For the uninitiated, gamers can appear strange, emaciated, sun-starved, even loser-ish. Most of all, however, they are infuriatingly impossible to understand.

The hyper-fast pace of the internet has given rise to a strange and confusing mess of jargon and shop talk that is utterly foreign to someone who doesn’t have their head buried in a dedicated server night and day.

Knowing this, I, Jerod Jarvis, have braved the sometimes terrifying culture that gamers have created in order to bring you this lexicon of gaming terminology. Study hard – there won’t be a quiz, but this is your happiness we’re talking about here.

• n00b—traditionally, someone new to gaming, but expanded definitions can include anyone or anything that just isn’t quite up to par, aka Macintosh computers, most movies based on video games, people who are not named Harrison Ford, and anyone who is not reading my blog
• Hacks—A term used to describe behavior not sanctioned by the rules of a game. Also known as cheating ‘h4x’, ‘haxorz,’ ‘cheats’, and ‘WTF, mate?’
• 4chan—a place of strange and weird chat occurrences, populated largely by uber-nerds. One of the many places on the interwebz that real men do not go
• Spawn point—Where you begin; in the real world, this would be known as the womb
• Pwn— To ‘own’ or ‘totally dominate’ or ‘publically humiliate.’  No, it is not pronounced ‘pone’. n00b.
• CAPS LOCK—the typing format used by people who take themselves far too seriously
• PM—a ‘private message’, not to be confused with P.M., which is the general term for the hours that separate the n00bs, who are reported to engage in an activity known as sleeping, from the pros, who take the good fight into the A.M.
• LOL—an intensely overused acronym that once stood for Laughing Out Loud, but now merely means ‘I am mildly amused.’ Can be improved by adding various terms to the end, as in LOLerskates; LOLerpop, or LOLOLOLOL
• ROFL—Has taken the place of LOL as the term used when wanting to communicate actual laughter—literally, Rolling On the Floor Laughing
• Revolutionary gameplay—something you’ve seen hundreds of times before, but this time with stunning graphics.
• Stunning graphics—Look! They’re shiny!
• Death—a temporary annoyance which is easily remedied with the quickload key
• Quickload key—gaming analogue to CPR
• Quicksave key—gaming analogue to life insurance.
• AFK—strictly speaking, this means ‘away from keyboard.’ In practice, the person typing this means to say that there is something happening on their end of cyberspace that is so important they must leave the game to attend to it. Of course, there isn’t really anything that could be more important than gaming, with the possible exceptions of lycan transformation and the spontaneous arrival of Gordon Freeman in your home, so anybody who says this can be safely classified as a n00b.
  
• BRB – ‘Be right back.’ Similar to AFK, except this sounds better with LOL after it, so it’s less n00bish.
• PC gaming—could be compared to driving a Lamborghini down the autobahn
• Console gaming—could be compared to driving a one-wheeled moped powered by a pithed monkey down the autobahn
• Macintosh gaming—Not technically a term, since it doesn’t technically exist…
• Leveling up—a bit like graduation, except with more epic
• !—traditionally, the exclamation point is used to denote surprise or intensity. In gaming, however, a single exclamation point merely indicates a level of excitement barely above comatose. To truly communicate surprise, try adding several. For shock or intense surpries, add one or two 1s to the end.
  For example:
  Surprise = Great Snakes!
  Big surprise = BLOOMIN’ HUGE SNAKES LOL!!!!!11

Armed with this primer of the mysteries of gaming jargon, venture forth without fear, thou n00b, and discover the exciting landscape that is gaming.