One of my Gamespot acquaintances recently posted a blog entry about gamer stereotypes. So when I posted a short comment to it, a bunch of ideas and situations come back to me, which made me feel I should write about it.
There are many misconceptions about gamers in general, and about girl gamers in particular. How many can you think of? I can name a few.
All gamers are fat and lazy. Because apparently we are all couch potatoes who do nothing but order food so we can eat in the comfort of our couches while still playing whatever game we love so much. Because when you play games, you obviously have no time for sports or any other outdoors activities. Which brings us to another.
Gamers have no social life. Not unless you count tournaments as a social event, I guess, because other than that, no gamer has friends other than the people they talk to on a daily basis through Xbox Live or chat with in any MMO they play. They don't even leave their houses, right? Right.
If you play violent games, you are a violent person. That's why whenever I play a fighting game, FPS or anything that involves attacking someone else I instantly feel the urge to hurt people. And after playing GTA I must go out on murderous rampages with a chainsaw too... but not for too long, because after all, gamers never leave their couch, let alone the house!
Games for girls must all be created around cooking, fashion and makeup. Because that's all girls ever really think about, the perfect pudding, the perfect shoes to match the perfect purse, the perfect lipstick to go with the perfect eye shadow. What a small world, that of a girl.
Games for girls should all be aimed at pre-teens and teens. The gaming industry still can't come up with the "games for women" idea, but it wouldn't matter anyway, since they would still be based on cooking, fashion and makeup, probably only with more complex terminology such as pro-retinol wrinkle reducer, full-length A-line pleated skirt and king oyster mushrooms with pistachio purée.
Girls only play casual games. Right, because heaven forbid women get into something more complex than a arcade puzzle! No, no! It's just too complicated for them to attempt to survive as Master Chief, run a guild and organize raids or follow an engaging story in any RPG.
Every girl loves The Sims because of the similarities with real life. Excuse me, but what fun is there in changing virtual diapers from a screaming virtual baby? Or helping moody children with homework? Or cleaning a very messy virtual kitchen? My Sims games are all about being rich, having friends, possessing all kinds of knowledge, creating the best houses, hosting parties and making custom content. I don't need to virtually work for hours, virtually come home tired and virtually have to cook and clean.
Girls play MMOs only to socialize. Right, because we don't really play to develop our character, to participate in big fights, to sport cool equipment, to see new zones and learn about the game world. We just log on, sit in a corner and talk to other players. About cooking, fashion and makeup, of course.
As for the stereotypes I've been a target of, there haven't been many but two of them were a constant for a long time, and that is why I don't like to socialize while playing MMOs. Because when I play a game, I actually play.
This one-time incident happened in Halo 2, the first time ever I decided to play online on my own (usually I'd be on with my husband and a friend playing Juggernaut, Capture the Flag and whatnot). I logged on, joined some random match and politely said hello. Someone asked if I was a real girl. I said yes. The rest was a mix of laughing, insults, teasing and in the end being called a 10 year old boy "because you sound like one".
There were two persisting incidents during the 5-6 years I played EQ, which also carried on to other MMOs as well. It all started with the typical “Are you a real girl?”.
Male character #126547: Hi. Are you a real girl?
Me: Yeah...
Male character #126547: Wanna cyber?
Me : F*** off.
/ignore Male character #126547
What the hell? Do you just run around the zones sending random tells to female characters hoping one would be glad to get a cyber tell? My ignore list grew considerably in a very short time. And if someone inspected me, at some point my profile would have said "Yes, I'm a girl. No I'm not here to cyber anyone."
The other incident was not as shocking, but still offensive.
Male character #359812: Are you a real girl?
Me: Yes.
Male character #359812: Need help?
"Need help?" WTF... is anyone with a vagina not supposed to know their way around a game or something? It was amazing how often random people would come up and ask if I wanted plat, this armor or such weapon. It was creepy too. It's like a stranger on the street coming up to you and offering you some candy.
Here's another great example.. The screenshots to the left show the same person, on two consecutive days asking me the same question in World of Warcraft.
Now, I'm not sure what the reasoning behind this whole thing is, but I didn't want to ask anyway. I just assume this person runs around and asks every female character the exact same thing... So I guess that if I'm a girl playing an MMO, chances are I'm looking for a guy. Can't be a female character anywhere nowadays, I suppose. Either that, or I must have some sort of magnet that attracts these idiots no matter what I'm playing.
Still, it's just ridiculous that some people will spend a monthly fee to log on to a virtual world and bother everyone until they find someone who is willing to spread their virtual legs...
Another sad thing is how girl gamers can be looked at as animals in a zoo. One time, my husband, his friend and I all decided to stop at a huge arcade, the Playdium in Mississauga. I didn't see any games I liked so I pretty much spent all my time on Soul Calibur 2. I did fine until Inferno, which is one fight that completely disorients me with all the moving flames. Some guy approached and started asking me how to do this or that move, and that was cool. But by the time I turn around, there is a group of about ten guys staring with some of the most astonished faces I have ever seen, as if I had just performed a miracle or something. I guess girls also don't play fighting games, let alone be any good at them.
The sad thing is, games have been around for so long now, yet the same old stereotypes persist. But like persistent warriors armed with our faithful keyboards, mice and controllers, we still brave the furious stereotype monster and just keep on gaming.
