I was searching for this image today, as someone tried to tell that WOW charges are ‘totally awesome’ (after I had noted that in the new star wars mmorpg, the sith in the demo video is just doing a wow warrior charge).
‘Totally awesome’
Mid range bet on my part? Self denial. Managed to summon some diplomacy and said that if you have ever looked like this when clicking charge
…then no, you do not think charge is totally awesome.
Maybe he does bounce in his seat each time he clicks it. If so, cool for him – I just doubt it and it reminds me of a forge essay where Ron reports “I have observed many such role-players to refer to hours of unequivocally bored and contentious play as “awesome!” given a week or two for mental editing.”
Mild buzz from it? Seems entirely plausible. Totally awesome? Mental editing seems plausible .
And anyway, the image is funny and I wanted to put it up to help preserve it – I didn’t find that many copies around the net.
The CDS Weblog 
I think the “awesome” is used as generic phrase meaning something is enjoyable. This applies to some of the 4e community and some of the story games community.
I have no idea how widespread the usage is in the English-speaking parts of the real world.
Erm, “Charge”?
I don’t know what that says about whether it’s denial or not.
Guy, charge, as in the warrior in WOW has a charging ability/run at someone real fast like!
It’s been several years since I’ve last played WoW, so wanted to be sure, that we’re not talking of “charging techniques”, which have casting times.
Callan: Language changes. You can call that denial if you want.
It is very possible that people actually do mislead themselves wrt the entertainment value offered by some activity, so I am not discounting that. Just saying that “awesome” is experiencing something of a shift in meaning.
A ‘shift in meaning’ refers to a legitimate shift that doesn’t involve denial. Or certainly it seems to be trying to refer to something legitimate. Saying it’s having a shift in meaning is indeed discounting any possiblity of denial.
I don’t think so, but having this fight about semantics is not something I see as interesting. So: whatever.
You brought it up, old boy! If symantics are boring to discuss, don’t assert that a word is having a shift in meaning. It’ll just prompt a boring responce for you.