| Delirious ( @ 2003-11-20 16:33:00 |
| Current music: | Pete Namlook - Ancient Beauty (Drone Zone: Atmospheric ambient space music. Serve Best Chilled. Safe |
Language fascinates me
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.