November 25, 2005: 10:19 pm: MichaelGame theory (or close enough)
This recent conversation on The 20′ By 20′ Room strikes me as an example of how people using different jargon (or differing understandings of the same jargon) sometimes have a really hard time communicating. Among the commenters are people who don’t know what DIP or DAS means, people who are fuzzy on their Forge terminology, and people who (like me) have no idea what the heck aerobic gaming vs. anaerobic gaming is supposed to mean. Throw all of that together and I think the result ended up being people spending more time and energy defining (and redefining) terms than about the original topic of DIP and DAS in indie games.
November 26th, 2005 at 9:13 pm
Hey, on behalf of 20×20, thanks for the link!
I’ll cop to some frustration of my own with that thread, and I realize I threw people a curve by making up the aerobic/anaerobic distinction in the middle of it. (There’s a separate post that talks about what it means, and I’ll try to work out the implications over time.)
I don’t know if we have any option other than to try to work through terminological problems as they arise, though. DIP and DAS, for instance, have been named concepts for many years now, and they describe real behavior that goes back much further than the terms. It’s handy to be able to type “DIP” – probably with “develop-in-play” after it the first time – instead of a paragraph describing the phenomenon every time it comes up.