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Minggu, 11 Januari 2009
Gamer Stereotypes
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Talk Like a Gamer
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Recently, Verbatim ran a piece by Erin McKean entitled "L33t-sp34k" about the typographical games played with words by hackers, warez d00dz, and other online lowlife (although open source coders will of course complain that "hacker" should be used in its original sense, meaning a programmer of astounding skill, rather than in the popular, degraded sense of an online vandal). The piece touched on the language used by online gamers--some of whom, particularly in the world of first-person shooters--adopt hacker terminology.
McKean defined fragging (killing another player, from Vietnam era soldiers' slang) and gib (from giblets, the bloody goblets left in the playing field after a player or monster is killed). But first person shooters (FPSes) -- games in which the player sees the playing area as his character would see it (first person view) and plays mainly by shooting weapons at others--have produced rich terminology.
To bunny hop is to leap rapidly about the game world to make yourself a more difficult target. A rocket jump is a way of exploiting a feature of a FPS game's physics model by jumping into the air and detonating explosives on the ground so the blast causes extra lift and lets you jump higher. Strafing originally mean "moving sideways while firing," the derivation from the military term being clear--but has come to mean moving sideways even when not firing. To telefrag is to kill someone by teleporting into his location, which usually results in mutual death.
Once you kill an opponent, you often taunt him--sending a line of text celebrating your victory, although some games allow you to play a sound file on your enemy's machine as another form of taunt.
A low-ping bastard (or LPB) is a player who has a really fast Internet connection and low "ping" times to the game server, giving him an advantage over (better) players with slower connections. Contrariwise, a high-ping bastard (HPB) has such a bad connection that the player is often frozen, offering no help as a teammate and not much challenge as an opponent. A llama is a player without much skill--probably derived from "lamer," itself hacker slang for a wannabe hacker who is basically an idiot.
A boomstick is a shotgun; a BFG (from "big fucking gun") was originally a weapon in Doom, but has come to mean any weapon capable of inflicting truly awesome damage. A bot is an artificial, computer-controlled character resembling a player character, used to make a multiplayer FPS game playable in single player mode; it's a shortened form of "robot."
An aiming bot, however, is a computer program that a player may run which alters the player's controls to provide a perfect lock onto an enemy character, meaning the player always aims true. This is a form of cheating, and will get you kicked (ejected and banned) from the game's server if you're caught.
Shooters are not the only game style to produce interesting vocabulary; massively multiplayer online games, like EverQuest and Ultima Online, are another rich source, perhaps because interplayer communication is so important in these games.
A PC or player character is one controlled by a live player, and an NPC (non-player character) is controlled by the computer. A monster is an NPC that exists for the sole purpose of being killed by PCs. All these terms are borrowed from tabletop roleplaying.
Monsters are often called mobs (possibly from "mobile object"). A train is a whole group of mobs, which together are far more dangerous to PCs than a single mob; when someone nearby yells "Train!," you're best advised to run like hell. In verb form, to train is to lead a train, that is, flee ahead of it--this is usually due to misfortune, but sometimes a character will seek to lead a train into a group of waiting comrades, as a means of ambushing the mobs. Thus "That guy is training the skeletons" doesn't mean he's seeking to improve their skills, but instead leading them a merry chase across the landscape.
To kite is to train but in a way that makes it unlikely that you will be harmed by the mobs. The idea is that your character has appropriate buffs or skills so that it's trivial for him to get away from the train. Kiting means leading a train, getting a substantial lead, turning to cast spells or use ranged weapons to attack them, then fleeing again before the mobs can close enough to fight you, repeating the process as needed until the train is dead.
A buff is a spell or other game effect that temporarily increases a character's abilities; to debuff is to cast a spell on a character that adversely affects his or her abilities.
In an online game roleplaying generally means speaking consistently in character, e.g.,:
Player 1: hey bitch gimme buffs
Player 2: Sirrah! Dost thou address a lady thus?
Player 2 is roleplaying; Player 1 is not.
Some games have separate gameworlds devoted to roleplayers and to power gamers--those who play primarily to become more powerful in the game world and can't be bothered with such fripperies as pseudo-Elizabethan chat. Power gamers seek to power level, increase in ability in the game quickly--often with the help of a more powerful character who provides buffs to allow the character to gain experience rapidly. This practice is called twinking--gaining quickly in power or level in a semi-illegitimate fashion through assistance from a more powerful character. The term is obviously derived from Twinkie, but the association with a sugary snack is not obvious--I surmise that the usage may come from gay slang, in which a "twinkie" is a cute young man with an older lover.
To gain a level in the game--improving your character's ability--is to level up.
PKing (player killing) is killing another player character in a game world--generally this is frowned on, and some games prohibit it. Some games allow both PvP (player versus player) gameplay as well as player versus environment play (which, curiously, is never abbreviated), meaning going out and hunting mobs.
One way to hunt mobs is to camp their spawn point, the place in the gameworld where a particular type of mob appears from time to time; camping means hanging out near that point and waiting until the mob spawns, then killing it. Camping is viewed as morally dubious, since you're hogging this particular hunting ground; however, turtling (just standing around not doing anything) carries no negative connotation.
To zone is to move from one area of the game world to another, triggering a big download of gamestate information that will take a while. However, being in the zone is being totally focussed on the game and playing it like a master.
Sometimes a player figures out an exploit, a way to use some aspect of the game to produce results the game operators did not expect and don't find appropriate--for instance, an Ultima Online player discovered how to create almost unlimited amounts of game money very quickly, causing massive inflation in the game. Exploiters are banned (barred from returning to the game); the game operators then nerf the game system, preventing others from using the exploit. More generally "to nerf" is to reduce game power; e.g., if Shaman characters are made less powerful in an update, players of Shamans will complain bitterly that they have been nerfed.
