I believe that there are three basic types of "secret languages" used in games.

The first one relates to something concrete. It includes basic technical information that help translate abstracts into something quantifiable for players (Hp, mana, mob, bot, DOT (damage over time), DPS (damage per second), etc), specific roles to play in-game (tank, ranged support, healer, etc..) and other such information. This level of gaming language is starting to become more and more uniform across games simply because it relates to standard elements of most games. I believe that game should support this language as a standard form as it makes easy for a player to reorient itself when switching games. Additionally this is the easiest level of language to learn for new players or non-players (such as parents) because it describe tangible technical concepts.

The second secret language is also spread across games and very much alive within the online player community, whether they are MMO players or plays online through game console's online features. Words such as pwn, noob and such are in the very sense parts of a secret language. They are known and understood only by the initiated and the level of mastery of this language help the player define his social standing within the gaming community. If you don't want to look like a noob, you better learn the language quickly. Since this language is in all respects a secret language, it is not meant to be understood by the non-initiated. It does evolve from year to year and I don't believe any effort of standardization is either possible or even a good idea. Speaking this language, l33t, define the player as a part of a special group, offering a sense of belonging. It's an important part of the human social experience. It does replace the secret handshakes or old.

The third secret language is the only one that is IP-related. It's uses is a bit similar to the first two: it is use to define game-related realities (such as enemies, locations and such) as well as a way to distinguish inexperienced players from masters of the games. In WOW, asking what a Tanaris is will brand you as a noob, while discussing the finer strategies of capital raiding will mark you as an experienced player, not matter what your character's level is. This language should stay IP-specific, as it reinforce the sentiment of community for this specific game's players. Of course that doesn't means that games that are meant to be played for a few months and then put aside need extensive or overly complex specific terminology.

All in all secret languages in gaming does serve specific purposes, from technical realities to community identification to social ranking. The number of languages known and the extant of their mastery define an individual player position within the general gaming community. You find this kind of use of language in many profession/trade or social groups. It fulfill the basic human need of belonging and of exerting power over his environment by naming things. The power of naming things is the earliest form of magic, but maybe its a discussion for another time.

This reminded me of my Halo 3 play session this weekend. I rarely play Halo 3, but one of my friends that plays regularly invited me to play online. We played some Team Slayer matches. What stood out to me was that my teammates had nicknames for most of the landmarks on every map ("purple elevator", "gold elevator", "the rocket", etc). These nicknames didn't exist when I played it heavily around the game's launch. I had to ask a lot of "What do you mean?" and "Where is that?" because I was massively confused. My friend also gave me an explanation of the layout for a new map that I hadn't played before, going over the landmarks and some general strategy. Once I understood the language I was able to follow what was going on.

To me, this highlighted an important aspect of level design in FPS games. Even when you've got the same repetitive textures and props, there has to be iconic landmarks so the player won't get lost. Even if it's subtle as changing the light color. So when someone says "Rush bomb site A!" you know exactly what that means.

I find it kinda ironic how your talking about the secret language of gamers. I have parents who work for Boeing and some of the acronyms they toss around can be quite confusing to me.

in a way, everyone has a multitude of 'secret languages'. particle physists talk about about quarks, gravitons and anti-particles philosophers debate existenialism,stoicism and agnostism. when ever you enter a new area you need some time or someone to 'show you the ropes' in reagrds to the language. Honestly you just have to get in there and learn stuff if you want to get it; tehre is no way around it. if you want to learn all 150 pokemon, you just have to put time into it.

"I've got a job and three kids. How am I supposed to learn all the Pokemon?"

Hands down, greatest quote I've ever read. This, my friends is the question all parents should be asking.

I think RTS games can have a fair bit more language that cover tactics and strategy. Here's an example list of build orders in Starcraft:
http://starcraft.burningblade.org/zerg/build.html

I think names are important for their ability to communicate ideas and concepts quickly to the player. It'd be an interesting experiment to take a simple game and mess up the labels on everything to see how disconcerting it will be. Like playing Monopoly on a set localized for a foreign country. My copy of Monopoly has Nassim road as one of the purple properties and Geylang as the brown ones.

