The Great Metaplace Meep-In
Some kinds of meeps
A meep is a fuzzy critter I made in Metaplace that is sort of a cross between the things Marvin Suggs beats on in his Amazing Muppaphone and a Miyazaki soot sprite. They come in a variety of colors and with a variety of behaviors — some like people, some are shy, some have big teeth… I put them on the marketplace, and they quickly became popular on the service.
If you have been on Metaplace, you may have noticed that people get “meeped” instead of “poked.” This was put in by our web guys as a joke, originally, when meeps became popular. Sure enough, everyone started asking, “What is meeping?”
Well, last week we decided to rename the feature to “nudge” or something else mundane. Too many people in our user testing were getting confused, didn’t know what it meant, or were commenting on it. So with regret, we decided we needed to change the term. Meeps would remain running around the worlds, but the feature needed to be easy for new folks to understand. We figured some of the veterans would not like this, but that everyone would understand and be supportive.
We were wrong. Within an hour after we posted about the change, a petition had been created. And the eventual result was this (another article here, and another screenshot here. Here is a marketing take on it. I hear an MPInsider video is on the way as well). Edit: here’s Cuppy’s take.
The Keep the Meep protest
Julian Dibbell has already commented that this is Metaplace’s “naked-protest-at-Lord-British’s-castle moment.” Yes, yes it is. With some key differences: this happened in a user’s world, not ours. One of the organizers of the protest does political organization for a living. We have guaranteed rights of assembly and free speech. This was the first time, silly as it may seem, where the rubber met the road on our version of user rights.
The text of what I said at the rally:
Thanks, Joe. But I really don’t think I am most responsible for any of this. It clearly couldn’t have happened at all without the contributions of you the users. Without people in a place, even a Metaplace, is cold and lonely. You guys matter more than we do, in the end. That’s why we built MP.
So I want to start by saying something. Maybe they are just big furry bouncing monsters, I know that. But they are also near and dear to my heart. I drew these meeps, you know. So I have great affectiion for them.
We should not, however, think that just because they are cartoon critters that this moment is any less important. Yes — they’re silly, and the whole thing has a bit of a carnival tone. But we should take it seriously for many reasons. There are online services out there where what you are doing right now would not be permitted to happen. Where this world isn’t yours. This may be an issue that has its roots in green fuzz versus impersonal nudges, but the underlying principles are still important.
On that note, I want to briefly reference an incident earlier today where, entirely in jest, some of the MP employees were having fun with their admin powers here. No offense was meant, but I want to tell you all — MP employees included, here and now — User worlds are THEIRS. We have our power only for the good of the community and we use that power in their worlds only by invitation. So even if it was meant well, I want to let you all know that this principle is important, because it is also the principle that permits this protest in the first place.
It doesn’t matter if offense was taken or not; we as MP employees and admins do stand in an odd place. We own the worlds in between yours, the overall context, and we have a responsibility to make the overall framework one that helps you all succeed. Some of you are here to hang out with friends. Some of you are here to chat. Some of you wish to build games. Some want to throw tomatoes. And some want to express themselves politically and in serious ways.
When we originally made the decision to change meeping to something else, we did it with the best of intentions. We have gotten consistent feedback that new folks simply don’t know what meeping is. It isn’t adequate to say “well, they should just learn” — we want to help them be successful, and that means meeting them halfway. So it was a decision made with the intent of helping, not hurting.
That said, it is with pleasure that I want to let you all know —
Meeping stays.
BUT! And there is a but.
With this comes a responsibility. We will still have those newbies entering, and they will still be confused. We still have to introduce them to the unique culture here.
So I also want to tell you all that we are going to be implementing a newbie helper flag whereby anyone who wants to help can flag themselves — just a UI tag, no hours, responsibilities, or anything — just visible notice, just a UI tag on your nametag that you can turn on. And I hope that those of you who are passionate enough to defend meeps are also passionate enough to help solve the problem that we were trying to fix.
