


A bot is an artificial, computer-controlled character resembling a player character, used to make a multiplayer FPS game playable in single player mode it's a shortened form of "robot."Īn aiming bot, however, is a computer program that a player may run which alters the player's controls to provide a perfect lock onto an enemy character, meaning the player always aims true. A llama is a player without much skill-probably derived from "lamer," itself hacker slang for a wannabe hacker who is basically an idiot.Ī boomstick is a shotgun a BFG (from "big fucking gun") was originally a weapon in Doom, but has come to mean any weapon capable of inflicting truly awesome damage. Contrariwise, a high-ping bastard (HPB) has such a bad connection that the player is often frozen, offering no help as a teammate and not much challenge as an opponent. Once you kill an opponent, you often taunt him-sending a line of text celebrating your victory, although some games allow you to play a sound file on your enemy's machine as another form of taunt.Ī low-ping bastard (or LPB) is a player who has a really fast Internet connection and low "ping" times to the game server, giving him an advantage over (better) players with slower connections. To telefrag is to kill someone by teleporting into his location, which usually results in mutual death. Strafing originally mean "moving sideways while firing," the derivation from the military term being clear-but has come to mean moving sideways even when not firing. A rocket jump is a way of exploiting a feature of a FPS game's physics model by jumping into the air and detonating explosives on the ground so the blast causes extra lift and lets you jump higher. To bunny hop is to leap rapidly about the game world to make yourself a more difficult target.

But first person shooters (FPSes) - games in which the player sees the playing area as his character would see it (first person view) and plays mainly by shooting weapons at others-have produced rich terminology. McKean defined fragging (killing another player, from Vietnam era soldiers' slang) and gib (from giblets, the bloody goblets left in the playing field after a player or monster is killed). The piece touched on the language used by online gamers-some of whom, particularly in the world of first-person shooters-adopt hacker terminology. Recently, Verbatim ran a piece by Erin McKean entitled "元3t-sp34k" about the typographical games played with words by hackers, warez d00dz, and other online lowlife (although open source coders will of course complain that "hacker" should be used in its original sense, meaning a programmer of astounding skill, rather than in the popular, degraded sense of an online vandal). Talk Like a Gamer by Greg Costikyan This piece was originally published in the Summer 2002 issue of Verbatim: The Language Quarterly.