To group is to join cooperatively with others for a short period of time ("Hey! Wanna group?"). If you want to join a more permanent group, you join (depending on the theme of the game) a guild, clan, or squadron (collectively called microcommunities by game developers). Some clans persist beyond a single game, and will move en masse from one game or server to another.
A quest is a set of tasks that, when accomplished, give a player experience, money, and/or equipment that is useful and powerful in the game world; a FedEx quest is one that involves delivering some item from point A to point B.
A mule is a secondary character used to provide more storage space for the crap you want to hang on to; if your backpack is full, just fire up the mule character and give him/her/it the stuff to carry. A mule will water ski, meaning it will automatically follow the main character about, like a boat pulling a water skier.
A brick is a powerful fighter, usually devoid of magic or other powers. The implication is that bricks wall off more vulnerable members of a group from dangerous mobs by interposing themselves between the two.
A newbie (or noob or n00b) is a new player who's just learning the ropes. A guide is someone in the game world, usually a volunteer but sometimes employed by the game provider, whose job is to help newbies and resolve problems during play. If the guide can't solve a problem, he kicks it upstairs to a gamemaster, which in a MMORPG is like a guide, but has higher rank and access to software tools that lets him modify the game world--tools sometimes used to produce custom quests or events for players. Another task for guides and gamemasters is dealing with griefers--people playing only to interfere with the experience of other players.
In the case of shooters and massively multiplayer games, the language is the product of gamers, the people who play the games. More generally, game developers and gamers together have developed a varied vocabulary to describe the many different game styles on the market and the way people play them.
A gamer is someone for whom games is a primary leisure-time activity. Gaming is playing a game--and gamers are generally snotty that the gambling industry has absconded with the term and used it as a euphemism for their repulsive exploitation of the statistically challenged.
Gameplay is a nebulous noun that means something like "the feel you get from playing a game." It dates back to the early 80s; I first heard it from people at Atari. "It has good gameplay." A game designer is the creative lead, the person who specifies gameplay and interface; game developer is a more general term, covering everyone involved in production of a game, including programmers, graphic designers, and management types as well as game designers. "Game designer" was coined by Redmond Simonsen, the art director at SPI, a leading wargame publisher, in the late 1960s; previously, designers were often called inventors or authors. In Germany, that tradition persists; a game designer is a spielautor.
The term videogame originally meant arcade and home console games, excluding computer games (many of which, in the early days, were text-only); it is still sometimes used that way. In the industry, the term is rarely used; people instead distinguish between PC (personal computer) games and console games. Sometimes, console games are called platformers, but the word is also sometimes used to refer specifically to 2D sidescrollers like the old Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog games.
A wargame is a game of military conflict.
The term roleplaying game (or RPG) was first coined in the pages of Alarums & Excursions, an APA (pron. "apah", meaning amateur press association--first used by amateur printers in the 1920s, then borrowed by science fiction fandom, then carried over into gaming) devoted to games like Dungeons & Dragons. In an RPG, each player takes the role of a single character; this was, initially, a paper game medium, but subsequently, console RPGs (played on home game machines like Playstation), computer RPGs (or CRPGs), and massively multiplayer online RPGs (MMORPGs, sometimes pronounced "morpegs") have evolved. Because MMORPG is such a mouthful, developers are currently experimenting with alternative formulations--massively multiplayer game (MMG) and persistent world being examples--but none have yet achieved widespread usage. The implication of "persistent world" is that the gameworld persists even with a player is offline--that's by contrast to games such as Quake or StarCraft that have no persistent, ongoing nature.
The term tabletop RPG is a back-formation to distinguish the earlier, paper, variety from the modern digital variety. In addition, fan groups often stage live action RPGs (or LARPs, pron. "lahrp"), in which dozens or hundreds of people play together in a single space, moving about rather than sitting around a table.
Although MMORPGs derive partially from the tabletop variety, they are technically an evolution of MUDs (pronounced as you'd expect; it's an acronym for "multi-user dungeon" or "multi-user domain"). The first MUD, MUD 1, was developed by Bartle and Trubshaw at the University of Essex in 1979; they're text-only multiplayer networked games with roleplaying elements, generally (although not always) run non-commercially. Many MUDs are still in existence, along with MUSHes (multi-user shared hallucinations) and MOOs (a contraction of a contraction: "MUD, Object-Oriented").
A plethora of words have been coined to describe computer game categories. An adventure is a game that depends on story-telling and puzzle-solving; the style derives from the academic game Adventure (aka Colossal Cave), which predates the commercial game software industry. Text adventures have no graphics (e.g., Zork), while graphic adventures (e.g., Myst) do. (Confusingly, the Game Manufacturers' Association, a collection of small hobby game publishers, collectively refers to its industry, which includes publishers of wargames, RPGs, and collectible card games, as the "adventure gaming" industry--even though their games bear scant resemblance to software adventures.)
Sim is used in two different senses; there are flight sims (or more generally, vehicle sims) in which the player controls a single craft; and there are sims in the sense of "simulation," such asSimCity, Roller Coaster Tycoon, and The Sims.
