My So-Called "Real Life"

TheAesthete

Possibly this should be in the "Site Suggestions" subforum, but I'm interested to see if the idea of "Real Life" in online gaming has any legs as a talking point, not just a note in the suggestion box. It seems to me the "Real Life" category in the Games List has outlived its usefulness. It's now used to describe a group of games as unalike as MMOs can possibly be.

1) Social interactive environments like "Second Life" and "There." (I would categorize as: "Social")

2) Spy games like "The Agency." (Possible category: "Espionage")

3) GTA clones like "Crimecraft," "APB" and a handful of others (Possible category: "Crime." Or maybe something else that puts them in the same group as a game like "The Agency."

4) Modern-day fantasy like "The Secret World." (In publishing, if "The Secret World" were a novel, it would be described as "Urban Fantasy," like the Dresden Files books, or Anita Blake, or The Hollows.)

5) LEGO Universe. (There are plenty of games on the list that might be better categorized as "Family" games.)

6). Playboy Manager. I don't know what that is, and the thought of clicking on it to find out makes me suddenly very tired.

If this topic has been brought up before, the search feature yielded no results. A few years ago, "Real LIfe" was just the awkward descriptor slapped on "Second Life" because nothing else seemed to fit. Now there are more than twenty games in this category, ranging, like I said, from LEGO to Playboy.

Thoughts?