Oliver 1
Henry ‘Tiger’ Oliver
5/14/08
EN301
Van Tassel w00t!: The History and Influence of l33t and Gamer Language on American Culture
From the very first grunts that our primitive ancestors made to the complexity of today’s vocabulary, language has been perhaps the most important resource and gauge of human culture.
Human speech can be colorful, dull, painful, soothing, helpful and dangerous, all at the same time. From the meekest three-year-old child asking for a chocolate chip cookie to a megalomaniacal madman Hell-bent on world domination, language is the most important tool in anyone’s arsenal. Politicians have used it to persuade and con the masses into buying into their plans, visionaries have used it to lead the people towards equality and peace, as well as hatred and violence. It is the dynamic keystone to not only culture itself, but also to the various subcultures that populate its underground; ever evolving to the circumstances, ever adapting to the times.
We have a staggering number of different languages: American English, British English,
Australian English, French, Spanish, Swahili, Thai, Russian, Gaelic, Latin, the list goes on and on. Each language is dynamic in itself, becoming the measuring rod of the mainstream.
However, one mustn’t simply look at mainstream culture as a courier for language, one must also look at the subcultures. Within these subcultures lay the framework for new sub-languages and dialects that can only define what lays within its boundaries. Basketball players, goths, nuclear physicists, channel cat-fishermen, street racers, gangster rappers, politicians, construction workers and religious fanatics: these and a million-million more groups have their own codes

Oliver 2 and languages which derived from other codes and languages. For example, skateboarders use a language that might seem like their stereotype - deadbeat and simple; but, by using a combination of laid-back surfer terms and elementary physics, one can see that there’s more to the language than “Gnarly bail, dude!”
However, there is one subculture that is especially recognizable by their language. These people are passionate about their hobby, and some make it their life’s work. These people are the gamers, or interactive electronic entertainment connoisseurs, if you will. This group of people spend their hard earned money on games, their hard-deserved free time on completing said games, and, depending on the person, their hard-earned night's sleep wistfully creating ways to hack the games they bought to update rosters, get infinite ammo for their guns, or create graphics and character models to make the female characters nude. Many radicals put their very social lives at risk to reach that extra character level or find that special weapon to give them untold amounts of power. The younger ones of this group save up countless weeks of allowances to get the latest “fad” game, or spend said countless weeks pestering their parents to buy them the aforementioned game for their birthday, Christmas, or just because they want it now, just to spend even more countless weeks glued to the television trying to find the key to the last dungeon or wiping out the alien population to keep them from locating and, subsequently, invading Earth. The only thing that’s as fascinating as their ability to snipe an enemy from fourhundred yards away or to find levels that were not completed and hidden deep within the game’s code is the language they use; and the only thing better than that is the origin.
There are two main types of talk that gamers use: “gamer speak” and 1337 (pronounced
“leet”). Gamer speak, as I like to call it, consists of various terms and phrases used by gamers of all genres: first-person shooters, role-playing games, adventurers, platformers, among others.

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Some terms are military in origin, some terms have a rich history in fantasy, and some are just plain weird. The second type is known as leet, a modified version of English consisting of letters, numbers, and other symbols to represent characters, despite the fact that it’s more of a code rather than a full-fledged language. With a rich history in itself, leet is often used by those referred to as noobs and those on the geek-end of the spectrum.
Throughout the history of video games, the vocabulary spoken by the gamers was extremely important. In the early days of video gaming, when people had to go to the arcades to play such classics as Pac-Man , Joust , and Centipede , vocabulary was very basic. It mainly consisted of “score”, “lives” and “Game Over”. As technology progressed, home consoles and personal computers brought video games into the home.
Because of this, new terminology came about. For example, a kill was, quite literally, when the player “killed” an enemy on screen (or vice-versa). Eight-bit 1 games were just that, games whose entire programming revolved around eight-bit binary code and whose graphics were in eight-bit quality. A text adventure was a game in which you went through by only entering in commands by typing them in, instead of literally controlling a character on a graphical user interface (Costikyan, www.costik.com).
As video games, themselves, continued to evolve, so did the language. With the creation of such games as Doom and Quake , the term first-person shooter , or FPS for short, was invented, for the player played the game in the first-person perspective. As the creators of those games added in, for the first time on any game, the ability to play a multiplayer deathmatch (or free-forall to see who scored the most frags
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, or kills) online; they not only allowed for both gamer
1 Ironically, 8-bit code (primarily used for games on the Nintendo Entertainment System, was often paired up with hexadecimal code, a type of binary code based off of a base-16 numerical chart.
2 Frag originated from "fragmentation grenade", which was a grenade that spread shrapnel in all directions when detonated.

