14 Common Gaming Terms You Should Know
If you’re a total n00b, this list of common gaming terms will serve as a crash course intro to the language of gaming. Knowing this lingo will help to spare you the embarrassment of confusion and give you the confidence to jump into the social scene of gaming and start playing!
Easter Eggs: Hidden features within a game, like a secret level or an unlocked ability.
Glitching: Bugs in the game’s program that cause weird things to happen on-screen such as your character getting stuck in a wall or spinning in circles.
FPS: First-person-shooter, the game proceeds from the visual perspective of the player.
PvP: Player-vs-player, two humans playing against each other as opposed to human vs. bot (or the game’s artificial intelligence).
N00b: Newbie, a player who clearly sucks due to lack of experience.
FTW!: For the win! A general exclamation of enthusiasm.
Camper: A player that stays in one place within the game’s map, not engaging, which isn’t cool because if you’re not gonna play, why play?
Spammer: A player that holds the trigger down, spraying bullets to get kills, also not cool because it shows no skill or desire to acquire it.
Kill Ratio: In online shooter games, kills vs. deaths, good players have high kill and low death rates.
NPC: Non-player-character, all characters not controlled by a human player but by the game’s artificial intelligence.
Bots: AI opponents whose difficulty level you can select, for when your friends don’t feel like playing or for practice.
Ping: The amount of time it takes for info to travel to the server and back, the lower the ping rate the better for your gaming experience.
Lag: When the ping rate is too high, your commands take too long to translate on screen, making the game virtually unplayable.
Pwnd: Used like ‘owned’ in the context of one player getting his ass handed to him by another player.
Though there are many more terms used in and surrounding the gaming dimension, understanding these 14 will keep you from being confused or annoying and being called out as a n00b.
Extra awesome tip: If you want to be a true game-sta, join BUFF to earn valuable tokens as you play! You can either stockpile your digital wealth, use it to pimp out your game with the best costumes, weapons and upgrades, or trade out your BUFF tokens for cold hard cash. FTW!
