[MUD-Dev] The Root of the Tree (was NEWS: Why Virtual Worlds ...)

[Hans-Henrik Staerfeldt]

On Tuesday 23 November 2004 16:10, David Kennerly wrote:

> In the past week, I saw a lot of discussion of terms going back in
> forth.  Or rather, a lot of terms going back in forth over a
> single term, THE term.  What do we call the domain into which all
> of our products services fit within?  Every year I entertain the
> topic (here and privately).

Well, perhaps - as I stated before - the problem actually arrives
from trying to force a heirachy onto a concept. As with most
concepts that have very diverse members, it becomes very hard to
make hard definitions.  Actually most concepts have this problem to
some degree, which is why a thesaurus is not 'a tree' but rather 'a
graph'. An umbrella term may be very hard to define, and if so (as
Ola points out, and i agree totally) the term becomes
meaningless. Dr. Bartles 'Virtual World' seems to cover a lot, but
not all of what the readers of this list work with. It also covers
some features that others don't see as part of the concept. That is
the pain of having a rich set of features in 'Virtual Worlds'
(there!  i used it!).

Trying to get some kind of consensus and asking 'what about this
.. and this and this..' seems unconstructive. Inventing yet another
term (CMC?) seems even more fruitless, as the concept is so
ridiculously broad (sorry David) that it covers almost
anything. Trying to get an umbrella term that covers 'everything'
makes no sense - or, at least no more sense than before.

I feel that using the 'Virtual World' as a good basis, and then
explain the particular features important to the discussion at hand
seems like a good plan, since this is what we had before, and it
caused no problems at all :-)

--
--Hans-Henrik Stærfeldt
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