Oliver 4 speak and leet to become more commonplace, but also to evolve. This caused the invention of terms like strafing 3 , boomstick 4 , as well as high-ping and low-ping bastard 5 (Costikyan, www.costik.com).
One term that is my personal favorite is B.F.G
. In Doom , there was a gun in the later stages of the game that, for lack of a better term, the designers dubbed “The Big Fucking Gun”.
This is because: A. It dealt major damage to all the enemies on screen, let alone killing most, and
B. It was a big fucking gun. Obviously, teenagers and people in public settings couldn’t flat-out say or type “Big Fucking Gun”; thus, gamers abbreviated the term to keep from getting in trouble (and to save time typing it out). Today, it is used for any insanely-huge weapon that deals an enormous amount of damage (Costikyan, www.costik.com).
With the invention of the MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game), several other terms were coined. A tank , for example, is any higher-level melee character who can kill monsters
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, leaving weaker players to pick the scraps and characters from other classes to attack from a distance. To draw away a large group of monsters from an area to complete a quest or to acquire an item is considered training , while the large group of monsters , themselves, is called a train (Costikyan, www.costik.com).
There are also more generic terms that apply to all genres of games. For example, an exploit is a glitch in the game in which a player can use to more-or-less “beat the system”
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. A
3 Strafing comes from when a soldier was firing his weapon whilst moving sideways. Today, the connotation has been simplified to refer to a player moving sideways, regardless of whether he or she is firing a weapon.
4 An old Western slang word referring to a shotgun.
5 A 'ping' is the amount of time in which data is transferred from one machine (generally a PC, Mac, or laptop), to the server, and back again. A low-ping bastard is one who has a very good Internet connection, giving him/her an esge over everyone else. A high-ping bastard is someone with a horrible connection, rendering him/her virtually useless due to the server not being able to pick up on their character's movements and actions.
6 Any computer controlled, non-humanoid character whose sole purpose is to kill the play while the character tries to kill it.
7 To put it into words even I can understand, think of it as "legally cheating" the game; one finds a way to cheat without actually doing any cheating, essentially. In other words, they find a loophole in the system.

Oliver 5 patch is an update to the game which fixes bugs, glitches, exploits, etc. A cheat is a function in a game that can do a variety of different things: unlock levels or characters, enable certain modes
(unlimited health, ammunition, magic power, etc.), unlock videos or concept art, etc. This is not to be confused with cheating, which includes, but does not necessarily require, the use of a program to give oneself invincibility or infinite ammunition, or to trick the game into giving an unnatural desired result (i.e., to give oneself perfect aim without actually having to aim themself). If caught cheating, the administrators of the game/server could suspend your account, if not completely kick or boot you off the game/server altogether (Costikyan, www.costik.com).
In all of gamer speak, there is one term that personifies the crème-de-la-crème of idiots, the one term that is the most famous in mainstream culture. This term is: newbie . A newbie , or n00b
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, is a new player that’s just learning the ropes (Costikyan, www.costik.com). However, in my personal experience, I have come to split the terms newbie and noob into two separate definitions. A newbie is still as Costikyan described, but a noob is usually a derogatory term used towards a player who is there to annoy other players and, essentially, to make an idiot out of him-or-herself. To quote myself from years back on the Yahoo! Chat role-playing rooms, “The only thing you... noobs are good for is for sucking up our nonexistent air...”
Noob is not just a word of the gamers. In fact, a few of these terms can also be used in my next topic of focus: l33t. Leet is, in essence, a combination of symbols and numbers to partially or completely substitute for letters. Originally done in the 1970's and ‘80s to keep the early hackers from being caught by federal authorities and, later on, system administrators when talking about illegal computer programs and hacks; it is now used by computer enthusiasts and
8 Also spelled: noob , noobie , n00bie , and any other possible variation involving leet, in which I will go into further detail later on.