I have great faith… this is one of the most amazing online communities I have ever been a part of. So thank you for your passion, and thank you for the protest — and I mean that sincerely.
21 Responses to “The Great Metaplace Meep-In”
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That’s the thing, isn’t it? The fact that newbies (or outsiders in general) don’t naturally understand a term such as meeping, even though the concept itself might be familiar from other communities, is actually strenghtening the community as a whole due to how it differentiates itself from other communities, and the outside world.
In a game I’m working on, we have a similarily inspired feature with a not necessarily unique or odd name, but different enough to get new players confused (It’s a bit different than poking though; you can chose another person who then gets an icon next to their chat name for the day. Those icons can even level up, the more you get). I really think there would be a similar outcry among our players if we renamed it to something mundane, as you say, because it became something they genuinely started caring about.
Well, at least I like to think it’s this way. Players might just be resistant to change. Wouldn’t that be depressing and much less romantic? 😉
No protest is complete without at least one unruly protester. I just had to play that role! I was teleported to the sidelines, jailed, disconnected, and I think /ignored, too. Several protesters wanted to silence me and one world owner even “warned” me.
All for throwing tomatoes at Raph and running around the podium, screaming “save the whales!” and “save the trees!” (Arguably good ideas!) Some called the tomato throwing an “assassination attempt.” That was funny! So I threw another one.
The only feature missing is a means to be a vandal the way you can/could as described in some Second Life stories. Even a graffiti canister would be fun.
Excellent way to handle the issue. This is why I think you’re awesome and read your blog.
I think it would have been a bad idea to change the name, too. Mostly because building your own “sacred words” (to borrow a term from the book Primal Branding) is part of creating a unique community. Outsiders aren’t supposed to “get it” because that’s one way that the “tribe” feels a sense of solidarity. Knowing the insider terminology is part of being a member.
Bravo for the handling of it all. I’m looking forward to seeing what Metaplace will become once it’s out of beta and open to the world.
Wow. Meeps are creatures?
I honestly thought it was the verb to meep, to playfully pinch the nose!
In what language is meep a verb for “to playfully pinch the nose”!? 🙂
I have two conceptions of meep: the playful sound the Road Runner makes in the cartoons, and a cutesy version of beep, another cartoon sound. So when you meep someone, that just means you’re saying hello in a playful, friendly way.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=meep
Er, Urban Dictionary is just as credible as Wikipedia, which is not very.
Raph: Is it a coincidence that these Meeps so closely resemble (both in looks and in name) of the Meeps from the Sierra adventure “Quest For Glory”? Both are varying-colored pom-pom creatures who live in the ground — the main difference I see is that the Q4G Meeps had arms, while yours don’t.
Someone mentioned those meeps at this event, too!
I never played Quest for Glory, actually. So it is on my part, anyway. I haven’t even seen a picture of them yet, I should go digging.
I’ve been meeped several times in Metaplace, but have never responded.
When new MMOs develop, they often bring things in from the real-world cultures of the players, and they often bring things in from other virtual worlds that the players have played before. It can even go the other way: words like nub from noob from newb from newbie from “new boy, except some of them are girls, so let’s make it gender-neutral” (blame me and MUD1) are now common in all virtual worlds, and have leeched into the real world. Sometimes it can come full circle: there are people who use lol in virtual worlds because they picked it up from their friends’ text messages, not knowing that originally it was a term used online (I first saw it imported into MUD1 on CompuServe by IOK players, but they in turn probably got it from either forum posts or chat).
Despite all this, though, you do see online communities creating their own terms and behaviours that are separate from those elsewhere. When it comes to words such as “meep”, their use serves to:
1) Identify a culture as being distinct. Part of the notion of identity is difference, and therefore for a culture to have an identity it needs to have some sense of its being different. Specialist words help.
2) Identify users of the term as being part of the culture. If you meep people, then you’re showing that you’re part of the culture and you’re inviting other people to join you.
