D&D Online: Grumpy Friday #1

Category: News Archive

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Written by BuckGB on February 11th, 2005

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I love the Internet. I love forums, I love watching the way people behave on forums, and I'm fascinated by the trends that develop. For example, you can see migration patterns in the language people use when they post. It fascinated me when WoW players occasionally referred to monsters as (creeps) instead of (mobs.) The latter being a long-established term from MUDs, adopted into MMPs (often by people who reused the term without understanding it.) But (creeps) was specifically a Warcraft III thing, and such a large shift in the vernacular is indicative of a major influx of people with a totally different background. Tracking population migration via vocabulary drift? Yeah, I'm a special kind of geek.

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