Oliver 6 gamers (generally within the teen years) to flex their “geek muscle”, but they usually just come off as complete idiots, or n00bs ([XPK_Sid], www.teamxpk.com).
As previously stated, leet uses symbols and numbers to represent letters. For example,
“dog” in leet is “|)06” 9 . With the anglicizing punctuation, the addition of suffixes like “-xor” &
“-zor”, changes in regular characters, and the elimination of almost all punctuation; a grand code of seemingly-mindless gibberish is born. Here’s another example of leet: “Heh, I just owned you, newbie!” would be translated as “w00t! 1 j|_|$4 p\/\/n3|) j00 n00b!one11one”.
While the preceding leet is known as “basic leet”, there is also another type of leet:
“31334 1334" or “elite leet”. This type of leet uses no letters (and, sometimes, very few numbers). Only the most 31334 leet-speakers learn how to speak or decipher this kind of leet.
Here’s an example of elite leet: “ |>|^[]|=|=-$$[]|^ \//\|\|+/\$$|=-| (_+|\/|=- /\/\|=- /\|\| /\ []|\| +|-||$
|>/\|>|=-|^!”
There have been many people who have questioned how anyone could easily decipher leet besides actually memorizing each symbol
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. Three Spanish researchers (one from the
Department of Methodology at the University of Valencia and two from the Department of
Cognitive Psychology at the University of La Laguna) conducted a study about the brain’s ability to read symbols as letters (i.e. leet) consisting of two experiments.
The first experiment was done on twenty-eight students from the University of La
Laguna with two hundred forty Spanish words varying from six letters to eight letters long.
They showed four words, the first consisting of normal, Spanish letters. The second word contained basic leet. The third contained various symbols that were similar to the replaced
9 "|" and ")" = D, 0 = O, and 6 = G.
10 Which is virtually impossible, seeing as there are a seemingly infinite amount of ways to make a character using leet.

Oliver 7 letters, and the final one replaced the letter from the first to another letter of similar composition
(Carreiras, Duñabeitia, & Perea; 238).
The second experiment consisted of a test group of twenty-four students from the
University of Valencia, similar to those from the previous experiment. The second experiment was conducted with similar words and in a similar fashion as the first, except with two additions; the first being another word with leet symbols added into the word that did not resemble the character replaced, and the second being that symbols that were visually unrelated with the replaced letters were substituted for said letters (Carreiras, Duñabeitia, &
Perea; 239).
The results were clear: regular leet-ed words could be read faster than any other group
(besides the first group), with related symbols being read second fasted (Carreiras,
Duñabeitia, & Perea; 240). What this study showed was that there was something behind leet, if you could read it. However, this study only covered basic leet. So, obviously, elite leet does take some practice into translating into Spanish (or English, for that matter).
Of course, leet has its own special vocabulary
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. Owned or pwned means you defeated or
“showed up” another person, or that someone “ failed
” (or had been embarrassed or injured in either an unfortunate circumstance or the result of their own stupidity/ignorance). Woot!
is a simple celebratory cry. Skillz simply means the ability of the gamer or hacker. Haxor usually means someone with great sk1llz , but was originally used to describe a hacker. Suxor means “sucks”, as in “This sucks!”
Joo means “you”, foo means “fool”, and dood means “dude”.
Finally, noob means “newbie” (BBC’s h2g2).
Leet began as a way for the early hackers of the 1980's not only to show off their skillz, but also to leave encoded messages that outsiders could not understand ([XPK_Sid],
11 For the sake of the reader, I will Anglicize the leet terms.