Creating engaging and original intellectual property is an impossibly hard thing to do. People alienate the unknown and are adverse to change. As creatives, it is our duty to identify this as a benefit, not a deficit.

In general, I find no problem with creative labels upon a game's content. However, as with all points of design contention, the content is often not the problem, it's the processes used to achieve it.

Common sense, consistency and accessibility are paramount in ensuring sound naming conventions across all forms of content (characters, weapons, game-modes, abilities, etc, etc). I feel the checkpoints would be;

a) Ease of Pronunciation - There is no point having an object in-game if gamers will never reach a consensus on its correct pronunciation. Names are a personal thing, the first thing you ask someone when you meet them is their name. It helps bring you closer. Phonetically ambiguous names and labels alienate your gamers through uncertainty.

Bad: G’hro Ilgh’our
Good: Gro Illgor

b) Relativity - We've all picked up a 'Sword of Rending' at one point in our gaming career. We know what it does, but is it exciting, does it carry a story of its own? Would the legend of Excalibur be quite as legendary if it was called 'The King's Sword'...? Be imaginative, be creative, link your creature, NPC, weapon with the world you've created... but also make it believable. We can believe in Excalibur, because it is relative to the universe in which it was created.

Good: ‘Sting’
Bad: ‘Sword of Blue Luminescence’

c) Don't Fix What Ain't Broke - The amount of times I've heard the term 'Deathmatch' reimagined. Grrr. It boils my blood. As developers it is our duty to ensure (as best we can) maximum ease of use in our product. We need to build upon (and support) the conventions provided to us by our peers (both past and present), it's what the film industry has been doing for years. Does renaming your Deathmatch mode, better your IP in any way? No. If it has the same rules, why not sacrifice some weak link to your narrative for a little accessibility. The word Deathmatch has the wondrous ability to convey all match rules to millions of gamers worldwide in a split second, replacing that with 'Bot War' or 'Slaughterfest' taints this beautiful occurrence of player confidence with ambiguity.

Good: Deathmatch
Bad: Slaughterfest

Staying true to these three rules can ensure we, as developers, continue to build fantastically original IP, whilst still retaining high levels of player immersion through maximum accessibility. For it is not the worlds we create that engage people, it is the suspension of disbelief gamers choose to impose upon themselves… let’s help them out a bit.

@ Sean Chan

"I think names are important for their ability to communicate ideas and concepts quickly to the player. It'd be an interesting experiment to take a simple game and mess up the labels on everything to see how disconcerting it will be."

Great point! It's funny that you bring up Monopoly also. I own a Star Wars Episode 1 Monopoly Board. Mayfair and Park Lane are replaced with notable Coruscant locations, Jedi Council and Galactic Senate (respectively). One thing I always found interesting about this was that all friends that played, upon reading the new 'labels' would turn to me and ask "So these two are Mayfair and Park Lane, yeah?"

They would then often call the new Star Wars locations, Mayfair or Park Lane by accident. It was because they see Mayfair and Park Lane as the absolute labels for those two spaces on the board (game assets). If someone who had played many shooters was playing Halo for the first time and they asked you, a Halo veteran, what the rules of Slayer were, you would simply reply... "It's the same as Deathmatch." All of us assign labels, it is what our brains do. Recognise and internalise patterns, and then proceed to assign a label to that pattern.

The problem with the Slayer example, is that there is now a generation who were introduced to shooters and their absolute label for the Deathmatch game-mode model is now 'Slayer'. This confuses and taints the convention, ultimately muddying the convention pool developers and gamers from all around the world utilise.

In saying this, we MUST continue to push out old conventions in the hopes of securing better, more accessible, conventions, but only ever for the player's sake... not the IP's.

It's true that language is of critical importance when you're talking about immersing players in a shared experience. Think about Star Wars, for example. It's not a "magic, glowing sword", it's a lightsaber. They're not knights or samurai, they're Jedi or Sith. The words that we use in the context of fantasy are what establishes that fantasy as something other, but something still real. In the construction of a universe or a setting, there's absolutely nothing more important than language.

This does have the downside of creating something of a wall, especially when dealing with established franchises. How, for example, do you describe warp drive or a phaser to someone who doesn't watch or care for Star Trek? More importantly, how important are these terms to the setting, and are they worth the trouble of inscrutablity? Even as a sci-fi fan, I find my eyes boggling at some of the terms used conversationally in the Star Wars setting.

