You’re Speaking My Language

by Daniel Bullard-Bates

Gamers, like kids and drunks, say the darndest things. Just last night I sat down to play Mario Kart Wii with a few friends. This was only the second time any of us had ever played this incarnation of the game, but we were having a blast just learning the courses and the new power-ups. As we chatted about the mechanics of the game and shouted obscenities at one another, I took note of some of the stranger sentences that sprung unbidden from our mouths:

“I think that if you’re in the air when you get POW’d, you don’t spin out.”

“The lightning storm works like a hot potato! Ram somebody!”

An outsider would surely think us mad, but such is the nature of video games and their effect on language. One of the great beauties of language is its adaptability. Lacking the needed terms to describe a given situation causes players to create their own. When Shakespeare didn’t have a word that worked for one of his plays, he invented one. I’m not saying that words like “POW’d” have quite the same puissance as Shakespeare’s invented words, but they still serve a linguistic purpose. I know that when I played Neverwinter Nights online, terms like PhK and FoD were bandied about, and no one looked askance. We all spoke the same language; our communal terms helped to define us as a community.

(They’re spells, for the curious. Phantasmal Killer and Finger of Death. Both bad news.)

I’ve never played World of Warcraft, and when two of my in-recovery friends speak of their halcyon days in Azeroth they are completely incomprehensible to me. (Chris grows more understandable with each passing day.) I’ve picked up a few words here and there, maybe enough to get around, find a bathroom and even a bite to eat. From the Penny Arcade comic below, for example, I’m pretty sure aggro is aggression and DoT is damage over time. Many gamers use terms like nub, newb or noob to mean someone who is either new to a game or acting like they are. But Omen? Raidwipe? L2P? MT? I need a translator, someone who has walked these lands before.
Whether it’s yelling at a friend to use their star power or complaining about shotty spam, video games do more than take us to new locations. They teach us new, bizarre languages and rule sets that only make sense in the context of the game. We talk about the gaming community as a whole, and the communities that arise around specific genres and games, and nowhere is this more clearly illustrated than in these communal languages. It’s a testament to the power of video games that this never strikes us as odd: just like our own native languages seem like the norm to us, the languages of the games we play become perfectly natural over time. It’s only when we walk into a room of people playing a strange game that we realize just how bizarre this phenomenon can be.

So what’s the strangest thing a game has ever driven you to say? Have you ever paused to wonder just how such a sentence left your lips? I know I have.

Orwell and the Xbox

By C.T. Hutt

I suppose it was inevitable that my personal politics would eventually dominate one of our discussions here at Press Pause to Reflect. Still, I find descending from the lofty and comfortable towers of intellectual discourse on the arts to the mire of politics to be a sobering decent indeed. A matter has come to my attention that I feel must be addressed. While I take no pleasure in this task, I feel that it would be a greater disservice to the gaming community at large were I to remain silent. Today I would like to reflect on the impact of censorship in video games and its implications.

There is nothing more crippling to art, nor to the community that surrounds it, than censorship. To have the twisted and inconsistent morality of a few people applied to our entire society through sclerotic institutions such as the FCC is surely oppressive enough. But as our technology outpaces itself with each subsequent year a very disturbing trend has emerged which threatens not only the artistic medium that we love but the very root of our cultural heritage. The very same corporations which deliver us our beloved video games have taken it upon themselves to impose a set of moral restrictions on us wholly outside the law. I truly cannot stress enough how dangerous this concept is. A non-government body with a monopoly on a given means of communication is dictating to people what is, and what isn’t acceptable to say or write. That is more than an irritation; it is a recipe for corporate control over our personal lives.

This issue came to my attention after reading an article on Penny-Arcade. Apparently, Microsoft’s Orwellian “decency policy” on language control is not content to simply censor commonly recognized swear words but has also taken it upon itself to dissect the ever expanding lexicon of modern slang and cherry pick words or phrases that it finds to be offensive, or even potentially offensive. This list of banned words or phrases is not available to the general public so we are simply forced to accept the premise that the Microsoft corporation, an organization that has been sued by businesses, NGO’s, and even the United States Government for its multiple violations of privacy laws, fair business laws, and legal misrepresentation, has our best interests at heart.

