Massively Multiplayer Online Game Jargons

More closely related to the gamer identity are slang terms limited to the community of

online gaming. They are more like technical terms or jargons because their users could be easily defined in terms of the clearly bounded field of expertise – the area of online gaming.

There could be two types of such MMOG jargons in the game chat in dependence on their specificity to MMOGs in general or only the virtual world of LoL. With respect to those exclusively understood by MMOGamers as a bigger community, most of them are confined in relevance to software systems of the games. Consider the following highlighted lexical items shown in context:

(25) Game No. 43 (recorded on September 6, 2015) 1 庫奇 (AD Carry)： sor

‘Sorry.’

 2 拉克絲 (Support)： nvm 我很 lag nvm wo hen lag

‘Never mind. I am lagging, too.’

(26) Game No. 6 (recorded on August 9, 2015) 1 菲歐拉 (Top)： JG 不見惹

JG bujian re

‘Our jungler disappears.’

2 瑪爾札哈 (Mid)： 然後ㄋ ranhou ne

‘So?’

 3 菲歐拉 (Top)： 他掛了哦?

ta gua le o

‘Is he not playing?’

(27) Game No. 97 (recorded on November 8, 2015) 1 瑟雷西 (Support)： 上路不會玩?

shanglu bu hui wan

‘You do not know how to play the game, Top?’

 2 菲歐拉 (Top)： 外掛阿 waigua a

‘Cheat!’

3 泰達米爾 (Jungler)： ?

4 他怎

ta zen

‘What is with him?’

5 菲歐拉 (Top)： 他打我超痛ㄉ ta da wo chao tong de

‘His damage output is crazy.’

The conversation displayed in Excerpt 25 occurs after the bottom laners AD and Support lost a trade against the enemy champions. 庫奇 interprets the stumble as owing to his own fault and apologizes to his co-laner 拉克絲 (sor, Line 1). However, 拉克絲 responds to make 庫奇 exempt from all the responsibilities for their loss. She tells 庫奇 not to worry about it

(nvm, short for “never mind”) and furthermore claims part of the responsibilities for the lost fight by admitting she ran into lags while playing the game. “Lag” is a term used to describe a technical problem in online gaming; it is a delay between player commands to the server

and what is visualized on the screen in reaction. Normally, the causes of lags are either insufficient processing power of players’ computers or low capabilities of the game servers.

In Excerpt 26, we see another term that is universal to almost all the online game worlds; 菲 歐拉 is questioning whether the team’s jungler is “hanging on the net” (gua, abbreviated

from guawang, 掛網). The term guawang is used by MMOGamers to refer to a player’s state of absence from the avatar body. In other words, it is when the player is not controlling his/her avatar to take any actions in the virtual game world, even though other players can still see the avatar remaining still in the space. The state of guawang usually occurs when the player is caught up by real life emergencies or when he/she deliberately gets off line to escape the game. In Excerpt 27, waigua is still another common jargon that prevails among online gamers. In Line 1 瑟雷西 casts a question on whether the top laner (shanglu) knows how to play the game, in response to which the top laner 菲歐拉 defends herself by claiming that her rival has been cheating (waigua). Waigua is a widely known term to MMOGamers; it normally involves game code modification or bot assistance.⁵² In the case of Excerpt 27, 菲歐拉 thinks that the opposing champion is using waigua because she has taken much more damage than one can expect from a human-controlled avatar (Line 5).

These jargons may somehow reflect that the users are not new with MMOGaming overall,

even though they may be indeed newbies to LoL.

Besides these “technical” terms, there are jargons that could only be comprehensible to

LoL or MOBA game players alone, not MMOGamers in general. Such slang terms were

employed by totally 147 out of the 400 LoL players (36.75%) who came under my observation. This type of game jargons can be further categorized into two: one denoting the

52 “Bot” is short for “software robot,” which is designed to do automated tasks for the actual player who owns

game mechanics with strategic values and one tagged along with ideologies about player behaviors while gaming. To start with, Table 4 lists all of the jargons of the former sort found in my conversational data. I furthermore divide them into respectively nouns and verbal phrases, including those describing states and actions.

