That was a cool story. I think there will always be jargon in any setting and it’s ok to have that be something special people learn, you can always put a page on a website with orientation or have a kiosk when people land or whatever.

You’d have a hard time convincing me that meeps were not borrowed from the original Quest for Glory:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AR36tDbC_og

All the same, I think its great that they are standing up for their virtual rights in metaplace. Go meeps!

Gene Endrody>Raph already stated that meeping started by their web guys as a joke.

Doesn’t a joke have to be, well, funny?

>these things often start as the unintended consequence of decisions made by the world builders.

Yes, I know. When I called mobile objects in MUD1 “mobiles”, that was only ever supposed to be used in the code. It escaped when other people looked at the code and started to use it in the game.

>In Sherwood, a “shockwave” is the term the players use to describe a crash bug because Macromedia/Adobe

Again, I know. We had a particular client for MUD2 on Wireplay which used to come up with a weird message when it lost contact with the server, and people used this description to mean they’d been disconnected. The term died with the replacement of the client, though, which explains why I can’t bring it to mind right now…

>Whether a culture flagging-word is “proper” or not is irrelevant to a new player learning the language of the community.

In the case of meep, the players at the protest were trying to validate the term formally. They could have continued to call pokes “meeps” even if the word “nudge” had been used instead, but no, they wanted the word “meep” to be the one that was implemented. This is embodying culture in code: it fixes it. No new, better term than “meep” is going to come along once meep is fixed in stone. That’s what I mean by “proper” here – something emergent of and sustained by the community.

Formally (and formerly!), the entities that a player controls in an MMO are “characters”, with “avatar” meaning the visual representation of the character. Players don’t use this, though: they refer to characters as “mains” or “alts”, or occasionally as “avatars”, with “toon” meaning the appearance (although I’m seeing quite a few uses of toon=character now, too). The word “character” only lives on in the term “NPC”, meaning a mob that is of the same game race as a player character (olde term: PC) could be. Terms change over time, as the communities and societies that use them change. As soon as you nail something down, though, you stop it from changing.

No MMO actually calls monsters/NPCs “mobiles” internally any more, but players still refer to “mobs”; these protesters could have still used “meep” for poke, just as I could use “ping” for it if I liked, but no, they wanted meep to be formalised as the word to mean poke.

I’m not complaining about the desire to keep the word “meep” as a verb here – it genuinely does show that the users want to feel they are establishing an independent community. However, a better way to handle it would have been to have made “meep” one of many verbs that could have been used to send a content-in-the-word message to someone – along with “poke”, “hug”, “tickle”, “wave” (at), “curtsey” (to) and potentially hundreds of others.

Richard

We will still have those newbies entering, and they will still be confused. We still have to introduce them to the unique culture here.

I’ve been meeped several times in Metaplace, but have never responded.

When new MMOs develop, they often bring things in from the real-world cultures of the players, and they often bring things in from other virtual worlds that the players have played before. It can even go the other way: words like nub from noob from newb from newbie from “new boy, except some of them are girls, so let’s make it gender-neutral” (blame me and MUD1) are now common in all virtual worlds, and have leeched into the real world. Sometimes it can come full circle: there are people who use lol in virtual worlds because they picked it up from their friends’ text messages, not knowing that originally it was a term used online (I first saw it imported into MUD1 on CompuServe by IOK players, but they in turn probably got it from either forum posts or chat).

Despite all this, though, you do see online communities creating their own terms and behaviours that are separate from those elsewhere. When it comes to words such as “meep”, their use serves to:

1) Identify a culture as being distinct. Part of the notion of identity is difference, and therefore for a culture to have an identity it needs to have some sense of its being different. Specialist words help.

2) Identify users of the term as being part of the culture. If you meep people, then you’re showing that you’re part of the culture and you’re inviting other people to join you.

3) Identify non-members of the culture. If you don’t know what the word means, you’re insufficiently inculcated. This is seen a lot in instance references in MMOs, for example, where people will refer to an instance by its initials so that players new to the appropriate content will be discouraged from joining their groups. It’s a shibboleth.