3) Identify non-members of the culture. If you don’t know what the word means, you’re insufficiently inculcated. This is seen a lot in instance references in MMOs, for example, where people will refer to an instance by its initials so that players new to the appropriate content will be discouraged from joining their groups. It’s a shibboleth.
There are perfectly good existing words for “meep”. Some of these are in everyday usage and have established themselves for other online services (eg. “poke”). There are other jargon words that could substitute, too (as a programmer, I’d secretly have preferred “ping”). They make more sense than “meep”. However, in order to flag Metaplace’s community as being separate from other communities, a bunch of players have decided that the incoming masses (tens of thousands guaranteed, but millions expected) will all have to learn the word “meep”.
Personally, I think it’s a mistake. The word “meep” is just a relabelling of “poke”, and it conflicts with the meep creatures you created. If you get a message saying you’ve been meeped, yeah, OK, you may be delighted to know what it means and meep all your friends, but after a while it’s going to seem tired and artificial. It’s also going to be ineffectual, because newbies who have been meeped are going to think it’s like one of those add-on things you get in Facebook that exist for 4 weeks in a flurry of activity and then disappear (thank gawd those bitten-by-a-zombie messages have gone away). When people want to make business worlds within Metaplace, or academic worlds, or therapy worlds, or any other “serious” worlds, then “meep” will be an obstacle for them – it’s not use-neutral, it says “this is a fun place”. Not everyone will want to create fun worlds.
Proper culture-flagging words will arrive entirely of their own accord. They’ll involve things that people who are using the service actually need to know and to talk about, not merely use as a codeword. For example, in Second Life players (er, “residents”) will use the word “rez” a lot, to mean the drawing of a new scene object by object (why start with the shoes?) until the image is fully resolved. They probably don’t know that “rez” is short for “resolve”, but they don’t care – “rez” is the word they use, and it now has subtleties not completely conveyed by the original technical term from which it came (eg. it’s a pain). We’ll see similar things happening in Metaplace. We probably already are seeing them, we’re just not newbies enough to spot them.
As for bowing to public protest and keeping the word “meep” instead of “poke” or “nudge” or “wave” or “prod” or “jog”, well if you were really keen on player participation you’d have put it to the vote. I had no idea there was an organised pro-meep protest going on, and therefore had no opportunity to register my opinion one way or the other. You listened to a lobby group of 42 people, and now everyone else has to live with their success. The door is now open for other groups to hold open-air protest marches to get their way. Are you going to listen to them all? What if they’re for stupid things – are you going to tell them you won’t listen to them? Eventually, they’re going to ask for a pony. Eventually, the W-Hats are going to get beta keys.
You listened to the pro-meep people because you like the idea of community emergence and because your anti-meep feelings weren’t all that strong. You let your heart rule your head. It’s a one-off, though – you can’t do it every time, nor should you. Some protesters are going to be disappointed, and accuse you of listening to protests when it suits you and not when it doesn’t.
By the way, in my opinion a better solution tot he meep problem would have been to create multiple synonyms for meep. If I want to meep you, OK, I meep you; if I want to poke you, OK, I poke you. I had a hundred or more such hard-wired emotes in MUD2 (plus freeform ones, but I wouldn’t recommend that for Metaplace), it’s not like it’s hard to implement. Instead, though, because debate was replaced by “listening to the voice of the people”, we get just one: meep.
Hmm, I think I rambled on a little longer than I meant to, there…
Richard
“Personally, I think it’s a mistake. The word “meep” is just a relabelling of “poke”, and it conflicts with the meep creatures you created.
“Proper culture-flagging words will arrive entirely of their own accord.”