A sneaker is a game like a first-person shooter in which you're encouraged to gain your objectives by stealth rather than combat (Thief is the canonical example). A fighter is a game like Soul Calibur in which you control a swordsman, boxer, kung fu fighter, or other combatant in one-on-one combat with a similar opponent. Similarly, a dancer is a game in which the player must manipulate the controls in a set pattern in time to music, frequently (but not always) controlling an onscreen-character that responds by dancing. In some arcade versions, the player stands on a pressure-sensitive area, and controls the game by stepping (or dancing) on different parts of the platform. (The Hackers' Dictionary uses the term "dance-o-matic" for dancers, but I've never actually heard anyone use that word in real life.)
A real-time strategy game (or RTS) is real-time because it is not turn-based; all players (and computer-controlled "AIs") perform actions continually and simultaneously, instead of taking actions one turn at a time, round-robin-style. Examples of RTS games are StarCraft and Age of Empires.
Action is another word with multiple senses; an action game is a game, generally but not always from a first-person perspective, in which a player controls a single character, and his or her success in the game is based on player skill--the ability to manipulate the interface accurately and precisely--rather than character skill--game abilities gained by the character in the course of play. Thus, shooters are a subcategory of action games, but the term also encompasses games like Tomb Raider, in which avoiding traps and overcoming physical challenges are more important to gameplay than simple combat. An action-adventure game is like an adventure game in that story and puzzle-solving are important to play, but unlike classic adventures in that they depend on player skill.
"Action game" usually refers to a PC title; the term for consoles (and arcade) is skill-and-action. Console skill-and-action games are less often first-person in perspective, but always dependent on player skill. Snotty gamers who prefer more cerebral styles of gameplay deride these as twitch games.
A 4X game is a game of space colonization and combat; it stands for eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate. A god game is a game in which the player controls a whole empire or civilization; Civilization is the canonical god game.
In the arcade, a redemption game is a game where play is mainly motivated by the desire to get little paper coupons that can be redeemed at the counter for cheap prizes. An LBE (or location-based entertainment) is a large, generally expensive and often multiplayer game, often in an arcade setting but sometimes in a theme park.
Miniatures games are played with little metal figures arrayed on a table; collectible card games (or CCGs) are played with cards, purchased in starter decks and booster packs like baseball cards, with a player building a deck from among all the cards he owns before playing with others.
An online game is a game played over a wide-area network--at present, the Internet, but previously, the commercial online services. A massively multiplayer game is online, but one in which hundreds or thousands of people play in the same game world (this is by contrast to non-massively multiplayer games, involving a handful of players at once). A persistent world is a massively multiplayer game which is always online and available for play, with characters or game positions retaining their characteristics from one play session to another.
Games, according to gamers, almost always either suck or rock; there doesn't seem to be a middle ground. A game that sucks is a coaster--the implicating being that the game is so bad that all the CD is good for is setting your drink down on. (One game magazine reviewed a game for which David Bowie had provided the music under the headline "We Can be Coasters, Just for One Day.") One way a game can suck is if the animations skate, meaning that they don't synch up properly with the background, so that they appear to be moving too quickly or too slowly given the motion of their walk cycle.
A patch is a software update, usually available for free download--gamers don't like them ("Man, they patched that game practically before it shipped--it must be buggy as hell.") A walkthrough is a document describing how to beat a game in detail; a hint doc is less explicit. A cheat is a game feature, purposefully built into the game by the game developers, that lets a player gain power or abilities, or unlock special game features. Cheats aren't usually described in the game manual; instead, the publisher usually reveals them in a mildly secretive way (mentioning them in an online chat, say), encouraging players to seek out websites that describe the cheats. Some cheats put the game in god mode, which renders the player invulnerable.
Easter eggs are hidden features included by the developers, usually without their boss's knowledge, that don't help players in any particular way, but are sometimes amusing, and sometimes designed to boost the developer's ego. The first easter egg in a commercial product is creditted to Warren Robinett, the programmer of Adventure for the Atari 2600; unlocking the easter egg shows you his name (at the time, developers were almost never creditted in console games).
A boss is the main bad guy at the end of a game; a mini-boss is a less powerful enemy at the end of a level.
Some terms used by game programmers have passed into general usage, too; AI (artificial intelligence) is often used to mean "computer-controlled opponent," and indeed the computer-controlled opponents' choices in the action are determined by very primitive artificial intelligence routines. ("The AI beat crap out of me.") When a computer needs to determine a route for a unit in a game, it uses pathfinding algorithms to determine the best possible route for the unit--but pathfinding algorithms can be computationally very processor intensive, so that many games cut corners by using less than optimal--but faster--algorithms, resulting in such oddities as a unit getting caught in a cul-de-sac. In which case, gamers say "the pathfinding sucks." And many games boast about their realistic physics model, which supposedly helps objects in the game behave more like real-world objects.
Gaming has grown from virtually nothing to a multibillion dollar industry over a remarkably short period of time--since Nolan Bushnell placed the first Pong machine in a local bar in 1972. The field continues to mutate and grow amid rapid technological change--currently, the Internet and emerging wireless technologies are reshaping it, even as designers create games like The Sims, a simulation of suburban life, that appeal to entirely different types of players. As the mere recitation of the different types of games demonstrates, the game is an enormously plastic medium, and we have yet even to ring a fraction of the changes possible in the form. As new game styles emerge, we can expect continued rapid linguistic innovation among gamers and the developers who cater to them.
McKean defined fragging (killing another player, from Vietnam era soldiers' slang) and gib (from giblets, the bloody goblets left in the playing field after a player or monster is killed). But first person shooters (FPSes) -- games in which the player sees the playing area as his character would see it (first person view) and plays mainly by shooting weapons at others--have produced rich terminology.
