technobabble
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Excelsior! The cheerful insanity of the Guild Wars 2 Asura
It would have been easy for ArenaNet to make Guild Wars 2's Asura race just another batch of quirky MMO "shorties," playing into the standard fantasy trope. You know how it goes -- what the little guy lacks in brawn he makes up for in quick wit and charm. Throw in some floppy ears, a mischievous grin, and some mechanical gizmos, and you've got yourself a gnome by another name. So did ArenaNet rise to the challenge of porting and updating the Asura? We got a good look at the race and its starting zone in the game's final beta weekend event in the hopes of figuring that out. Follow on for our first impressions!
Plain English Campaign wants to bring down walls of technobabble, rule the world
So look, we fully understand that not everyone "gets" technology-related lingo -- we've had to walk our mums and dads through setting up a WLAN router with a WPA2 password and 1337 encryption many, many times. But this... this is just comical. Peter Griffiths, who we can only imagine looks and speaks exactly like Peter Griffin (pictured), is hoping that his Plain English Campaign can knock down the "walls of techobabble" by "pulling our heads out of the digital clouds and using plain English." Ironic, really, given that most of the technologically illiterate wouldn't know that a digital cloud actually refers to an off-site storage hub where information is exchanged. At any rate, it seems the campaign is pushing to have flummoxing terms such as digital TV, phone jack, desktop and dongle (yes, seriously) changed, or at worse, have them defined clearly in a dictionary that precisely no one would ever read.
Grimwell gives one reason fantasy pwns sci-fi, we go "Huh?"
Watch your head, you don't want it hit by return fire in the ever-present MMO blogosphere discussion of fantasy vs sci-fi. The most recent discussion started up with Massively's own Michael Zenke and his "Five Reasons Sci-Fi Pwns Fantasy" which prompted the return fire in question from Grimwell. Both of the posts are certainly worth reading, especially if you have any kind of lingering interest in the subject matter. As far as we can see, there's truth to be had on both sides of the fence. However, we do have one point of contention to make with Grimwelll's argument. He states that the reason fantasy "pwns" sci-fi is that it's accessible, which is a constant argument on the matter. While we think he may have a point in that less people are inherently familiar with sci-fi, we very much disagree with his assessment that you need to be a math nerd to enjoy good sci-fi -- his example in this case being Star Trek and its now-infamous technobabble.
