Centre for Language and Literature, Lund University

BA Thesis, General Linguistics (15 credits)

Fall 2018

Gaming Language and How It

Is Characterized
A Study of Gamers’ and Non-Gamers’
Differences in Lexicon

Name: Catarina Hsu

Supervisor: Johan Blomberg

Abstract
Language is a social act and the fact that social communities create new or change existing
words that are known in daily standard language, can make the lexicon difficult to comprehend
for the ones not involved. The communication that belong to a specific social group can be
classified as a jargon, and in this present study we look at gaming language as an example of
how social communities’ lexicon can be manifested.

Gaming language is used between gamers when they talk about gaming. Briefly explained,
gaming is the act of playing videogames and is a phenomenon that the past decades have
expanded rapidly in step with the swift development of IT and access to the internet. In modern
times, it is common to play videogames online together with other players. Gamers have formed
their own social community and language similar to other social communities, creating a
specific jargon. The present study aims to investigate how gaming language is characterized,
focusing on how gamers describe videogames to other gamers or non-gamers, and what this
lexicon looks like. To test this, an elicitation study was conducted and participants were
recruited into two groups of Gamers and Non-Gamers, who described 20-30 seconds long clips
from well-known recent videogames like Overwatch and Fortnite to each other. From their
descriptions, content words were classified as either a gaming or non-gaming term based on a
couple of criteria. This study aimed to investigate the following research questions:
• What lexicon characterizes gaming language?
• To what extent do Gamers adjust their vocabulary dependent of the interlocutor’s
knowledge of videogames?
• To what extent do Gamers and Non-Gamers use game-specific and genre-specific
words?

The results from the study proved that there is a difference when a Gamer speaks to another
Gamer or a Non-Gamer, and Gamers adjusted their speech depending on the listener’s
knowledge of videogames. As for the gaming terms, it was shown that its semantic meaning
could differ from its daily standard use. This study also suggests a level of specialization
regarding gaming language and its lexicon.

Keywords: gaming, lexicon, vocabulary, jargon, sociolinguistics, ludolect, semantic field

2
Acknowledgements
First and foremost, I would like to acknowledge my supervisor Johan Blomberg for all the time
and enthusiasm he spent on helping me on how to approach the subject. Thank you, Johan.

A big thank you to Sandra Petersson at the Academic Support Centre, you have been such a
good support and help. I really appreciate you.

To Jordan Zlatev, I really want to thank you for your encouragement throughout my linguistics
education. You might not have known that your words meant a lot to me. Thank you, for being
such a great teacher with such a kind heart. Please keep sharing your bright mind with others.

To Peter Marthinsson, my teacher and guidance counselor for always taking time to answer my
questions or to have a chat and giving me advice, support and encouragement as well as being
understanding and a good friend. Thank you.

I would also like to thank Lund University Humanities Laboratory for lending me space in order
to carry out the study.

Thank you to Inet Malmö and my friends who work there, who did their best to retrieve lost
files in the heat of Black Friday.

A big thank you to all the participants in the study and thank you to those who shared my post
to find participants. A special thank you to Per Oskarsson, Robin Renner, Linus Nilsson, Alex
Rau and Teo Haglund for helping me record the material for the stimuli.

And last but not least, thank you to my family who I love so dearly. Thank you to my friends,
both IRL and online who have been encouraging me to finish this paper.

… and to you who decided to pick up this paper and read it, thank you.

