I was shooting basketball at the local rec center last night and there were half a dozen 9-11 year olds in my proximity. I nearly fell over laughing when one of them exclaimed, 'I so pwned you!'.
(For anyone that doesn't know this term, the short answer is that it's pronounced "poaned", as in, "owned" with a "p" at the front and it means exactly the same thing as when one is "owned", in sports or gaming parlance. Feel free to Google the history, but it's derived from PC gamers often mis-typing "owned" as "pwned" because of the proximity of the "p" on the keyboard.)
I've been playing video games since they existed, I still play games on Xbox Live, and I have a number of friends who play WoW, so I'm well versed in the various geek terms that have become prevalent across different platforms. I hear this stuff all the time through those filters, so I never really think about it until a source outside of the norm crashes through to wake me up to the mainstream usage. A 9 year old pwned somebody on the court last night! Whoa!
Are 90's and 00's gamers the equivalent of the previous generation's surfers of the 50's and 60's? Surf lingo hit the scene heavy in the late 50's and through the 60's and gave us lasting terms, such as "Dude!", "Air" (almost all X-Games get "Air" and surfers were the originals), "Bail Out" (see "Air"), "Gnarly", "Heavy", "Kook/Kooky", and "Sick!" (good sick, not bad sick). Even the shaka or "Hang Loose" hand gesture has it's place. Unfortunately, while surfers gave us generally pleasant terms, gamers contributions have generally been derisive.
Starting with the title phrase, to teabag is the ultimate insult. I implore all parents and adults out there to be aware of this upcoming vulgar gesture. What concerns me is that this one is slipping under the parental radar in gaming, so when it makes its real life appearance, many won't even know what the gesture represents. A "simulated" teabag would look like a weird squatting dance, probably with reduced downward motion to not look too stupid. Make no mistake, this is as vulgar as flipping the bird or making the upraised fist, hand in the crook of the elbow gesture (fyi, I'm purposefully not telling you what it really is so you can go find out yourselves). Do I teabag in games? Absolutely, although judiciously. (There is a rationale behind the usage, as it's the only non-verbal F-You one can give in games.) Do I want to see it in person? Absolutely not, and I'll punish my children unmercifully if I ever catch them doing it either.
Newb/n00b: Newbies have been around since man first organized itself for competition, but now we have a way to brand them.
Fail and Epic Fail: Do I really need to tell you what these mean? Fail is derived from a the "Blazing Star" game's terrible Japanese to English translation for defeat: "You fail it! Your skill is not enough! See you next time! Bye bye!"
A few for the positive side, or at least not exactly negative: w00t = Wow! Loot! or Wonderous Loot. The double 00 is an idiotic geekism. (See the perversion of newb above). (Wikipedia attributes woot to other derivatives, but they don't make sense given the 00 inclusion) W00t has now transcended its gaming origins to be generally used as a positive exclamation, most commonly as "Woot!". Also, can be used when leveling up in a game, as can "Ding!".
There are some more floating out there, but I don't see any of them floating to the surface anytime soon. Or, as some would say, they haven't become a meme yet. I specifically referenced surf lingo because it predates "meme", which I think is a pompously overused term by people who try to make themselves sound smarter and cooler on the Internets.
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