Whenever I talk to someone about AlienRPG, I always bang my head against the same brick wall. People have either played text-based, browser-based games before, or they have no freakin idea what I’m talking about. Some of the more popular games include Earth2025, Utopia, and Tribal Wars, but even among gamers, the percentage of those who have played and are familiar with the genre we’re aiming for with AlienRPG is very low. Games like Eve Online, World of Warcraft, and Everquest have been branded MMORPG, and at this point, even people who don’t play them can easily associate with the genre. You’re probably aware by now of where I’m going with this. We need a genre identity for the collection of games that are of the browser-based class. By chance alone I stumbled onto this site, http://www.pbbg.org, which does the best job yet of describing what our genre is:
A persistent browser-based game, or PBBG, is a computer game that satisfies the following two criteria:
- It is browser-based. The game is played over the Internet using only a web browser.
- It is persistent. Progress in the game is achieved over multiple playing sessions.
PBBGs merge the depth and longevity of an application-based game with the accessibility and portability of a browser-based game. PBBG can be spoken as pee-bee for brevity.