Brush-up your gaming vocab!

In an episode of The Big Bang Theory, Penny interrupts Sheldon while he’s in the middle of an online gaming session. “AFK,” says Sheldon, clearly irritated. While non-gamers watching the show were just as baffled as Penny was, at the usage of the term, hardcore gamers around the world presumably said, “What a noob!”

As of this particular moment, there must be a gazillion FPS-shooters running after an enemy, believing that the world is split between gamers and non-gamers. They actually might be correct, because if you’ve already faced three terms here that you don’t understand, you’re clearly the latter.

But there’s no need to worry – we’ve got a handy guide to ease you into the gaming lexicon (a different language altogether).

Before we launch into the world of gaming jargon, it’s important to know the different genres of gaming, because if gaming lingo is different in itself, the genres decide the dialects.

One of the most popular and engrossing genres is FPS, or ‘first-person shooter’. Games like Call of Duty, Halo, and the cult classic Counter Strike fall under this category. Since these games involve everything from hardcore strategy to brute force (the latter is usually employed in massive online scenarios), you’ll hear a lot of weird terms.

For instance, if a player says that he’s camping at Site A, it doesn’t mean he’s propping up a tent with a stove to cook sausages – it means he’s placing himself at a strategic position to kill enemies as they pass by. You’ll also get to hear things from clans (group of gamers) like “frag him!” or “zerg” or witness the unholy act of “TKing”.

To frag someone basically means killing them – it can also mean killing them with a grenade (because the term evolves from fragmentation grenades). That’s one-on-one battling – to “zerg” someone is to annihilate someone, by taking on a single enemy with massive numbers of your forces (say, 15 guys taking on one). However, if you’re on the receiving end of this brutal treatment, you’re “ganked”. A TKer is someone who kills his own teammates – you can imagine the treatment he gets in real life once the game is over.

There are other genres such as RTS (real-time strategy), RPG (role-playing game), Arcade, Third-Person Shooter, etc. One of the most popular casual game genres is beat-‘em-up, where the player runs through levels beating up minor enemies and occasionally encountering big ones, known as Bosses. Boss fights are the centre-points of Beat-‘em-ups, and everything you do until facing a Boss affects your fight, like collecting power-ups and weapons. A Shmup is a variant of Beat-‘em-up, where the term stands for Shoot-‘em-up. In the most difficult Shmups, you’re faced with Bullet Hell – a scenario where your screen is filled with enemy fire and it’s nigh impossible to win.

So yeah, going back to what a noob Penny was – noob stands for newbie. However, it can also be used in a derogatory manner. Say, if you get yourself killed by the simplest of enemies, or make rookie mistakes that cost the team big XPs (experience points – gamers value this more than oxygen or water), you’re a noob.

Then what’s the opposite of a noob, you ask? There are many terms that have been used, such as God, Guru, Wizard etc.

But in gaming, simply defeating an enemy is not enough – you have to ‘own’ them. Because when you ‘own’ someone, your awesomeness quotient increases exponentially. But as gamers love misspelling, the ultimate win is when you ‘pwn’ someone. Hence, “pwners” are probably the best ones around.

Ironically, gamers also use terms like RL or IRL (real life, or in real life) during gaming, to remind themselves and their fellow gamers that there’s a scary world outside the screen that they have to face when they’re not gaming.

The horrors may include homework, girlfriends, expenses and other such that even the most massive in-game arsenals can’t take on. Time for us to go AFK. Away from keyboard.