I delved deeply into the MMO scene sometime last year (more on that in a few days) during a consulting project for Tom Glocer, CEO of Reuters, and the Reuters Venture Board on the applicability of gaming user interfaces in financial services software (/me thinks briefly about where that NDA got to but I think we’re fine here as long as we don’t talk details). During that time I met a lot of younger folks playing online and ever since I’ve been fascinated by the gaming subculture, especially its language. I’m not just talking TLAs like LOL, WTF and more advanced things like GTFO or the occasional lame 1337 sp34k, I’m talking the gestation of stuff like LOLcats. Originally a Starcraft or Counter-Strike phenomenon (in-game chat: “dude where are you?”, “I’M IN UR BASE, KILLING UR D00DZ“), this is one meme that will be with us for a long, long time. Think “All Your Base“, though it’s not as yawn-worthy just yet. If you don’t know lolcats, check out the seminal I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER or the equally venerable lolcats. Also, the Wikipedia page on lolcats may help you understand the meme if you’re completely baffled.
My time playing varied MMOs and getting very much into hardcore raiding in one of the games in particular meant I needed to get my head around jargon, abbreviations, variations in spelling, grammar and the semantics of recurring phrases. The one site that supplies all that and more is Urban Dictionary. It’s a user-generated repository of suggested entries for each term that are then voted up or down. Think Wiktionary meets Digg for the breaking edge of language.
For a neophile and language/literature fan like myself, Urban Dictionary is like crack. Word leads on to word and its urban word of the day is, unlike the emails of regular vocabulary sites, worth reading regularly. I often find myself googling terms during episodes of South Park or Battlestar Galactica (yes, nerd alert) and thanks to its excellent SEO (given Google’s improvements, read: high quality content that is linked to by quality sites), Urban Dictionary pages are first result for many, many search terms.
So remember: if you ever find yourself pwnd by new-fangled slang, it’s Urban Dictionary FTW!
Two asides:
Here’s a talk about gaming user interfaces by David Kieras at Michigan U that’s worth looking at if you’re really into it. And Reuters CEO Tom Glocer is, as far as I know, the only CEO of a Fortune 500 company with a public Facebook profile and certainly the only one that has accepted my friend request. Reuters thus wins at the Internet.
And leaving you with my fave lolcat:
