The Haus

Gamer-to-English Dictionary

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

B

Bot: "Bot" can have two different definitions.

  1. A computer-controlled opponent driven by artificial intelligence to practice and play against. Mainly used for training players and for single-player play.
  2. A computer-controlled aiming or other add on that allows a gamer to use the computer's processing power to improve their play. The major "bot" of this type is called ZBot, and is used to make dead-on aim and fire 100% accurate from any angle. This is cheating, and has been the downfall of much of the FPS online gaming segment (especially Quake2).

C

Camper (Camping): Refers to either the person or action, but in reference to a player in a game who places him/herself into a position of dominance over some portion of the game that is very difficult to remove them from. Examples include staking out the most powerful weapon or power up in a game. "Quit camping the quad you 1053r". This is considered poor sportsmanship.

Circle Strafe: A technique of move-and-fire in quake where you circle around another player using the turn and slide keys, so you generate a smooth circle with your target in the middle, whom you then eradicate with extreme prejudice.

CTF: Acronym for Capture The Flag, a teamplay style game where two or more teams compete to capture the most enemy flags to win the game.

D

DirectX: DirectX is Microsoft's API for doing nearly anything a game would want to do with the hardware in a PC. The idea behind DX is that it's a consistent, documented API for accessing hardware of any kind (from video, sound, joysticks and even the network) without having to know anything technical about that hardware. The downside is Microsoft has changed the DX API significantly over the many revisions, and many of those earlier versions were very buggy and difficult to program. While DirectX has garnered much of the game programming market, OpenGL has quite a few companies at its side, including id software and many others.

F

Frame: A frame is a single rendered image of gameplay. Frames are the measure of refresh rate for a game, as well as movies. Movies at theaters run at 24 frames per second, and television runs at a full-screen refresh rate of 30 FPS (which is actually the result of a 60 FPS interleaved refresh rate). 60 FPS is the goal of all games and video cards. You can find out more about video formats at HowStuffWorks. (Thanks go out to CB--you know who you are--for the corrections to this entry.)

FPS: FPS can have two different definitions.

  1. Acronym for First-Person Shooter. Games such as Doom, Quake, Half-Life and Unreal are FPSes.
  2. Acronym for Frames Per Second. The higher the frames per second of a game, the more "stable" and "smooth" it will feel.

G

Gib (Gibs, gibbage): The small chunks of meat/blood that fly away from a game character or monster when hit or killed. The term was coined by Adrian Carmack of id software, and is correctly pronounced as jibs.

Gold (Gone Gold): The term "gone gold" refers to the final CD that is released to the manufacturer or distributor of a game. The term gold refers to the gold color of a CD/R copy of a game's programs and data files.

Grapple Monkey: Indicates a CTF player who doesn't ever seem to STOP using the grappling hook. What this resolves into is someone bouncing all over big rooms using the grapple, which makes it very difficult to hit them with missile weapons. In Quake2, this can be quite impressive since the grapple is a delay fire item.

H

H4x0r: Leetspeek for hacker.

Hacker: A hacker is someone who really gets into computers and writing code (e.g. Linux kernel hackers). The media often uses the term to describe someone who breaks into computer systems, although the more correct term for that is "cracker". "White hat" hackers use their skills for good; "black hat" hackers, well, don't.

HPW A acronym for High Ping Whiner. Refers to people who have normal 56k or less modem connections to the Internet and use it as an excuse for lack of skill. (Also see LPB)

L

Lag: Lag is a term indicating the latency of a connection, mainly to the bad. More lag indicates a longer time for your game to communicate with the game server, and thus a higher amount of lag indicates slower responses.

Leet: Cool, neat. It is often spelled "1337." It is an abbreviation of "elite." It has become a derogatory term for someone who believes they ARE cool but in fact are not.

Leetspeek: A form of hacker-speak where much of the text is replaced with characters that resemble the original text. Such as replacing L's with 1's, o's with zeros, e's with 3's, etc.

Llama: A term coined by American McGee, formerly a level designer at id software. This is the Quake-lingo version of lamer, loser, idiot, etc etc.

LPB: A acronym for Low Ping B**tard. Refers to people who have high speed connections to the Internet. This term can be taken in many ways, since in some games the lower latency of a high-speed connect is irrelevant. In Quake, most LPBs have a huge advantage over normal modem players (known as HPWs).

M

Mad (Mad skillz): Mad is usually a reference to someone with exceptional gameplay abilities. "You got the mad Skillz"

Mod (Modification): A derivative game based upon a released game. CTF, Painkeep, Requiem, and Teamfortress are all examples of mods of Quake.

Model: A model is a 3-D description of an object in a game. Torches, weapons, ammo boxes, other monsters, and even your own player character are models that are then covered with skins.

Mutator: Small mods for Unreal Tournament that allows programmers to easily change one aspect of gameplay (e.g. InstaGib, Low Gravity)

O

OpenGL (GL): OpenGL is a method for rendering 3d images. GL stands for Graphics Language. OpenGL is the "open source" version of GL. id software is a huge proponent of OpenGL because it is platform-independant, unlike DirectX which is Windows-specific.

Own (or 0wnz): To dominate someone in a game. (e.g. "I 0wn j00")

P

Packet Loss: Packet Loss is a measure of the number of "messages" lost in the communication between your game client and the game server. Packet loss is one of the major problems with online gaming, since most of it is beyond the gamer's control.

Ping: In Internet terms, a ping is a simple message sent from one computer to another, which is used to measure the time it takes to get from one point to another on the Internet. In game terms, Ping is often a generic measure of the quality of a connection to a game server, and is almost always a weighted average of a number of "real" pings.

P/L: Shorthand for Packet Loss.

Q

Quad Monkey: A player who camps the quad damage in Quake. There are several less flattering and more profane versions of "Quad Monkey" that you might hear too, especially if another player is getting frustrated.

R

Rocket Jump: A method of jumping in Quake and other FPSes where you first jump and then fire some sort of high explosive directly beneath you to gain massive jump height.

S

Skills (Skillz): Well, skills :-) A term indicating somebody's skill level in a game. Most often written as skillz. "You've got the mad skillz."

Skin: A skin is the graphical image imposed over a model. This is what generates the final look of a player character, weapon, item, etc.

T

T&L: T&L is an abbreviation for Transform and Lighting, which is one of the primary stages of 3d rendering. T&L is also one of the most computing-intensive, so off-loading this function to a video card is a huge improvement for games that require high numbers of polygons on-screen. The Nvidia GeForce256 was the first consumer level T&L 3d chipset on the market.