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Old 03-15-2008, 08:00 PM   #58
Jherlen
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Join Date: Jul 2002
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Re: Looking for an RPI, where the 'I' stands for "Immersive"

The thing about classifying roleplay muds is that everybody has their own favorite brand of roleplaying, with its own standards and rules. It's easy enough to say if a game is an RP game or not, but I think any further definition beyond that shouldn't be used as a measure of "how" roleplaying focused a game is as much as what kind of roleplaying a game is focused on.

RPI is just one of many terms of roleplaying games that have similar features, similar policies and are played by people of similar mindsets. I don't think the administrators themselves of Armageddon or SoI or Harshlands or Accursed Lands or other RPIs in development are trying to promote that term in order to set their games apart from others (certainly not to imply a kind of elitism, though unfortunately it seems like some people take it that way.) Instead I think the community of players of those games created a term for itself to identify the kind of games they preferred apart from the much larger umbrella of RP games.

You'd get different styles of roleplaying in different genres of games; MUSHes, for instance, have a lot different style of roleplay than RPI games, but I wouldn't call either one more "intense" or "immersive". They're just different.

If it's the term RPI itself that people seem to have a problem with, maybe a different term should have been chosen (probably too late to coin another one by now.) But I think the intent was just to qualify a subset of RP games with similar features and set them apart from the larger whole, for players interested in games like those.
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