The Xbox Live Code of conduct appears to be designed with the noble intention of providing a safe and fair gaming environment to gamers. I can hardly fault them for this goal, but the fact remains that it is simply not their place to legislate morality to the world. Who is to say where that type of censorship ends? Microsoft just recently announced its intention to merge with web-searcher Yahoo. How long before we are punished for what we type in the search bar in the privacy of our homes? How long before our real names, rather than just our game handles, start appearing on banned lists?

No one elected the people who are making these decisions and there is no functional oversight to moderate their behavior. Make no mistake, if we, the community that made gaming what it is today, make no move to resist these policies they will continue to grow. I urge you as a writer, a gamer, and an ardent believer in a free and democratic society to take action. Write your congressional representatives in the House and Senate (they really do read what you send in), send a letter to Microsoft, and light up the blogs and forums and chat rooms with your dissent. Do your part for the gaming medium and the community we’ve built around it.

Thank you.

Where's My Virtual Lightsaber?

I’m a pretty religious Penny Arcade reader, even going so far as to pepper my everyday dialogue – that is, the things I say to real people, when I’m looking at their faces – with phrases from the comic. (Yes, in real life I drop references to an internet comic focused on the gaming community. Someday I’ll show you the stick with which I fend off the hordes of ladies perpetually surrounding me. I call it “Sting.”) Today’s PA entry ties into what I feel is the most significant development within today’s gaming scene, with Gabe bemoaning – via a, um, novelty T-shirt – the increasing prevalence of physically immersive simulations. His complaint is that simulated experiences, like those presented in Rock Band and Wii exercise titles, require a very real level of coordination (and produce, on occasion, equally real sweat). I remember the predictions from the pre-Wii, pre-Internet halcyon 1980’s and 90’s concerning the future of gaming: we were going to strap on VR suits and gloves, and pick up our virtual swords, and fight some virtual zombies. Their matted hair would be tangibly repugnant; the smell of the grave would fill our nostrils. (Alternatively, we were going to strap on VR stirrups and riding crops and ride some virtual magical ponies. The rest – matted hair, smell of the grave – still stands.) I look back now on all the movies promising these developments – Hackers comes to mind, as do The Matrix and The Island – and can only mourn our failure to realize so noble a goal. I’m on the opposite side of the debate from Gabe; I yearn for more immersive experiences. I maintain that I’d be a much more efficient zombie killer, fighter pilot or Space Marine than video games today imply, if only I could utilize the respective tools of these trades as they were intended to be used – with both hands, and my feet if necessary. Something in my brain bone rebels when I press a button or push a joystick to swing a sword. It’s as though my deep, reptilian subconscious is shouting at me, “No! No! We built you arms for this very purpose! Entire arms for holding swords!” When I’m playing a game, I want to feel a sword in my hand, and move it in a way that threatens to dislocate my entire shoulder. I want to strain to stay upright while wearing full plate armor. I want, in short, to look left by moving my neck. As it stands now, using a cursed twin stick control scheme, I put a lot of stock in how well a game maps its skies. This is because I spend a good portion of my time looking directly up, or down, or off into the middle distance, unable to focus my gaze upon a given point. If a button could be utilized to slacken my character’s jaw and trigger a drool response, I imagine that I would inadvertently press it. I’ve really enjoyed games like Rock Band that challenge our assumptions on the nature of a “controller.” I may not be able to sync up the Left Bumper with my need to reload a shotgun, but I’ll be damned if I can’t understand the basic mechanics of a guitar and how one is played; my head can wrap comfortably around this process, as I’m doing with my hands exactly what I want my character to replicate with his own. So, gamers, thoughts? What’s your preference: an immersive simulation, or a contained exercise in hand-eye coordination? I know that I’ll be the first in line to buy a holodeck, so what’s the argument against physically demanding games?