In college, I started playing World of Warcraft. It was the first computer game I had played in a long time (having moved away from PC games and on to console games) and I was amazed at its breadth. One part of the game that threw me, however, was the global chat in cities. There were hundreds of people conversing – some trying to sell items, some trying to buy items, some just being silly – and yet I could not understand anything they were saying. It seemed as though everyone was typing in code, a code for which I had no key.
I slowly began piecing together the strange new language, asking in-game friends for help when I could not decipher what I read. Every now and then I would stop to think about what was going on and was amazed. Here were people from all around the world, communicating effectively by adjusting the English language as necessary to quickly express their needs. Take, for example, a party looking for more members to go fight in a dungeon named the Deadmines. The party still needs a warrior class player (for taking the heaviest damage) and a distant damage dealer such as a hunter to round out their group.
They could type something like this into the chat window: “Need two more players for the Deadmines – melee and distant,” but that is lengthy and ineffective at attracting the types of players they need. Instead, what is seen in the chat window is more like this: “LF2M VC tank and DPS.” This translates to “Looking for two more players (LF2M), Deadmines (VC – called VC because the end-boss in the dungeon is named VanCleef), melee damage dealer (tank) and distance damage dealer (DPS – stands for Damage per Second, it is the statistic that distance damage dealers focus on the most).”
Without some knowledge of the lore of the game and the mechanics of the game, this phrase is impossible to decipher. I did not yet realize that I was growing fluent in an emergent language. What brought my attention to this fact was an article I read about two years after starting WoW. The article was about a school for deaf children in Nicaragua. The teachers struggled to get anything across to the children, because they had no language with which to communicate. Soon, however, the teachers realized the children had begun to craft their own sign language – one that was as complex as any spoken language.
As I read the article, I saw similarities between the deaf children in that school and the players of World of Warcraft. These were people from all around the world. Some were native English speakers and some were not, however all were able to communicate through text alone using this hybrid language that mixed English with WoW gameplay. What the Nicaragua students showed scientists was that humans have propensity for complex language. What WoW players were showing me was that games could be used as a flash point for developing new languages.
Part of what makes the language in a game like WoW unique is that it evolves so rapidly. All languages evolve, but it takes long periods of time of increasingly frequent usage for new words to be added or for definitions to be updated. However, in game languages new words or phrases spread quickly – like a viral video online – and soon become common vocabulary. Words like pwn did not exist until someone made a typo one day. Similarly, the language updates itself based on additions to the game as well as internet video fame. One of the most infamous World of Warcraft videos is about a character named Leeroy Jenkins. In-game, it quickly became an insult to call someone Leeroy or Jenkins.
I am curious about the spread of these game languages. World of Warcraft is the only MMO I have played, but I am sure the players of this game were not the first to invent the language. As players leave the game and start to play a new MMO, they probably take these language conventions with them. While the basic structure of the language would probably remain mostly intact, the content must change depending on the context. I think it would be interesting to study what (if anything) is similar cross-game and what is different and why.
Humans are social creatures and games are social spaces. With humans’ inherent ability to develop and learn complex language, could games be utilized to facilitate cross-cultural communication in a way that would develop a global language? I think it would be fascinating to create a game that would do just that and then study the language that emerges. I think it would be useful not just to linguists and psychologists, but also to game developers who could use those techniques to create games that harnessed the power of the human brain and built upon this basic structure that we typically take for granted. Also, it would just plain be DI (see below)!
Here is a link to the article I referred to above about the language developed by deaf children in Nicaragua:
http://www.damninteresting.
DI = Damn Interesting
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