A Sense of Place

I was going to write a long and tediously boring piece about the importance of designing virtual environments which have a "sense of place." A sense of place is that ephemeral quality which makes one environment/building/world/place unique from another. I was going to bore the spare few of you who stuck around to read the whole thing to absolute tears. Then I found this article over at Planetizen, which looks at the same thing through the lens of urban planning, and it does it in a refreshingly amusing way: Jargon.

For example, where else will you find the definition for the acronym BANANA? (its Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything, by the way).

Some of the terms are very exclusive to urban planning, but a healthy majority apply in one shape or another to the practice and politics of virtual world design and building.