Massively Multiplayer Online Games can be strange and curious beasts, with concepts and jargon impenetrable to the outsider. Even those familiar with the genre can benefit from taking especially esoteric ideas and equating them with normal, everyday situations we can all recognise, so to kick off KiaSA’s “Analogies To Illustrate MMOG Concepts”, the MMOG itself:

A MMOG is like a book. Not a normal book, though, a book where you don’t have to read all the pages, and where you can read the chapters in a different order. And some chapters might take really, really long to read, and you need to read them loads of times until you understand them. And it’s not just a book, but a game as well. A game-like book. Like a Fighting Fantasy book. But with loads of other players, all reading the same book, only maybe different bits of the same book, or maybe the same bit as you, and some people read much quicker than others, and other people spend much longer reading. Imagine that, a Fighting Fantasy book with loads of people reading it, but on a computer, and instead of pages there are graphical representations of the players and the monsters. Can you imagine that at all? A MMOG is like if someone made a film of the game that was like a Fighting Fantasy book, only it’s a film you don’t have to watch in order, they put it out on DVD so you could go backwards and forwards and skip to different bits of it. If someone made a game where you could control a person who had the remote control of a DVD player with that film in it, that’s what a MMOG is like. If the person watching the film is a cowboy. And they own an otter.