To bunny hop is to leap rapidly about the game world to make yourself a more difficult target. A rocket jump is a way of exploiting a feature of a FPS game's physics model by jumping into the air and detonating explosives on the ground so the blast causes extra lift and lets you jump higher. Strafing originally mean "moving sideways while firing," the derivation from the military term being clear--but has come to mean moving sideways even when not firing. To telefrag is to kill someone by teleporting into his location, which usually results in mutual death.
Once you kill an opponent, you often taunt him--sending a line of text celebrating your victory, although some games allow you to play a sound file on your enemy's machine as another form of taunt.
A low-ping bastard (or LPB) is a player who has a really fast Internet connection and low "ping" times to the game server, giving him an advantage over (better) players with slower connections. Contrariwise, a high-ping bastard (HPB) has such a bad connection that the player is often frozen, offering no help as a teammate and not much challenge as an opponent. A llama is a player without much skill--probably derived from "lamer," itself hacker slang for a wannabe hacker who is basically an idiot.
A boomstick is a shotgun; a BFG (from "big fucking gun") was originally a weapon in Doom, but has come to mean any weapon capable of inflicting truly awesome damage. A bot is an artificial, computer-controlled character resembling a player character, used to make a multiplayer FPS game playable in single player mode; it's a shortened form of "robot."
An aiming bot, however, is a computer program that a player may run which alters the player's controls to provide a perfect lock onto an enemy character, meaning the player always aims true. This is a form of cheating, and will get you kicked (ejected and banned) from the game's server if you're caught.
Shooters are not the only game style to produce interesting vocabulary; massively multiplayer online games, like EverQuest and Ultima Online, are another rich source, perhaps because interplayer communication is so important in these games.
A PC or player character is one controlled by a live player, and an NPC (non-player character) is controlled by the computer. A monster is an NPC that exists for the sole purpose of being killed by PCs. All these terms are borrowed from tabletop roleplaying.
Monsters are often called mobs (possibly from "mobile object"). A train is a whole group of mobs, which together are far more dangerous to PCs than a single mob; when someone nearby yells "Train!," you're best advised to run like hell. In verb form, to train is to lead a train, that is, flee ahead of it--this is usually due to misfortune, but sometimes a character will seek to lead a train into a group of waiting comrades, as a means of ambushing the mobs. Thus "That guy is training the skeletons" doesn't mean he's seeking to improve their skills, but instead leading them a merry chase across the landscape.
To kite is to train but in a way that makes it unlikely that you will be harmed by the mobs. The idea is that your character has appropriate buffs or skills so that it's trivial for him to get away from the train. Kiting means leading a train, getting a substantial lead, turning to cast spells or use ranged weapons to attack them, then fleeing again before the mobs can close enough to fight you, repeating the process as needed until the train is dead.
A buff is a spell or other game effect that temporarily increases a character's abilities; to debuff is to cast a spell on a character that adversely affects his or her abilities.
In an online game roleplaying generally means speaking consistently in character, e.g.,:
Player 1: hey bitch gimme buffs
Player 2: Sirrah! Dost thou address a lady thus?
Player 2 is roleplaying; Player 1 is not.
Some games have separate gameworlds devoted to roleplayers and to power gamers--those who play primarily to become more powerful in the game world and can't be bothered with such fripperies as pseudo-Elizabethan chat. Power gamers seek to power level, increase in ability in the game quickly--often with the help of a more powerful character who provides buffs to allow the character to gain experience rapidly. This practice is called twinking--gaining quickly in power or level in a semi-illegitimate fashion through assistance from a more powerful character. The term is obviously derived from Twinkie, but the association with a sugary snack is not obvious--I surmise that the usage may come from gay slang, in which a "twinkie" is a cute young man with an older lover.
To gain a level in the game--improving your character's ability--is to level up.
PKing (player killing) is killing another player character in a game world--generally this is frowned on, and some games prohibit it. Some games allow both PvP (player versus player) gameplay as well as player versus environment play (which, curiously, is never abbreviated), meaning going out and hunting mobs.
One way to hunt mobs is to camp their spawn point, the place in the gameworld where a particular type of mob appears from time to time; camping means hanging out near that point and waiting until the mob spawns, then killing it. Camping is viewed as morally dubious, since you're hogging this particular hunting ground; however, turtling (just standing around not doing anything) carries no negative connotation.
To zone is to move from one area of the game world to another, triggering a big download of gamestate information that will take a while. However, being in the zone is being totally focussed on the game and playing it like a master.
Sometimes a player figures out an exploit, a way to use some aspect of the game to produce results the game operators did not expect and don't find appropriate--for instance, an Ultima Online player discovered how to create almost unlimited amounts of game money very quickly, causing massive inflation in the game. Exploiters are banned (barred from returning to the game); the game operators then nerf the game system, preventing others from using the exploit. More generally "to nerf" is to reduce game power; e.g., if Shaman characters are made less powerful in an update, players of Shamans will complain bitterly that they have been nerfed.
To group is to join cooperatively with others for a short period of time ("Hey! Wanna group?"). If you want to join a more permanent group, you join (depending on the theme of the game) a guild, clan, or squadron (collectively called microcommunities by game developers). Some clans persist beyond a single game, and will move en masse from one game or server to another.
A quest is a set of tasks that, when accomplished, give a player experience, money, and/or equipment that is useful and powerful in the game world; a FedEx quest is one that involves delivering some item from point A to point B.