Oliver 8 www.teamxpk.com). When bulletin board systems (BBS’s) came readily available in the same decade, they began to shorten messages to speed up. Administrators were soon put on the BBS’s due to the distribution of illegal software and pornography. To counteract this, terms like w@r3z and pr0n were employed. In the early-to-mid-1990's, however, a new playground became available for hacking and whatnot: the World Wide Web. As users of the bulletin board system transitioned to the Internet, hackers no longer found the use for leet, causing the code to go to the brink of mass extinction (Mitchell, www.technewsworld.com).
Then, the worlds of leet and gaming came together, and all hell broke loose.
According to [XPK_Sid], id Software enabled Internet connectivity to the games Doom and Doom II in 1994
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. This allowed gamers (and those still fluent in leet) to use the neardeceased code for, among other things, to “flex their ‘geek muscle’” or to taunt their opponents after fragging or owning them. However, the code had just been raised from near-deceased to semi-comatose. To quote [XPK_Sid], “...(leet) would have dissappeared from gaming completely, but for the... harmonic convergence of: Starcraft online gaming...
(Counter)Strike (which gave us, among other things, “pwning”), and the very popular web comic called Megatokyo , which brought (leet) into the mainstream with its infamous
“speak l33t?” comic.” ([XPK_Sid], www.teamxpk.com).
Nowadays, the use of leet has fallen in gaming, but is still surviving. With the massspreading of the Internet, thanks to innovations in technology and the introduction of the
Microsoft Xbox and Bungie’s sleeper smash hit
Halo and subsequent sequels Halo 2 and Halo
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, video gaming went from the subculture of gaming as a hobby into mainstream American culture. With the addition of thousands, if not millions , of “normal” people partaking of online
12 There is still debate on the exact year Id Software enabled the feature, and also what game became the first to support multiplayer modes.
13 Which was release for the sucessor of the Xbox: the Xbox 360.

Oliver 9 gaming (on both the computer and on consoles), this not only lead to the threat of the dilution of leet on the virtual battlefield, but also the prospect of the introduction of a mass quantity of people to be exposed to it.
Unfortunately, the latter overcame the former. With so many mainstream gamers (many of them college students and those with no interest in the geek culture) going online to challenge the world at Halo and Madden , leet could not catch on as many, including myself, had hoped for.
While it still is used by some gamers, mainstream gamers (and even some hardcore geeks) criticize said use of it.
There is a beacon of light, however, that can be shed upon this great shadow. All over the
Internet, the use of leet has picked up some significant ground. There are literally dozens of videos on YouTube paying homage to (or making fun of) leet. These videos include movie trailers, game trailers, and clips from television shows, movies, and video games alike with leet subtitles. There are also entire episodes of internet shows based off of the premise of leet that use both live action actors (like “L33t Haxxors”) and clips taken from people playing video games in multiplayer mode (i.e., “Counterstrike, The L33T Movie!”).
Gamer speak will not die so easily. With more people partaking of the electronic
Fountain of Youth, this causes gamer speak to catch on more quickly to laymen. On websites like IGN.com & gamespot.com, television channels like G4TV and shows like Attack of the
Show!
, X-Play , Gamehead and GameTrailers TV , even more people are exposed to the language, especially parents who decide to do their homework on the games their children have been pestering them about for countless weeks.
This leaves us with one question: what’s so important about this geek speak? With the preservation of leet (and gamer language on a lesser extent), even on internet shows and movies

Oliver 10 on YouTube that are watched by a very minuscule percentage of the traffic that goes on the website, comes evidence that language is the most important resource that us, as humans, have to preserve our culture. With each slang word, each technical term, each mutation of words from the past and present from every origin imaginable that’s invented, there is also one more word added to the dictionary of human speech, one more bullet added to the clip of the greatest weapon men have ever wielded. It preserves not only the culture, even long after it’s decline and eventual death, it also catalogues the entire history of a group of people with a common bond, an ethereal connection that ties them together like so many other groups and brotherhoods throughout history. With leet in particular, it shows how symbols, previously unused for anything but grammar, can be turned into the character set for an entire sub-language. For gamer speak, it shows how terms from the past and our environment evolve into useful vocabulary.
The knowledge of not only these two sub-languages, but every other one out there, ensures us that human language will further evolve and adapt to the new world order known as the Information Age; and, to quote Ralph Waldo Emerson
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: 7|-|3|23 1$ |\|0 |<|\|0\/\/|_3|)63 7|-|/\7
|$ |\|07 |^0\/\/3|2.
14 Translation: There is no knowledge that is not power". This was featured before the title screen on both Mortal
Kombat III and Ultimate Mortal Kombat III , released by Midway in the mid-1990's in arcades and on various home consoles.