Video slang
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Opinion: "These gaming terms are transforming slang. Do you know them? Even those not involved in gaming culture are becoming familiar with the new vocabulary." Washington Post, by Adam Aleksic (June 20, 2024)
…Dozens of video game terms have sneaked into everyday conversation over the past several years, particularly among younger people. For instance, it’s common to hear “speedrun” for completing a task quickly, “sidequest” to tell your friends about an unexpected adventure or “spawn” when you’ve made a sudden appearance.
All of these come from gaming culture, where they’re used to describe virtual actions — yet they’ve transformed into offline slang.
Since at least the early 2000s, millennials have adopted gaming words such as “noob” (short for “newbie”), “OP” (short for “overpowered”) and “gg” (short for “good game”) in real life. These terms reached such ubiquity online that they made intuitive sense when extended to analogous in-person interactions.
The author then compares gaming slang to baseball metaphors, such as “swing and a miss,” “home run” and “strike out.”
Now America has a new pastime. Roughly 70 percent of U.S. adults play video games on at least one platform, according to a 2022 survey, compared with the 50 percent who keep up with Major League Baseball. Even those notinvolved in gaming culture inevitably must become familiar with the vocabulary, since it serves as a linchpin of Gen Z popular culture.
There has also been an uptick in “narrative identity-building,” or the construction of personal stories around ourselves. People refer to themselves as the “main character,” describe others as “NPCs” (non-playable characters) and romanticize their past adventures as “lore,” a term frequently used to describe the backstories of characters in
video game universes. Even “sidequest” implies a departure from the overarching plotline, like a diversion from the structured adventure of a role-playing game.
…
In the same way that baseball slang gave us more ways to talk about success and competition — think phrases such as “big hitter,” “grand slam” and “knock it out of the park” — video games help us describe our conscious experience through comparisons with their virtual storylines. Just look at popular memes, which often start with the discourse marker “POV,” coming from the “point of view” perspective in video games. It’s an invitation to experience media in the first person, allowing the viewer to build a narrative identity, just like we’ve all been conditioned to do.
Many of these terms start in ironic contexts. A lot of metaphors arise because it sounds funny to extend a phrase from one context into another that it’s less associated with — but comedy eventually gives way to authenticity.
Even if people initially said “swing and a miss” or “gg” in a joking manner, those phrases are now acceptable in serious contexts, as they’ve lost their humorous subtext. The same will be true for a newer generation of words. Eventually, people might be surprised to learn that “speedrun” or “spawn” had origins in gaming.
Selected readings
- "Annals of opaque sports metaphors" (2/21/10)
- "'Game Over'?" (1/30/11)
- "Character amnesia yet again: game (almost) over" (4/28/22)
- "Verbs are what make video games work" (10/24/06)
[Thanks to François Lang]
David Marjanović said,
June 24, 2024 @ 11:09 am
I've only seen that as an accusation against putative narcissists, not played straight.
Seth said,
June 24, 2024 @ 12:04 pm
I've seen "NPC" used to mean roughly "dull, unthinking person" – not "narcissist", but someone who supposedly lacks independent thinking ability. It's derogatory, like "sheeple" if you know that term.
Joe said,
June 24, 2024 @ 12:12 pm
I've mainly seen "speedrun" used semi-ironically, e.g. a certain recent US president doing a "Nixon speedrun". But on the other hand, even the original gaming term refers to a very unusual kind of playing, ignoring all the parts that are normal considered fun in order to compete for a very arbitrary goal, so maybe there's sometimes derision in the original usage as well.
Speaking of hands, "hands down" seems more popular than ever even though I think horse racing is very much not. The rise and fall of common pastimes seem to add to our vocabulary of metaphors but don't seem to subtract from it.
Sergey said,
June 24, 2024 @ 12:13 pm
Isn't "grand slam" a term from bridge (a card game)?
BZ said,
June 24, 2024 @ 2:47 pm
Does POV really come from video games? I feel like it's been generic video jargon that's been around much longer than first-person shooters or whatever types of POV games exist these days. And the abbreviation POV is transparently "point of view" and has not developed a meaning separate from this.
J.W. Brewer said,
June 24, 2024 @ 4:40 pm
The google books corpus contains the following from 1960: "I will pause for one moment to say that POV is a handy contraction of the term 'point of view,' which is used in the shooting script of movie scenarios." So yes, older than video games.