A mule is a secondary character used to provide more storage space for the crap you want to hang on to; if your backpack is full, just fire up the mule character and give him/her/it the stuff to carry. A mule will water ski, meaning it will automatically follow the main character about, like a boat pulling a water skier.
A brick is a powerful fighter, usually devoid of magic or other powers. The implication is that bricks wall off more vulnerable members of a group from dangerous mobs by interposing themselves between the two.
A newbie (or noob or n00b) is a new player who's just learning the ropes. A guide is someone in the game world, usually a volunteer but sometimes employed by the game provider, whose job is to help newbies and resolve problems during play. If the guide can't solve a problem, he kicks it upstairs to a gamemaster, which in a MMORPG is like a guide, but has higher rank and access to software tools that lets him modify the game world--tools sometimes used to produce custom quests or events for players. Another task for guides and gamemasters is dealing with griefers--people playing only to interfere with the experience of other players.
In the case of shooters and massively multiplayer games, the language is the product of gamers, the people who play the games. More generally, game developers and gamers together have developed a varied vocabulary to describe the many different game styles on the market and the way people play them.
A gamer is someone for whom games is a primary leisure-time activity. Gaming is playing a game--and gamers are generally snotty that the gambling industry has absconded with the term and used it as a euphemism for their repulsive exploitation of the statistically challenged.
Gameplay is a nebulous noun that means something like "the feel you get from playing a game." It dates back to the early 80s; I first heard it from people at Atari. "It has good gameplay." A game designer is the creative lead, the person who specifies gameplay and interface; game developer is a more general term, covering everyone involved in production of a game, including programmers, graphic designers, and management types as well as game designers. "Game designer" was coined by Redmond Simonsen, the art director at SPI, a leading wargame publisher, in the late 1960s; previously, designers were often called inventors or authors. In Germany, that tradition persists; a game designer is a spielautor.
The term videogame originally meant arcade and home console games, excluding computer games (many of which, in the early days, were text-only); it is still sometimes used that way. In the industry, the term is rarely used; people instead distinguish between PC (personal computer) games and console games. Sometimes, console games are called platformers, but the word is also sometimes used to refer specifically to 2D sidescrollers like the old Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog games.
A wargame is a game of military conflict.
The term roleplaying game (or RPG) was first coined in the pages of Alarums & Excursions, an APA (pron. "apah", meaning amateur press association--first used by amateur printers in the 1920s, then borrowed by science fiction fandom, then carried over into gaming) devoted to games like Dungeons & Dragons. In an RPG, each player takes the role of a single character; this was, initially, a paper game medium, but subsequently, console RPGs (played on home game machines like Playstation), computer RPGs (or CRPGs), and massively multiplayer online RPGs (MMORPGs, sometimes pronounced "morpegs") have evolved. Because MMORPG is such a mouthful, developers are currently experimenting with alternative formulations--massively multiplayer game (MMG) and persistent world being examples--but none have yet achieved widespread usage. The implication of "persistent world" is that the gameworld persists even with a player is offline--that's by contrast to games such as Quake or StarCraft that have no persistent, ongoing nature.
The term tabletop RPG is a back-formation to distinguish the earlier, paper, variety from the modern digital variety. In addition, fan groups often stage live action RPGs (or LARPs, pron. "lahrp"), in which dozens or hundreds of people play together in a single space, moving about rather than sitting around a table.
Although MMORPGs derive partially from the tabletop variety, they are technically an evolution of MUDs (pronounced as you'd expect; it's an acronym for "multi-user dungeon" or "multi-user domain"). The first MUD, MUD 1, was developed by Bartle and Trubshaw at the University of Essex in 1979; they're text-only multiplayer networked games with roleplaying elements, generally (although not always) run non-commercially. Many MUDs are still in existence, along with MUSHes (multi-user shared hallucinations) and MOOs (a contraction of a contraction: "MUD, Object-Oriented").
A plethora of words have been coined to describe computer game categories. An adventure is a game that depends on story-telling and puzzle-solving; the style derives from the academic game Adventure (aka Colossal Cave), which predates the commercial game software industry. Text adventures have no graphics (e.g., Zork), while graphic adventures (e.g., Myst) do. (Confusingly, the Game Manufacturers' Association, a collection of small hobby game publishers, collectively refers to its industry, which includes publishers of wargames, RPGs, and collectible card games, as the "adventure gaming" industry--even though their games bear scant resemblance to software adventures.)
Sim is used in two different senses; there are flight sims (or more generally, vehicle sims) in which the player controls a single craft; and there are sims in the sense of "simulation," such asSimCity, Roller Coaster Tycoon, and The Sims.
A sneaker is a game like a first-person shooter in which you're encouraged to gain your objectives by stealth rather than combat (Thief is the canonical example). A fighter is a game like Soul Calibur in which you control a swordsman, boxer, kung fu fighter, or other combatant in one-on-one combat with a similar opponent. Similarly, a dancer is a game in which the player must manipulate the controls in a set pattern in time to music, frequently (but not always) controlling an onscreen-character that responds by dancing. In some arcade versions, the player stands on a pressure-sensitive area, and controls the game by stepping (or dancing) on different parts of the platform. (The Hackers' Dictionary uses the term "dance-o-matic" for dancers, but I've never actually heard anyone use that word in real life.)
A real-time strategy game (or RTS) is real-time because it is not turn-based; all players (and computer-controlled "AIs") perform actions continually and simultaneously, instead of taking actions one turn at a time, round-robin-style. Examples of RTS games are StarCraft and Age of Empires.
