A Gamer’s Glossary of Terms and Acronyms
Once you start gaming, you’ll realize there’s a lot of jargon, slang, and acronyms floating around that you may have never heard before. You may wonder, are these actual words? Are they speaking Orcish or some other fantasy nerd language? If none of that made sense, we have a little guide to help you tackle the linguistics of ever-changing gaming lingo
ESRB Rating Guide
EC Early childhood, intended for young children
- Everyone, for all ages
- E10+ Everyone 10+, for ages 10 and up
- RP Rating Pending, not yet assigned a final rating
- Game genres include sports, action, adventure, racing, and fighting
Chat Terms
Cheese – an underhanded strategy that cheats his way to victory
- Feeder / Feeding / Fed – someone who dies to the other team repeatedly, either intentionally or not
- FF
- Friendly Fire – if your teammate shoots you and you take damage, that’s Friendly Fire.
- FTW
- For the Win
- Griefer – a person who harasses or provokes other players on purpose to ruin their fun
- Hack / Hackz / Hax – cheating software, or cheating software itself
- Hax!
- IGN – in-game name
- Noob / n00b / newb – a player who is new at a game
- Rekt / Owned / Pwned – players usually drop this one after a one-sided match
- OHKO
- One-Hit Knock-Out
- OOM / OOR
- Out of Mana / Resource
- Much faster to type during intense boss fights
- OP / Imba
- Over Powered” / “Imbalanced.” Used to refer to items or characters that are too strong compared to other things in the game
Miscellaneous Terms
Triple-A (AAA) Games that have a big budget, lots of backing, and generally get a lot of praise from fans and critics
- DLC
- DRM
- Easter Eggs
- F2P
- LAN
- P2W
- Voice Over IP
- VOIP
Genres 3:
FPS / TPS / OTS
- Third-Person Shooter / Over the Shoulder
- MMO Massively Multiplayer Online
- MOBA Multiplayer Online Battle Arena
- RTS Real-Time Strategy
- RPG Role-Playing Game
- SIM Simulation
In-Game Terms
1-Up stands for an extra life.
- Adds “Additional Monsters.”
- Aggro: When fighting a boss monster, it will sometimes summon additional things for you to fight (e.g. additional monsters)
- AoE: Area of Effect: Refers to spells and abilities that work within a certain area rather than just against a single foe
- BoA: Bind on account: items cannot be moved or used on another character, but can be bound to one specific character
- Buff / Debuff: Beneficial / harmful effect on target
- CD: Cooldown: Some abilities and items have cooldowns, and after using them, you have to wait a set time before you can use it again
- DPS: Damage per second
- FoV: Field of view: The area of the world around you that is being displayed at once
- Grind: Grind is to do something repetitively, grind quests, monsters, and even crafting
- Mod Modification: Mods can range from content from bug fixes to new items to MP points
- Lag: A technical problem that delays the game’s reaction to your input