Jargon

Hi everyone, Rodney here. I want to talk about the jargon involved with the entire gaming industry and how it adds to the 'hype' which helps internalize new comers, also known as newbies, to the gaming sphere and in turn transform them into gamers or possibly reversely drives them away.

The very 'techi' nature of the industry commands its own genre in terms of the hardware alone, but when it comes to gaming software, new comers almost require a pre-initiation stage in order to understand what others are talking about for all but the most basic of tasks required to interact with the games. With reference to Kevin's wording of a 'territorial staking', this word usage suggests to outsiders that you will not cope in our world if you cannot navigate your way through our terminology. Hype is what drives people to search for what is on their radars and, at least for the gaming industry it seems, the more specific to this industry, and the use of as many acronyms as possible is all for the better to foster the hype. One more point however is that because of the interactive component of the games, and the fantasy type world which is created for the games, new jargon will continue to be generated as gamers and makers come up with new ways of playing games. A good example of this today was 'bomb jumping', essentially blowing up a bomb underneath ones feet which the bomb blast then repels you in a certain direction. Do it wrong and you may in fact actually kill yourself. However, although this looks perfectly feasible on the screen and therefore the term is relevant, I am not so sure this would be so possible in real life. Great lecture today, really enjoyed it.