Action is another word with multiple senses; an action game is a game, generally but not always from a first-person perspective, in which a player controls a single character, and his or her success in the game is based on player skill--the ability to manipulate the interface accurately and precisely--rather than character skill--game abilities gained by the character in the course of play. Thus, shooters are a subcategory of action games, but the term also encompasses games like Tomb Raider, in which avoiding traps and overcoming physical challenges are more important to gameplay than simple combat. An action-adventure game is like an adventure game in that story and puzzle-solving are important to play, but unlike classic adventures in that they depend on player skill.
"Action game" usually refers to a PC title; the term for consoles (and arcade) is skill-and-action. Console skill-and-action games are less often first-person in perspective, but always dependent on player skill. Snotty gamers who prefer more cerebral styles of gameplay deride these as twitch games.
A 4X game is a game of space colonization and combat; it stands for eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate. A god game is a game in which the player controls a whole empire or civilization; Civilization is the canonical god game.
In the arcade, a redemption game is a game where play is mainly motivated by the desire to get little paper coupons that can be redeemed at the counter for cheap prizes. An LBE (or location-based entertainment) is a large, generally expensive and often multiplayer game, often in an arcade setting but sometimes in a theme park.
Miniatures games are played with little metal figures arrayed on a table; collectible card games (or CCGs) are played with cards, purchased in starter decks and booster packs like baseball cards, with a player building a deck from among all the cards he owns before playing with others.
An online game is a game played over a wide-area network--at present, the Internet, but previously, the commercial online services. A massively multiplayer game is online, but one in which hundreds or thousands of people play in the same game world (this is by contrast to non-massively multiplayer games, involving a handful of players at once). A persistent world is a massively multiplayer game which is always online and available for play, with characters or game positions retaining their characteristics from one play session to another.
Games, according to gamers, almost always either suck or rock; there doesn't seem to be a middle ground. A game that sucks is a coaster--the implicating being that the game is so bad that all the CD is good for is setting your drink down on. (One game magazine reviewed a game for which David Bowie had provided the music under the headline "We Can be Coasters, Just for One Day.") One way a game can suck is if the animations skate, meaning that they don't synch up properly with the background, so that they appear to be moving too quickly or too slowly given the motion of their walk cycle.
A patch is a software update, usually available for free download--gamers don't like them ("Man, they patched that game practically before it shipped--it must be buggy as hell.") A walkthrough is a document describing how to beat a game in detail; a hint doc is less explicit. A cheat is a game feature, purposefully built into the game by the game developers, that lets a player gain power or abilities, or unlock special game features. Cheats aren't usually described in the game manual; instead, the publisher usually reveals them in a mildly secretive way (mentioning them in an online chat, say), encouraging players to seek out websites that describe the cheats. Some cheats put the game in god mode, which renders the player invulnerable.
Easter eggs are hidden features included by the developers, usually without their boss's knowledge, that don't help players in any particular way, but are sometimes amusing, and sometimes designed to boost the developer's ego. The first easter egg in a commercial product is creditted to Warren Robinett, the programmer of Adventure for the Atari 2600; unlocking the easter egg shows you his name (at the time, developers were almost never creditted in console games).
A boss is the main bad guy at the end of a game; a mini-boss is a less powerful enemy at the end of a level.
Some terms used by game programmers have passed into general usage, too; AI (artificial intelligence) is often used to mean "computer-controlled opponent," and indeed the computer-controlled opponents' choices in the action are determined by very primitive artificial intelligence routines. ("The AI beat crap out of me.") When a computer needs to determine a route for a unit in a game, it uses pathfinding algorithms to determine the best possible route for the unit--but pathfinding algorithms can be computationally very processor intensive, so that many games cut corners by using less than optimal--but faster--algorithms, resulting in such oddities as a unit getting caught in a cul-de-sac. In which case, gamers say "the pathfinding sucks." And many games boast about their realistic physics model, which supposedly helps objects in the game behave more like real-world objects.
Gaming has grown from virtually nothing to a multibillion dollar industry over a remarkably short period of time--since Nolan Bushnell placed the first Pong machine in a local bar in 1972. The field continues to mutate and grow amid rapid technological change--currently, the Internet and emerging wireless technologies are reshaping it, even as designers create games like The Sims, a simulation of suburban life, that appeal to entirely different types of players. As the mere recitation of the different types of games demonstrates, the game is an enormously plastic medium, and we have yet even to ring a fraction of the changes possible in the form. As new game styles emerge, we can expect continued rapid linguistic innovation among gamers and the developers who cater to them.
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Gamer Mom to Be
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"So can you guess what it is?"
I squinted at the ultrasound dumbfounded. I had no idea what I was looking out. "Ok, you got me. I give up."
"It's a boy. See this right here?" I didn't see it. I still don't see it even after she drew an arrow to it and printed it out for me. All I see is a white blob next to a bunch of other white blobs. But the nurse seemed quite certain.
I really didn't have a preference on sex. Having grown up mainly around girls, I knew a girl would be at least easier to understand (although not necessarily easier to raise). On the other hand, a boy would be quite an adventure for the very same reason. As a kid, I barely understood boys. As an adult, I now have a chance to see that same timeframe from a different perspective.