I would have liked to have seen a section on fighting games and their language. As a reader of various fighting game forums and a longtime player of fighters, I can understand when someone types 236+P what they mean, or when someone writes "cr.mk xx knightmare scissors is a B&B combo". However, as I teach some friends how to play fighters, they can glean nothing without me there to translate. It's an impregnable terminology deliberately set up to be obtuse to the uninitated, and a thing in which developers themselves had little say.

How is this secret language in game playing anything different from the rest of the world?
In every hobby or profession there are technical terms and names, which might come over as a secret language.

Also the FPS example is just laughable, "Deck 17" and "Deck 16" refer to maps, or locations if you will. When I say I took the train from Enschede to Hengelo the majority of the world has no idea what I'm talking about, not even other people that take the train. It's not part of some secret language. They are just names for locations. You shouldn't reuse names across IP because it creates confusion.

Nice article but I'm disappointed you were so quick to skip both sports and casual games.

Sports game language raises the issue of differentiating between sports fan players and general game players. I've recently designed several sports games, and the goal for each one was to bring in general game players (while still appealing to sports players). As such, the design document for each contained almost no sports language in it, and I'm very proud that in each game the player need not learn the sport and its language in order to play, understand the game, and have fun. In contrast, hardcore sports fans may have the same reaction as the MMO players in your article -- that is, perhaps the sports language draws them into the world of that sport more and gives them a common dialogue. I'm not sure but in any case the omission was unfortunate.

Similarly casual game players are becoming more and more niche and as such their language has evolved and I think it's worth noting to explore how deep that evolution goes. I think most casual players with some kind of "Game Club" subscription (or casual players hardcore enough to post on portals' forums) know what a "click management" game is or a "HOG" whereas that is totally foreign language to an MMO or sports player.

As far as I can see, there's two levels of "secret language":

1) The in-game language
Games tend to invent new names and terms for the simple reason that they need to ensure product differentiation - apart from reducing the risk of legal action, it also helps to promote brand loyalty and reduce the risk of negative perceptions. That's why you'll find yourself firing a phaser in one game and a laser in another, using med-packs instead of nano-goop, mana instead of magic and so on

2) The player language
This is something which grows up as players try to find ways of interpreting in-game actions: tanks, campers, mobs, drops, ganking, etc. There's no real way to control and predict this: there's likely to be several variations floating around until one gains traction.

In the end, the point of both these variations is simple: people need a unique and concise way to describe something, which can be easily interpreted by other people with similar experiences. It's the same elsewhere - in science or sports, for example. The key thing to understand is that the description has to be unique: it's often no good trying to reuse terminology from elsewhere, as this is liable to not map exactly to the current situation.

The interesting thing with games is that the languages both evolve and die a lot quicker than in other arenas. So I'm sure there's some potential for a Social Studies paper or two there :)

So, to answer the original "problem": yes, the use of unique terminology does make sense, both for the developer and the gamer - and it's unlikely to ever change!

I'm currently writing my dissertation about language in online games (MMOs mainly), what its special features are, how it is used and what points of influence there are on RL. This article covers some important aspects for my work- especially in showing in how far the gamer communities' language is of interest to the designers (this aspect is much more difficult to research than the users' perspective).

One of the things I've noticed is that many peculiarities of gamer jargon are first born out of necessity. Efficient large group raiding in WoW needs a specialised kind of language to discuss and plan events. This is especially evident in the vocabulary used, which does not only cover unique places and entities in the virtual world but also the mechanics underlying the game. "Damage per second (dps)" or "area of effect (aoe)" are examples of this. Since the battle system is not (or not primarily) twitch based but based on mathematical values and their comparison. Talking about and optimising the use of these values needs a specialised language. In this respect MMO language resembles other professional languages. And just like with other professional languages, certain elements are also used as social markers, strengthening community or setting the community apart from others.

I believe that most of the time the gamers' setting themselves apart from their social environment is not deliberate act. It is probably more deliberate among gamers in their youth, but this may be a general characteristic of youth groups and youth language, not of gamer language per se.