Hello, gentle readers, and welcome to the RPG Reload, the weekly feature where I sometimes have to throw dinner together from scraps of leftovers. While I had planned to do a developer interview this week, my day job has become rather busy all of a sudden. Because of that, I haven't been able to conduct the interview as I had originally hoped. I gave some thought to the idea of taking a week off, but we haven't missed a Reload in three and a half years and I don't plan on changing that. Ultimately, I settled on an early debut for an idea I had been planning: the RPG Reload Glossary. The Glossary is a place where I can define things and go into their histories a little so that you, the reader, know where I'm coming from. I'll be doing a Glossary entry every month or two as long as I can come up with ideas for it, so if you have anything you want explored, let me know in the comments.
I thought I would kick this series off with a question that has come up now and then in the comments on some stories here at TouchArcade: what is a 'social RPG'" Since I'm partially responsible for dragging the term into the English-speaking world, I felt I should probably help with the actual definition. The truth is that it's a fairly broad term, one that is well-understood in Japan, its country of origin, but not nearly as clear outside of that country. I don't know if it's going to stick around as a genre label, but since we officially recognize it here at TouchArcade, we'd probably b...