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Old 03-12-2008, 06:12 AM   #29
KaVir
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Join Date: Apr 2002
Name: Richard
Home MUD: God Wars II
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Re: Looking for an RPI, where the 'I' stands for "Immersive"

I think the main problem is that some people take offence at the literal definition of the label, particularly those who feel that their mud has very immersive roleplaying. If that label had instead been something like "RPA" (standing for "Role-Playing Armageddon-style"), implying that such games have a similar roleplaying environment to Armageddon, I doubt there would be so many objections.

Unfortunately the label chosen was "RPI", and it's been used for many years among those who play the Armageddon-style muds; when they look for similar muds to play, they're going to ask for RPIs.

It's the whole "label means more than the literal definition" thing again. Technically, not even the original MUD was a Multi-User version of Dungeon (i.e., they didn't download a copy of Dungeon and make it multiplayer, they just borrowed the name). But MUD was still a Multi-User game in the style of Dungeon, so the name stuck, and was applied to the entire genre. As all of our games belong to the same genre, we are all MUDs.

An interesting comment by Richard Bartle: "AberMUD was, for a while, known as AberMUG. The reason it was known as AberMUG was because I asked Alan Cox not to call it AberMUD because otherwise people would think MUD was a generic term. I used to use MUA ("Multi-User Adventure") as the generic term. It didn't catch on, and despite my efforts, MUD did become the generic term."

It's very difficult to stop people using a particular term; I don't think you can realistically stop people from using "RPI" to refer to roleplaying muds with an Armageddon-style feature set. You might be able to dilute the term over time, but I don't think that's a very constructive solution.
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