As to more recently-arisen lexemes, my nine-year-old has taken to calling his mother a "noob," which she may not regard as his most endearing characteristic. I know nothing of the origin of "noob," or when/where it was clipped from "newbie." I associate "newbie" with earlyish (meaning 1990's) online communities (which overlapped to some significant degree with gamer communities), but a bit more poking around indicates that it apparently originated as (U.S.) Army slang, back to at least the Vietnam era. The earliest citation Green's has for it is from 1966.
J.W. Brewer said,
June 24, 2024 @ 5:03 pm
@Sergey: The card-playing sense of "grand slam" (which seems to predate bridge-as-we-know-it)* looks to be significantly older than the baseball sense, which does not really seem to have been well established before World War 2. However, I daresay that the baseball sense is primary for most living AmEng speakers because bridge and its jargon has throughout our lifetimes been much more of a niche interest in American culture than baseball.
*L.N. Andreyev wrote a short story in the late 1890's titled in English translation "Grand Slam," and apparently Большой шлем in the original Russian. The game the characters play is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vint.
Ethan said,
June 24, 2024 @ 10:59 pm
"Spawn" has been computer jargon with the meaning "create a new instance of a program" since at least the 1970s. It was a command in the VAX/VMS operating system (1977); I no longer remember if the same term was already used by the earlier RSX operating system that preceded VMS. Of course even in the 70s some fraction of computer nerd time was consumed by gaming (text games rather than video games, but still…). Which direction the term went, from systems programming to game design or vice versa, seems like something that might be illuminated by searching through early source code comments and ARPANET/uucp mail archives. My own recollection is that I already knew the term well from systems code before I encountered it being used to describe the creation of new monsters to populate a digital dungeon playground.
Philip Taylor said,
June 25, 2024 @ 3:55 am
"[SPAWN] was a command in the VAX/VMS operating system (1977)" — agreed. See https://wiki.vmssoftware.com/SPAWN. VAX/VMS played a major rôle in much of my professional life, and I still yearn for those halcyon days.
Peter Taylor said,
June 25, 2024 @ 5:14 am
I associated "grand slam" in a sporting context with tennis; Wikipedia suggests that it was first used in golf in 1930 and in tennis in 1933. In the context of playing cards, OED's earliest references seem to imply that "slam" was the name of a card game in the 17th century, as well as being the act of winning all tricks. J.W. Brewer's observation that "grand slam" seems to predate bridge-as-we-know-it is backed up by a reference in 1814 to "grand slam" as a bid for 13 tricks in whist.
I haven't tracked down the precise page in archive.org, but the only card games discussed in Hoyle's Games Improved are whist, piquet, and quadrille.
Peter Erwin said,
June 25, 2024 @ 6:36 am
@ Seth
I took David Marjanovic's comment as meaning that "People refer to themselves as the 'main character' " are the narcissists. (As in, "Yeah, she's the sort of narcissist who thinks of herself as the main characters, and of other people as just NPCs".)
(My side comment would be that "NPC" originated in tabletop/pencil-and-paper roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons as "non-player characters", although the quoted expansion as "non-playable character" is fairly common in video-game contexts.)
Keith Clarke said,
June 25, 2024 @ 7:32 am
@Peter Taylor
An answer by "Hugo" to a question on Stack Exchange is pretty comprehensive – .
This has The Sporting Magazine, For July 1800 – for the earliest usage, referring the taking of 13 tricks in Boston ("played very much like Whist").
Keith Clarke said,
June 25, 2024 @ 7:33 am
Aargh, the links have disappeared from my post above. I put them in angle brackets; what's the right way to do it?
Richard Hershberger said,
June 25, 2024 @ 2:49 pm
"Grand slam" does indeed come from cards. Bridge was the proximate source. Bridge was huge in the first half of the 20th century, and the term jumped from it to various sports, including baseball. Going backwards, it can be traced to the Renaissance. In the baseball context it initially usually meant a hard-hit home run that went deep into the stands, but the usage morphed into its modern sense of a home run with the bases loaded.
"Newbie": I was in both college and the Society for Creative Anachronism in the 1980s. We definitely used "newbie." Also "mundanes," I believed borrowed from SF cons, for someone not in nerd culture. Neither term was, upon reflection, very endearing. I don't recall "noob" in any spelling until much later, and I find the plausible that it came from gaming.
Andy Stow said,
July 2, 2024 @ 10:00 am
We had a British manager at an American work location. In one of his first big meetings, he talked about cultural differences and asked us to avoid sports metaphors like "home run" and "grand slam" because we were an international team.
In the same meeting, he used the terms "sticky wicket" and "own goal", neither of which is familiar to most Americans.