Pat Kane cites Boing Boing for posting on 'The Cubes', "a corporate drudgery playset for grown-ups". This, he offers, as a wry contrast to Lego Serious Play ("LEGO SERIOUS PLAY is an innovative, experiential process designed to enhance business performance").
Dan mused "it seems to me that there are a helluva lot of MMORPGs that could use a sense of humor." I don't know if Kingdom of Loathing qualifies as a parody, as funny as it is. Some might argue that the entire MMO genre exists in a humorless self-parody...
...A subset of parody is self-parody in which an artist or genre repeats elements of earlier works to the point that originality is lost.
How would your parody start? I think I would begin with a love story involving Emily Dickinson, and a bear and an exit...
In any case, I predict that it won't be until we see the first full-blown MMO parody that we can we say that the genre has matured and joined the mainstream.
World of Warcraft has quite a bit of parody. One of the high level quests is "When">http://www.abcmartinfry.com/abcabsolutely/whensmokey.html&e=912">When Smokey Sings, I Get Violent"
Posted by: Scott | Jan 17, 2005 at 09:32
Ack, cut off in mid tangent. Anyway, in terms of self-parody, that's always been in MMOs as well, although usually under the radar. Mainly because it's perpetrated by the lower-level folks actually working on the content, who've been staring at spreadsheets and level design kits for months and are in danger of losing their sanity anyway. Examples include the always very slighly below the surface Monty Python references in DAOC, the NPC in one of Everquest's planes who would annihilate you if you said the words "phat lewt", and pretty much anything, in any game, involving gnomes.
Posted by: Scott | Jan 17, 2005 at 09:37
As long as were on tangents anyway, the toast-popping graphic on the Serious Play page is one of the funniest corporate info-graphics I have ever seen.
Posted by: Cory Ondrejka | Jan 17, 2005 at 16:07
in terms of self-parody, that's always been in MMOs as well, although usually under the radar. Mainly because it's perpetrated by the lower-level folks actually working on the content, who've been staring at spreadsheets and level design kits for months and are in danger of losing their sanity anyway. Examples include the always very slighly below the surface
After what point will these "easter eggs" interfere with the experience. When must the world transition to a full parody rather than isolated embedded experiences. Or must it?
Posted by: Nathan Combs | Jan 17, 2005 at 21:12