As we left the doctor's office, something unexpected happened as I was thinking about the sex of my baby. I started thinking of all the crap that can happen between now and... well lets see I'm up to when this kid gets married and has kids of his own. I prepared my "talks" in advance from day 1, knowing full well that what I am going to say will completely depend on the personality of the kid and will likely change dramatically. I started thinking of things like:
Fighting off the monsters under the bed
Finding porn on his computer
His first girlfriend
His first black eye
Teaching him about strangers
Teaching him about drugs
Instilling good eating habits on him
Dealing with depression
Dealing with loss
Breaking down stereotypes
Respecting women while not getting his heart torn up
Showing him good strategies for playing FPS games
And the list goes on. You also start to worry about stuff like whether you should go to a flat screen monitor so your kid doesn't become ADHD (new studies have shown that the refresh rate in TVs and monitors effects a child's brain increasing their chance of getting ADHD during the first couple of years), and whether I should be writing this article right now knowing that the radiation from this 21" monitor might be affecting my kid. Hm, good reason to get that flat screen now... I wonder if my husband will go for that...
Of course, the worrying didn't end there. Does it ever end I wonder? As I was going maternity clothes shopping today (staring through the cheesy racks of pastel pink clothes that were about ready to make me gag), I started thinking about the kid's clothing section and how I found both the boy and girl sections to be nearly as frustrating. The girl's section is riddled with flowery designs in pastels and hot pink, and the boy's clothes look drab and washed out with images of sports and cars on just about everything you see. Looking at the clothes reminded me of those idiotic Barbie and Hot Wheels computers for kids. It's so difficult to find things that aren't stereotyped to a certain sex when you are shopping for a child. Especially when shopping for boys. Girls have far more options as they can cross over with little reprecussions. For example, a girl playing with Hot Wheels is far more acceptable in today's society than a boy playing with a Barbie. How does one broaden a kid's choices when so many of the toys and images available are so narrow in vision? All I gotta say is, thank god for Legos.
Speaking of toys, I've also come to the conclusion that my kid will probably hate video games since his parents play them rather religiously. It's Murphy's Law after all. Besides, my hobbies are somewhat different from my parent's hobbies. I wonder what he's going to find interesting and fun? Hrm, there goes my aspirations to make him my crafting mule when he gets old enough to use a computer. :) Ok, I'm not that mean. And according to one of my Dark Age of Camelot friends up in Montreal, it's more likely that my kid will put me to work by making me powerlevel him.
Well that's the beauty about individuality. You never quite know what you're going to get. For now, maybe I should just stick to figuring out how to change a diaper and leave the ulcers for another day.
I squinted at the ultrasound dumbfounded. I had no idea what I was looking out. "Ok, you got me. I give up."
"It's a boy. See this right here?" I didn't see it. I still don't see it even after she drew an arrow to it and printed it out for me. All I see is a white blob next to a bunch of other white blobs. But the nurse seemed quite certain.
I really didn't have a preference on sex. Having grown up mainly around girls, I knew a girl would be at least easier to understand (although not necessarily easier to raise). On the other hand, a boy would be quite an adventure for the very same reason. As a kid, I barely understood boys. As an adult, I now have a chance to see that same timeframe from a different perspective.
As we left the doctor's office, something unexpected happened as I was thinking about the sex of my baby. I started thinking of all the crap that can happen between now and... well lets see I'm up to when this kid gets married and has kids of his own. I prepared my "talks" in advance from day 1, knowing full well that what I am going to say will completely depend on the personality of the kid and will likely change dramatically. I started thinking of things like:
Fighting off the monsters under the bed
Finding porn on his computer
His first girlfriend
His first black eye
Teaching him about strangers
Teaching him about drugs
Instilling good eating habits on him
Dealing with depression
Dealing with loss
Breaking down stereotypes
Respecting women while not getting his heart torn up
Showing him good strategies for playing FPS games
And the list goes on. You also start to worry about stuff like whether you should go to a flat screen monitor so your kid doesn't become ADHD (new studies have shown that the refresh rate in TVs and monitors effects a child's brain increasing their chance of getting ADHD during the first couple of years), and whether I should be writing this article right now knowing that the radiation from this 21" monitor might be affecting my kid. Hm, good reason to get that flat screen now... I wonder if my husband will go for that...
Of course, the worrying didn't end there. Does it ever end I wonder? As I was going maternity clothes shopping today (staring through the cheesy racks of pastel pink clothes that were about ready to make me gag), I started thinking about the kid's clothing section and how I found both the boy and girl sections to be nearly as frustrating. The girl's section is riddled with flowery designs in pastels and hot pink, and the boy's clothes look drab and washed out with images of sports and cars on just about everything you see. Looking at the clothes reminded me of those idiotic Barbie and Hot Wheels computers for kids. It's so difficult to find things that aren't stereotyped to a certain sex when you are shopping for a child. Especially when shopping for boys. Girls have far more options as they can cross over with little reprecussions. For example, a girl playing with Hot Wheels is far more acceptable in today's society than a boy playing with a Barbie. How does one broaden a kid's choices when so many of the toys and images available are so narrow in vision? All I gotta say is, thank god for Legos.
Speaking of toys, I've also come to the conclusion that my kid will probably hate video games since his parents play them rather religiously. It's Murphy's Law after all. Besides, my hobbies are somewhat different from my parent's hobbies. I wonder what he's going to find interesting and fun? Hrm, there goes my aspirations to make him my crafting mule when he gets old enough to use a computer. :) Ok, I'm not that mean. And according to one of my Dark Age of Camelot friends up in Montreal, it's more likely that my kid will put me to work by making me powerlevel him.
Well that's the beauty about individuality. You never quite know what you're going to get. For now, maybe I should just stick to figuring out how to change a diaper and leave the ulcers for another day.
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