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Gaming terminology

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Something that I find utterly fascinating is the origins and necessity behind certain gaming phrases, specifically played at a competitive level or in a multiplayer setting.

 

For example the use of "ding" in most MMORPG's nowadays to describe leveling a character up which originates from the noise made in Everquest when your character advanced a level. Or the gradual phasing out of letters of the word "congratulations" to "grats" to "gz", simply due to laziness and ease. 

 

I find it really interesting to see these popular phrases bleeding over into other games and genres, and then discovering where they came from and why they're used. I guess this probably stems from my interest in general etymology, and may be connect to the fact I'm a fucking massive loser.

 

Has anyone else got any words they particularly love using or know that have an interesting back story? Or even ones they just made up right now (because I have foresight and a vague understanding of how these forums/the internet works)? 

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I didn't get into RPGs for a long time, so terms like tanking, proc, buff, DPS, etc. were once mystifying to me.  Now, the terms associated with Lords management games are the ones I don't know.  Listening to DOTA Today is a strange experience.  I understand words like carry, laning, and mid, but I'd be lying if I said I knew what they meant.

 

One of my favorite terms my friends and I came up with back in the early days of TF2 was the "uberneer".  We used to mess with the opponents by sending an ubercharged engineer to build a base near the spawn or behind enemy lines.  Most of the time it simply worked as a distraction but every now and then a team would fall for it and we could teleport behind them with the safety and comfort of a sentry and dispenser.

 

I'm also a fan of the Giant Bomb coined term "abilitease".  Brad explained it once on the Idle Thumbs cast, but it's basically when a game starts you off with a lot of abilities and them takes them away.  Examples of this are the Metroid Prime and God of War games.

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I always think of the brief ubiquity of "w00t" as the prime example of gaming jargon penetrating public discourse sans context and meaning. Not that I ever used it of course, I was far too cool.

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I always think of the brief ubiquity of "w00t" as the prime example of gaming jargon penetrating public discourse sans context and meaning. Not that I ever used it of course, I was far too l337.

 

Fixed it for you.

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I like how "frag" went from an actual word with a specific meaning to a generic kill.

 

"Nuzlocke" refers to a very specifically self-imposed challenge in Pokémon and originates from a character from the comic strip that chronicled the original Nuzlocke run, who appeared only once before being killed off. I only bring it up because that is baffling to me.

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Wow. Frobnicate is just bizzare. 

 

Yeah, Tegan, I've read that entire comic before and it is a swirling emotional torrent of love, loss and triumph. 

 

Another of my personal favourites has got to be "gank". I have no idea where the actual word comes from but it just has such a vile onomatopoeic sound to it, and is a fantastic way to describe just utterly destroying another player.  

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Another of my personal favourites has got to be "gank". I have no idea where the actual word comes from but it just has such a vile onomatopoeic sound to it, and is a fantastic way to describe just utterly destroying another player.  

 

Looks like it came from early- to mid-nineties hip-hop culture and penetrated gaming jargon by 2000 or so. There's a lot of disagreement about whether it's a contraction of "gang killing" or not.

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Don't we have have own term, the "meat circus", for big difficulty spikes? 

 

I have the term "lazy lockdown arena", which when a game gets lazy and instead of designing a level, they just lock you in an arena and throw enemies at you until you're dead or bored. It could probably do with a shorter names since it's a mouthful. :|

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Lazy Dorena

 

okay i was just being dumb but i'm not gonna lie this is amusing me for reasons i can't quite explain

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Actually I have a semi-real one that I started in my younger years.

 

Cheesemints! I started calling achievements "cheesemints" years ago and sometimes I see people use the word who I've never directly (or even indirectly) interacted with and it pleases me. It's so dumb. But it pleases me. I like to think I'm responsible for the few people that do say it.

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I like "Jungling" as a bit of lingo.

I don't play any LORDS MANAGEMENT games, so i don't even know what it means, but it always, always makes me laugh.

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Maybe this is the thread where someone can finally explain where the fuck "pwn" came from. I get what it means but why the "p" instead of an "o"?

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I assume its a p because p is next to o on a standard QWERTY keyboard, and "pwn" happened a lot when people were trying to type "own" really quickly.

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I assume its a p because p is next to o on a standard QWERTY keyboard, and "pwn" happened a lot when people were trying to type "own" really quickly.

 

Yeah, that's what wiki says but I don't want to believe that because it makes it a fucking super lame term.

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Yeah, it's just linguistic corruption, there's no interesting etymology behind it.

More reason you should hate people who think it's appropriate to slip "pwn" into a conversation.

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There's also "gib", the chunky character parts that appear when you frag them with an explosion.

 

Not sure about this, but ragdolling might also be a Video game term, but it might also originate from extreme sports.

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There's also "gib", the chunky character parts that appear when you frag them with an explosion.

Also, it's in reference to turkey giblets, it's comparing the pieces of meat left over from exploding a person to turkey giblets. So there's the etymology for that. (Also, it's a soft G. Only horrible people believe otherwise.)

 

There really aren't even a lot of shooters that have gibs anymore, when fidelity started ramping up real high, it just got a little too grim.

 

The first Gears of War had entrails spilling out of guys after you sawed them in half. Apparently Cliff Bleszinski realized it was getting kind of fucked up and decided to reel it back in for the sequels. (If you compare the games, the gibs in the sequels are much less defined, a little more abstract, and therefore somewhat less grisly.)

 

 

I always think of the brief ubiquity of "w00t" as the prime example of gaming jargon penetrating public discourse sans context and meaning. Not that I ever used it of course, I was far too cool.

Actually, i always heard it said that woot was, as an expression upon finding a nice drop, meant to be a portmanteau of "wonderful loot".

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I always assumed that "woot" came from the word "WHAT!?" as in displaying disbelief at something amazing or bad happening to you in a game. A lot of my knowledge comes from WoW tbh so stuff like "LFG" (Looking For Group) and "WTS" (Wanting To Sell) would always slip into my conversations with my friends whilst playing other games. But I guess they're simply just abbreviations, rather than actual interesting words themselves. 

 

I always like "tank and spank" as a term for defining boss fights as simply standing there and slowly whittling away their HP, although it was an incredibly boring fight I thought the term was funny. 

 

Also, a small piece of my soul dies when I see people use 1337speak in a completely sincere way. 

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The origin story I always believed is that w00t originated as a 90s hacker term for gaining root access on a system through illicit means, as in "w00t I got root".

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