There are perfectly good existing words for “meep”. Some of these are in everyday usage and have established themselves for other online services (eg. “poke”). There are other jargon words that could substitute, too (as a programmer, I’d secretly have preferred “ping”). They make more sense than “meep”. However, in order to flag Metaplace’s community as being separate from other communities, a bunch of players have decided that the incoming masses (tens of thousands guaranteed, but millions expected) will all have to learn the word “meep”.

Personally, I think it’s a mistake. The word “meep” is just a relabelling of “poke”, and it conflicts with the meep creatures you created. If you get a message saying you’ve been meeped, yeah, OK, you may be delighted to know what it means and meep all your friends, but after a while it’s going to seem tired and artificial. It’s also going to be ineffectual, because newbies who have been meeped are going to think it’s like one of those add-on things you get in Facebook that exist for 4 weeks in a flurry of activity and then disappear (thank gawd those bitten-by-a-zombie messages have gone away). When people want to make business worlds within Metaplace, or academic worlds, or therapy worlds, or any other “serious” worlds, then “meep” will be an obstacle for them – it’s not use-neutral, it says “this is a fun place”. Not everyone will want to create fun worlds.

Proper culture-flagging words will arrive entirely of their own accord. They’ll involve things that people who are using the service actually need to know and to talk about, not merely use as a codeword. For example, in Second Life players (er, “residents”) will use the word “rez” a lot, to mean the drawing of a new scene object by object (why start with the shoes?) until the image is fully resolved. They probably don’t know that “rez” is short for “resolve”, but they don’t care – “rez” is the word they use, and it now has subtleties not completely conveyed by the original technical term from which it came (eg. it’s a pain). We’ll see similar things happening in Metaplace. We probably already are seeing them, we’re just not newbies enough to spot them.

As for bowing to public protest and keeping the word “meep” instead of “poke” or “nudge” or “wave” or “prod” or “jog”, well if you were really keen on player participation you’d have put it to the vote. I had no idea there was an organised pro-meep protest going on, and therefore had no opportunity to register my opinion one way or the other. You listened to a lobby group of 42 people, and now everyone else has to live with their success. The door is now open for other groups to hold open-air protest marches to get their way. Are you going to listen to them all? What if they’re for stupid things – are you going to tell them you won’t listen to them? Eventually, they’re going to ask for a pony. Eventually, the W-Hats are going to get beta keys.

You listened to the pro-meep people because you like the idea of community emergence and because your anti-meep feelings weren’t all that strong. You let your heart rule your head. It’s a one-off, though – you can’t do it every time, nor should you. Some protesters are going to be disappointed, and accuse you of listening to protests when it suits you and not when it doesn’t.

By the way, in my opinion a better solution tot he meep problem would have been to create multiple synonyms for meep. If I want to meep you, OK, I meep you; if I want to poke you, OK, I poke you. I had a hundred or more such hard-wired emotes in MUD2 (plus freeform ones, but I wouldn’t recommend that for Metaplace), it’s not like it’s hard to implement. Instead, though, because debate was replaced by “listening to the voice of the people”, we get just one: meep.

Hmm, I think I rambled on a little longer than I meant to, there…

Richard

Raph: Is it a coincidence that these Meeps so closely resemble (both in looks and in name) of the Meeps from the Sierra adventure “Quest For Glory”? Both are varying-colored pom-pom creatures who live in the ground — the main difference I see is that the Q4G Meeps had arms, while yours don’t.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=meep

Wow. Meeps are creatures?

I honestly thought it was the verb to meep, to playfully pinch the nose!

Excellent way to handle the issue. This is why I think you’re awesome and read your blog.

That’s the thing, isn’t it? The fact that newbies (or outsiders in general) don’t naturally understand a term such as meeping, even though the concept itself might be familiar from other communities, is actually strenghtening the community as a whole due to how it differentiates itself from other communities, and the outside world.

In a game I’m working on, we have a similarily inspired feature with a not necessarily unique or odd name, but different enough to get new players confused (It’s a bit different than poking though; you can chose another person who then gets an icon next to their chat name for the day. Those icons can even level up, the more you get). I really think there would be a similar outcry among our players if we renamed it to something mundane, as you say, because it became something they genuinely started caring about.
Well, at least I like to think it’s this way. Players might just be resistant to change. Wouldn’t that be depressing and much less romantic?

“And the Oscar for Most Socially Responsible Community Management in an Online World goes to…”