The Middle is always behind the Edge

Microsoft, ahhh Microsoft.
They are like your Granny, nice to have around, occasionally she makes you cookies, but every now and again she opens her mouth and just plain embarrasses herself and probably you. I will explain where this is going after a little bit of a digression. I have written 2 articles as introductions to the world of the Massively Multiplayer Game.

I play MMORPG's on a daily basis and I have a reasonably good idea of what the hell I am talking about, I can write on the subject from an informed viewpoint. At one point I considered writing an article covering the language of the Multiplayer Game, after some reflection I decided not to for two reasons. The first and most important is that it's an enormous subject. The language of the MMPRG, much like that of the TXT Generation has evolved from acronyms and shortenings of words due to most people (Like me) having crap typing skills.

Thus instead of writing "I will be right back, I have to leave the keyboard as I need to go to the bathroom" a player will write something like "brb, afk for a bio" This is translated as "Be Right Back, Away From Keyboard for a Biological break". There are literally thousands of these acronyms and bits of slang. I once saw a guide to MMPORG speak that was Everquest specific on the EQLive forums, towards the end of its life it had expanded out to about 15 pages.

Here is a very basic primer to give you an idea of the type of thing involved in this new language. It is a vast and very new subject. Not even Nick Yee has done any significant research into this proto language. I don't know if the "serious" language researchers of the world simply don't regard it as worthy of study, but from someone who "speaks" this language reasonably fluently, I can state it is definitely evolving into a language very separate from its parent tongues.

The thing with online gaming speak is that it gets in your head, I actually find myself thinking in MMORPG speak. For example, if I find something funny, I will still physically smile or laugh, but I wll also think "lol" (Laugh Out Loud) to myself. I will have little conversations in my head and suddenly realize that I am actually thinking in the language of the MMPRG rather than fully articulating my thoughts in my native English.

The second reason that I didnt write anything on this subject is that the language, to an extent, is game or even Genre specific. Much of the core language is trans-game but a lot of it will evolve within a game to discuss specific aspects of that game's dynamics. Some parts of the language will work in some games and not others. For example in MMPRGs where it is possible to join a Guild type organsation the reference /GU will refer to speech made in the guilds chat channel. This is due to the use of the prefix /GU to speak in the guild channel rather than locally. In use you would see "Wow man, did you hear what johnny said in /GU the other day?"

In a Multiplayer FPS talking about /GU wont mean anything. Yet the commonly used phrase "Woot!" meaning that something good has happened (Woot I just soloed that MOB!) is used across all genre's and types of gaming. The phrase has even made its way into main stream media in places. It is claimed that this phrase evolved out of the FPS phrase "We Owned the Other Team!". Meaning that your team has decisively defeated your opponents.

On top of all of this there are the online worlds of the script kiddies, the BBS freaks, the Hackers and Phreakers, the IRC bots, web chat fans etc. It is truly a massive and in some cases disparate community, yet at a basic level they are all still able to "speak" the same base language.

The particular language dialect within the gaming community, will be different depending on whether you are playing a fantasy based MMPRG such as Asherons Call, Everquest or World of Warcraft, a more "realistic" type of game like The Sims:Online, a Multiplayer First Person Shooter like Halflife, Doom3, Unreal Tournament, Quake, a Science Fiction like MMPRG like Star Wars: Galaxies. Each game will have its own specific phrases and acronyms, as well as sharing many similarities across the Genres.

The reason the whole thing came up was a friend sent me this link on Kids online speech from Microsoft. I dug around and also found this on Teen Speak and this on Gaming Lingo. To me this kind of thing is like trying to learn the English Language from a single page of instruction written by someone 100 years ago. By the time Microsoft tries to write up a primer on this, it has already evolved well beyond them.

Ok its a way to start understanding the language, but if you ever truly want to understand your childs "L337 5p3@| <" (Leet Speak) you will have to go online and learn the language yourself.I will write up a short history of Online Languages and their evolution, as far as I understand it some other time.