Gaming Language - New or Recycled

 

"Noob", "K.D.R" and "spawn"; you may be feeling lost in the new world of gaming linguistics. However, perhaps you aren't in a new world at all, maybe you may actually be looking at the Frankenstein's monster of lexical groupings. You see, it is very difficult to categorise these new terms that spring up out of an industry that moves so fast.

The fact is most of these terms that many would categorise as new terms aren't entirely new. Referring to my earlier example of "K.D.R", it is clear that this is just an initialised phrase secretly hiding a set of pre-existing nouns merely indicating a new measurement. However there are also new terms whose roots are difficult to trace such as "Noob" so the question is, Is this language worthy of a separate grouping.

Many studies have been carried out into the language of this young industry such as one I used called, A Linguistic Profile of Power and Identity in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games by Benjamin E. Friedline, M.A which helped me to identify some of these terms. I also used The semiotic ecology and linguistic complexity of an online game world by Steven L. Thorne, Ingrid Fischer and Xiaofei Lu.  The researched terms I found from the research they did can be classed into three different categories.

 

Firstly in gaming, a lot of the field specific lexical choices can be considered as vocabulary that has either drifted into a different meaning or works in combination with another word to create field specific lexis. For example "quick scope" and "spawn" both come from these two sources. Therefore the language here seems to have been adapted and recycled for use by the gaming community. So it would seem that this new category of lexis doesn't exist.

However another source of field specific lexis can be new words entirely such as "Noob" and "Rinazook" both terms among the gaming community appear to be entirely new lexis created to describe certain situations and people within a game. Often these new terms will be nouns describing specific people or things as pre-existing proper nouns don't suffice. However if you look at the first type many of the terms used were verbs or verbs with adverbs. Therefore it would seem that most actions have a pre-existing verb to suit however nouns especially proper nouns have had to be created. This may be in part due to the fact games will often include real world processes but not real world objects or people.

However the last category is the initialised forms of gaming terms. These include "K.D.R" an initialised form of Kill to death ratio and "O.P" standing for overpowered. This category unlike the other two categories sticks to the denoted value of the vocabulary and these couldn't be classed really as new words.

Overall, from looking at the three categories it seems that there is no solid answer to my question. The fact is that this lexical grouping derives from a number of different sources of language formation so ultimately I would conclude that this would appear to be a patch work grouping with no definitive source.

 

By Nathan Watson