it a trademark or something? Why do people think it's a word? It's three words, with spaces in between, and none of them are numbers!

LFR -- 0 dumbpoints. I need to accept that everyone in WoW uses the wrong names for everything. There is no feature in World of Warcraft called "Looking For Raid", it's called Raid Finder. But everyone calls it LFR for no reason.

2 comments:

  1. I came expecting you to actually have explained why these terms have no merit in a serious conversation. I'm disappointed :)

    Please read this link. Let me know if you still think this serious piece deserves dumb points for use of themepark.

    http://www.trredskies.com/industrialization-mmos/

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    Replies
    1. I can acknowledge the usefulness of a word that describes strongly directed gameplay in a video game. But do you really not see the negative connotation in comparing a video game to a collection of theme park rides?

      http://www.whatgamesare.com/2011/12/the-four-lenses-of-game-making.html

      What Games Are has a great post detailing his "lenses" for grouping games by their (creator's) core aims. I'm not usually a fan of putting stuff into groups, but I found it very interesting to apply to MMOs especially.

      The horizontal axis represents how directed the player experience is (sandbox/"themepark") and the vertical axis represents how much the game values immersion over fair and fun rules (world/gameplay).

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