Building Browsergames

PBBG Is Going Nowhere

The acronym that is, not the type of game. Look for it (or pbbgs) as a tag on Magnolia, Delicious, etc. and you hardly find anybody using it even when they are tagging games which are PBBGs. Likewise a Google search pretty much just reveals sites like this one that are using it to refer to the games. It’s a great technical term and it definitely highlights the difference between something like Urban Dead and Tower Defense, but with the general public it’s getting zero traction.

It’s time to realize that unless you want it to have an eight to ten year gestation like RSS did then we need to either have a “PBBG Council” like the Beef Council that can promote awareness and adoption of the game and the term to refer to them or we need to pick a name that’s just a wee bit more end user friendly for the category as a whole. And maybe this time it can be one that you can say aloud without sounding like an idiot (or maybe that’s just me).

John Munsch is a professional software developer with over 20 years experience. He created a series of game development sites (XPlus and DevGames.com) on his own before co-founding GameDev.net in 1999. The blog for his PBBG work is located at MadGamesLab.com.