A noobs Guide to Gaming Culture

Have you ever listened to your friend playing Halo and wondered exactly what language he is speaking? The language in fact is very similar to everyday Aim or Msn conversations, except it's verbally pronounced and primarily offensive. Albeit many games contain their own terminology and vernacular, there is a common language throughout many that even the most mundane noob can comprehend.

Games come in common genres, just like movies. Movies have horror, sci-fi and action flicks. In gaming you have Fps, Rpg, Rts and a few others. Fps stands for first person shooter. This would be games like Halo and Counter-strike, where you control a first person view of your character and usually hold a gun to point and shoot. These are fast paced games that require twitch skill and good reflexes. You have your Rpg or Role-playing game where you usually pick or create your character and control them from a 3^rd person point of view. World of Warcraft would be a good example of this genre with the exception that it is an Mmorpg or Massively multiplayer online role-playing game (quite a mouthful so we call these mmo's for short). Next are Rts games, or Real-time strategy games. In these games you're shown an overhead view, usually of a battlefield. You control an army of units that you command everywhere to battle the enemy, you're the commander instead of the soldier. Examples of this genre would classically be the Command and Conquer series and Starcraft. Those are the main genres that you will come across when trying to pry your significant other off the couch.

Gaming has quite a few terms people throw around at each other in their virtual spitting contest, many of which can be utterly bewildering to the unknowing ear yet most of which are quite simple. Of course the most commonly used term; n00b, nub, scrub, newb, bk or bad kid they are all the same. You don't say rookie or newbie online, that in fact makes you look like a noob. A noob is somebody who very obviously hasn't played the game that much. People call eachother noobs as an offensive term. To teabag or do chickens on somebody is to crouch up and down on their dead body after you kill them. This is done to add insult to injury and is the nonverbal way of talking smack. To pwn, rape, own or spank is to not just beat your opponent, but to dominate them in the game usually with style. Other forms of these words are pwnage, get raped or graped, pwnt, pwnage, ownage, ownt and many others. A term common in Fps games is unscoped or noscoped. This is to kill your adversary using a long range weapon without aiming down its sights. This is more difficult to do then a scoped shot. Hand in hand with noscope is headshot. A headshot is when you kill somebody in the game by shooting them in the head, usually resulting in a one-hit kill. Again it is harder to shoot a moving target in the head then to just aim for their body. A noscoped headshot would be a good example of pwning your enemy.

In most Fps games there are many different gametypes common throughout the genre. Deathmatch (dm), Free for all (ffa) or slayer is a gametype where your goal is to kill everybody you see, as much as you can. Team deathmatch (tdm) would be the same except you have two teams trying to kill eachother. You win by getting the most kills. When you are killed, you go through what is called a respawn, because in a dm or tdm a death is not game over. You respawn or are reborn at your spawn point. Somebody who is spawn killing or spawn camping is guarding the enemy's spawn and killing people right as they appear. This is usually considered a bitch move will likely result in verbal conflict. Capture the flag (ctf) is a gametype everybody is familiar with due to its less exciting real life (rl) counterpart. I won't bother explaining it but will suffice to say it has a healthy fan base in contemporary squad based fps games. Last is search and destroy (sd). This is an objective based gametype and is the default gametype played on the professional level for competitive play (yes you read right, professional level). In this gametype there are usually 2 plant sites, A and B. One team tries to plant the bomb and then guard the plant, while the other tries to prevent the bomb from being planted. This gametype requires the most teamwork and communication of them all. You only have one life per round as well. All of these gametypes require strat or strategy in your gameplay which you can only learn over time.

Hopefully some of this helped with demystifying exactly what people are saying when they talk about games they play or are talking in game. It really is another world that requires education and a degree of socialization just like rl. With a bit of time and some ownage later, you may be calling somebody else a noob and saying “lol” out loud as well.