Table 4

Jargons of game mechanics used by League of Legends players

Jargons Literal Translation Slang Meaning

Nouns bingxian (兵線)

a line that minions form a minion wave or a distance it

reaches on one of the three lanes

yan (眼)

an eye a ward

huizhan (會戰)

a high-scale battle a team fight

qianpai (前排)

the front row champions who position themselves in the front line during team fights, usually tanks

houpai (後排)

the back row champions who positions themselves at the back

champion

shan (閃)

a flash the summoner spell, Flash

tan (坦)

a tank the champion role, Tank

damowang

(大魔王)

the biggest devil the enemy champion who has become the greatest threat

dansha (單殺)

to kill someone by oneself to slay a champion solo

nong (農)

to farm to earn gold from last hitting

chai (拆)

to tear down to destroy enemy structures

into wasting his/her ability or summoner spell,

53 “Cooldown,” usually abbreviated as “CD,” refers to the minimum time a champion must wait until an ability

another in terms of his/her

gui (龜)

to withdraw to passively defend a structure

fei (肥)

fat to be powered up by strong

chongta (衝塔)

to rush into turrets to try to kill enemy champions

qingbing (清兵)

to clear up minions to eliminate minions

dadeng (打燈)

to give off a signal to use a smart ping to alert an

to lose experience to lose experience points because the player is not in proximity to minion death

Note that some would argue that several of the listed jargons are not exclusively used in LoL or MOBA game chats, but can be evidently found in other MMOGs. The tricky business, however, is that these terms are widely spread because of LoL and other MOBA games, so the specificity I assign to the terms is a reasonable gesture to highlight their strong relationship with MOBA gamers. Now pay attention back to linguistics. Most of the jargons proposed here are neologisms that have undergone metaphorical or morphological processes alike. For example, yan is formed based on the metaphorical resemblance of the item to the body part, eye (眼). As discussed, wards help players clear out the fog of war nearby; to LoL players they indeed function like eyes, “windows to the world,” by which they can have clues

to where enemies are going. The verb phrase nong is also an instance of metaphor; it comes out of the metaphorical mapping between the conceptual domains of LoL gaming and agriculture. The play of last hitting minions resembles farming because their ways of making money are both through industrious work habits and accumulation of small gains. The same metaphorical mapping is at work in the use of nongfu (農夫) on LoL forums to refer to those players who engage in last-hitting. As for word coinage that derives from morphological processes, the nominal da and verbal jargon bao are two examples. While da is a reduced word for the longer phrase dajuezhao (大絕招), bao is a short form for baohu (保護). In addition to metaphorical extension and abbreviation, there are other interesting word formation processes. To name a few, the creations of nominal jargons hong and lan are based

on metonymic relations; that is, the quality “parts” of the referents mattering most to the speaker (i.e. the types of the buffs) are used to name the “whole” Red Brambleback and Blue

Sentinel monster entities. Conversion, another word formation process, comes into play in the use of the verbal phrase tan. Actually, tan is originally a noun meaning the champion role Tank (as shown in the upper part of Table 4); it afterwards comes to be used as another grammatical form – a verb – to mean what Tanks would normally do, to take damage from enemy champions. What is also worthy of mention at this point is the frequent collocations with the above-suggested jargons, yielding slang phrases in Table 5. The listed are ones employed by my informers.

Table 5

Collocate jargons of game mechanics used by League of Legends players

Jargons Literal Translation Slang Meaning

shoujia (守家)

to protect home to protect the home base from

chaita (拆塔)

to tear down turrets to destroy enemy structures

guita (龜塔)

to withdraw behind turrets to passively defend a turret

kaida (開大)

to open big to use an ultimate ability

rangtou (讓頭)

to concede heads to strategically let an ally get a kill

In the table, the framed words are the jargons that have been discussed before. As manifested by the data so far, the most frequent verbal construction of LoL jargons are verb-object phrases. In Table 4, the inseparable compounds huijia, paoxian, shangliu, huanxie, chongta,

budao, kaizhan, zouwei, qingbing, dadeng, daixian, buzhuang, daye, and diaojingyan all