Raph already stated that meeping started by their web guys as a joke. Meeping may not be a classic example or even a good example of a culture-flagging word, but these things often start as the unintended consequence of decisions made by the world builders. In Sherwood, a “shockwave” is the term the players use to describe a crash bug because Macromedia/Adobe uses an alert that reads something like “The Shockwave Movie is unable to continue. Please contact the author.” Pretty obvious to players, but confusing to an outsider when they ready through our Facebook discussion boards. Whether a culture flagging-word is “proper” or not is irrelevant to a new player learning the language of the community. I don’t think we need a new term to describe words that originate from an unintended side-effect of the world builder’s actions.
Gene Endrody>Raph already stated that meeping started by their web guys as a joke.
Doesn’t a joke have to be, well, funny?
>these things often start as the unintended consequence of decisions made by the world builders.
Yes, I know. When I called mobile objects in MUD1 “mobiles”, that was only ever supposed to be used in the code. It escaped when other people looked at the code and started to use it in the game.
>In Sherwood, a “shockwave” is the term the players use to describe a crash bug because Macromedia/Adobe
Again, I know. We had a particular client for MUD2 on Wireplay which used to come up with a weird message when it lost contact with the server, and people used this description to mean they’d been disconnected. The term died with the replacement of the client, though, which explains why I can’t bring it to mind right now…
>Whether a culture flagging-word is “proper” or not is irrelevant to a new player learning the language of the community.
In the case of meep, the players at the protest were trying to validate the term formally. They could have continued to call pokes “meeps” even if the word “nudge” had been used instead, but no, they wanted the word “meep” to be the one that was implemented. This is embodying culture in code: it fixes it. No new, better term than “meep” is going to come along once meep is fixed in stone. That’s what I mean by “proper” here – something emergent of and sustained by the community.
Formally (and formerly!), the entities that a player controls in an MMO are “characters”, with “avatar” meaning the visual representation of the character. Players don’t use this, though: they refer to characters as “mains” or “alts”, or occasionally as “avatars”, with “toon” meaning the appearance (although I’m seeing quite a few uses of toon=character now, too). The word “character” only lives on in the term “NPC”, meaning a mob that is of the same game race as a player character (olde term: PC) could be. Terms change over time, as the communities and societies that use them change. As soon as you nail something down, though, you stop it from changing.
No MMO actually calls monsters/NPCs “mobiles” internally any more, but players still refer to “mobs”; these protesters could have still used “meep” for poke, just as I could use “ping” for it if I liked, but no, they wanted meep to be formalised as the word to mean poke.
I’m not complaining about the desire to keep the word “meep” as a verb here – it genuinely does show that the users want to feel they are establishing an independent community. However, a better way to handle it would have been to have made “meep” one of many verbs that could have been used to send a content-in-the-word message to someone – along with “poke”, “hug”, “tickle”, “wave” (at), “curtsey” (to) and potentially hundreds of others.
Richard
And there’s no reason why that still can’t be implemented Richard; keeping the meep doesn’t mean you can’t extend the system. Technically Raph would still be in accordance to the promise to keep the meep if such a thing were implemented.
And it’s quite possible for users to do so on a per-world level, where the poke is only transmitted when accessing the world. And it even makes sense to do that on some level, because I’m sure there will be many applications where you won’t necessarily want to be going through the Metaplace main site directly, and so the meeps that go through the user profile wouldn’t be as easily noticed.
You’d have a hard time convincing me that meeps were not borrowed from the original Quest for Glory:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AR36tDbC_og
All the same, I think its great that they are standing up for their virtual rights in metaplace. Go meeps!
Nope, never seen them, honest, moo. Besides, they have legs.
I’m upfront about where I stole them from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qiJPZ0Rruc and the dust bunnies in Totoro: http://images.google.com/images?q=totoro%20dust%20bunnies&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hl=en&sa=N&tab=vi
That was a cool story. I think there will always be jargon in any setting and it’s ok to have that be something special people learn, you can always put a page on a website with orientation or have a kiosk when people land or whatever.
“Er, Urban Dictionary is just as credible as Wikipedia, which is not very.”
Yet there it is.
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