I have to agree with this.  I myself have never seen any formal definition of RPI.  I've also used the the terms RPE RPI RPS RPF RPGM in many posts over the years after defining them up front and then using them as shorthand.  I was nevertheless suprised by a response that in essence declared they shouldn't be used that way and meant something other than what I said they meant.  

It does remind me very much of the MU* term and it's attempted use.  Or an even better example...


Were the people who ran muds in the TinyMud family attempting to distinguish and separate themselves from the Diku and LPMuds by redefining MUD and then later inventing MU*?  
You bet they were.  

I'm not going to get into the elitist snob argument.  The point being that arguing over the use of an acronym, and one that is not at all well defined nor recognized by the general mud community, is rather petty and ignores any points about role-play a poster is making.  

Anyway I've recently moved on to using the terms dwarves, hobbits and elves when describing types of role-players or non-role-players.  

Just for the record... IIRC this is my various freewheeling uses of the acronyms over the breadth of my posts.

RPI - role-play immersive/intensive same as RPE or RPW (hobbits)
RPE - role-play versus the environment (hobbits)
RPW - role-play versus the world (hobbits)
RPF - role-play freestyle (elves)
RPS - role-play storytelling (elves)
RPGM - role-play game mastered (elves-hobbits)
The rest - non-role-players, light avatarism, Hack-n-slashers, roll-players (dwarves, and some hobbits)

I'll probably continue my loose use...  
And I've always been upfront concerning my distaste of Hobbits...  That's where opinion comes in.  Consider the source.

It does remind me a bit of the recent post over on MudMagic exhorting us to come to a "mud community consensus" and agree to redefine the term MUD to mean multi-user domain or dimension, and NOT dungeon.   Like nobody has ever dictated that we use dungeon or chat kingdom or domain or dimension or shared hallucination in the first place.  

So until RPI is trademarked, I look on it the same way I look on Pavel Curtis's quote about what a mud is.  Yeah errm whatver.  (Note: I don't believe that is his position now BTW, but I may be wrong.)

Yeah... Threshold is an RPI/RPE/RPW type of mud.  Quite similar to Armeggedon and Harshlands.  That's all a player needs to know.    ;-P