belong to this category of constructions. Even with the rest pure verbs in Table 4 (e.g. zhua,

chi, and chu), they should always take nominal phrases to be their objects and, when used

together too often, become collocates and parts of newly arising jargon words shown in Table 5. In addition to verb-object phrases, another primary construction could possibly be prefixed subordinate verbs, that is, verbs preceded by adverbial modifiers. Examples of this kind include dansha, diaoda, and tasha in Table 4 and danchi in Table 5. Overall speaking, the use of the pithy LoL jargons describing game mechanics allows players to communicate with each other more efficiently for tactical purposes. When the speakers are able to locate intended referents in the virtual world within no time, the recipients could react to what happens at just the right moments. This convenience granted by the language caters perfectly to the environment of MOBA games, where speed and accuracy of movements are all one could ask for from players. Consider now the LoL-specific jargons oriented to ethnographic

ideologies players have about each other and the game. Table 6 lists all of the examples that could be drawn from my data.

Table 6

Jargons of player ideologies in League of Legends

Jargons Literal Translation Slang Meaning

G or GG

good game to feel that the game is going to advantage of their sacrifice to escape from danger

allies have lowered most of

enemy champions, and thus awards them with a great amount of gold, like an ATM

wei (尾)

a tail for a player to make allies feel that he/she steals kills from them (i.e. to last hit on an enemy champion when allies have lowered most of the champion’s health)

kairei (凱瑞)

to carry for a player to make allies feel

that he/she is skillful enough to win over the game for them

fangsheng (放生)

to release for a player to make allies feel that he/she is not willing to help them get rid of the coming danger

LoL jargons of this category are different from the ones in Table 4 and 5 in that they carry

speakers’ subjective implications regarding what is right or wrong in the virtual society.

Perhaps because of this, they are more easily transferred to the real-life dictionary, used as alternative terms to describe real-life experience that leaves the speakers with similar feelings.

One can consider the cases of GG, lei, and OP, all of which have been treated as mere youth slang by laymen who know nothing about their origins. Table 7 compares the meanings of the three slang words when they are used in LoL versus in the reality.

Table 7

Slang Meanings of GG, lei, and OP in League of Legends and real life

Jargons Meaning in LoL Meaning in Real Life

GG to feel that the game is going

The comparison shows that the semantic component of social evaluation and the concomitant

political power of such jargons have been carried over into their slang usage in real life. What I categorize as “ideological” LoL jargons in here is directly related to the issue of social identity or membership in a social group as they reflect the speakers’ perceptions of and the

intended social relations with the addressees. The empirical exertion of influence through the use of these jargons will be more thoroughly covered in the next section when they are discussed with speech acts during communication. Note that the verbal jargon words we have been dealing with so far might overlap with the instances of abbreviation raised in support of the morpho-syntactic identity practices. The two arguments are not so contradictory as showing the evolution of language. At first, LoL players would apply morphological rules of abbreviation to novel language, in need of efficiency. As time goes, the most frequently used

ones got frozen in form and entered into our mental dictionary. The English correspondences

of the LoL jargons can also be seen as innovative idioms after language change; as shown in Section 4.1, terms like “splitpush,” “peel,” and “snowball” are now given fixed, idiosyncratic

meanings that are only valid in the context of the game and must be learned by newcomers.

In Table 3, we introduce the lexical categories of Internet, MMOG, and LoL slang as if they were three parallel concepts. Strictly speaking, the notion of CMC should be a hypernym whose semantic field is broader than MMOG speak, which further consists of LoL jargons.

The reason why the present study gives the same weight to all of the three is simply to highlight their respective sociolinguistic implications about LoL gamer identity. Apparently playing LoL does not necessarily entail the experience of playing other MMOGs, and playing any MMOG also does not guarantee that one engages in other online activities or uses other digital devices on a regular basis. The fact that LoL players employ the three categories of slang words to interact with each other matters most when it tells us that LoL gamer identity is ideologically linked to Internet users, MMOG players, and LoL players to an equal extent, just as it is to youngsters and male gangsters.

在文檔中 英雄實踐聯盟：從語言學角度探討大型多人線上遊戲玩家的社會認同 (頁 107-123)