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Table of contents
Abstract ...................................................................................................................................... 2
Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................... 3
Table of contents ........................................................................................................................ 4
List of Abbreviations .................................................................................................................. 6
List of Figures ............................................................................................................................ 7
List of Tables .............................................................................................................................. 8
1 Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 9
2 Background ....................................................................................................................... 11
2.1 Previous research on gaming terms - Neology......................................................... 13
2.2 Sociolinguistics and variation .................................................................................. 15
2.3 Ludolect .................................................................................................................... 18
2.4 Semantic fields ......................................................................................................... 20
2.5 Predictions ................................................................................................................ 22
3 Method .............................................................................................................................. 23
3.1 The Pear Movie ........................................................................................................ 24
3.2 The Hawthorne Effect .............................................................................................. 24
3.3 Final study design..................................................................................................... 25
3.4 Alternative methods ................................................................................................. 26
3.5 Material .................................................................................................................... 26
3.6 Participants ............................................................................................................... 27
3.7 Procedure .................................................................................................................. 29
3.8 Data processing and analysis.................................................................................... 31
4 Results ............................................................................................................................... 34
4.1 Gaming terms: Production across groups ................................................................. 34
4.2 Gaming terms: Types and Tokens ............................................................................ 36
4.3 Differences between Gamers’ and Non-Gamers’ descriptions from the study ........ 39
5 Discussion ......................................................................................................................... 40
5.1 Specializations .......................................................................................................... 41
5.2 Semantic meaning .................................................................................................... 41
5.2.1 Semantic field ....................................................................................................... 42

5.3 Production of gaming terms ..................................................................................... 43

5.3.1 Non-Gamers/Non-Gamers behaving anomaly ..................................................... 44

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 5.4 Review of the predictions ......................................................................................... 44
5.5 The Bridge of Gaming Lingo ................................................................................... 45
6 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 48
6.1 Method discussion .................................................................................................... 49
6.2 Proposal for further research .................................................................................... 50
References ................................................................................................................................ 51
Appendix 1 ............................................................................................................................... 53
Appendix 2 ............................................................................................................................... 55
Appendix 3 ............................................................................................................................... 57
Appendix 4 ............................................................................................................................... 60
Appendix 5 ............................................................................................................................... 69

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List of Abbreviations
G: Gamer
NG: Non-gamer
GG: Gamer vs Gamer
GNG: Gamer vs Non-gamer
NGNG: Non-gamer vs Non-gamer

V: Verb
N: Noun
ADJ: Adjective
ADV: Adverb

FPS: First-person shooter

MMORPG: Massively multiplayer online role-playing game
MOBA: Multimassive Online Battle Arena

WOW: World of Warcraft

LOL: League of Legends
HS: Hearthstone
OW: Overwatch
FN: Fortnite

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List of Figures
Figure 1a. Tree diagram over kinship structure ...................................................................... 21
Figure 1b. Tree diagram over the semantic field of furniture ................................................. 21
Figure 1c. Tree diagram over the semantic field of videogame .............................................. 22
Figure 2a. Fortnite clip, screenshot .................................................................................... 27
Figure 2b. Hearthstone clip, screenshot .................................................................................. 27
Figure 2c. League of Legends clip, screenshot ....................................................................... 27
Figure 2d. Overwatch clip, screenshot .................................................................................... 27
Figure 3a. Informant watches video clip ................................................................................. 31
Figure 3b. Informant describing video clip ............................................................................. 31
Figure 3c. Observant watches video clip ................................................................................. 31
Figure 3d. Observant deciding video clip ............................................................................... 31
Figure 4. An illustration of the flexibility of jargons with the help of gaming language ........ 46

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List of Tables

Table 1. Ludolect in the gradual scale of highly specialized to highly accessible .................. 19
Table 2. Varieties of ludolects ................................................................................................. 20
Table 3. Amount of gaming terms and content words across all participants ......................... 34
Table 4. Amount of content words across the three groups .................................................... 35
Table 5. Amount of gaming terms and content words in the Gamer/Gamer-group ................ 35
Table 6. Amount of gaming terms and content words in the Gamer/Non-Gamer-group ........ 35
Table 7. Amount of gaming terms and content words in the Non-Gamer/Non-Gamer-group 35
Table 8. Gaming terms and their frequency across Gamers .................................................... 36
Table 9. Gaming terms and their frequency across Non-Gamers............................................ 37
Table 10. Frequency of how many times the 15 most frequently used gaming terms by Gamers
occurred between Gamers/Gamers and Gamers/Non-Gamers ................................................. 38
Table 11. Frequency of how many times the 15 most frequently used gaming terms by Non-
Gamers occurred between Non-Gamers/Non-Gamers and Non-Gamers/Gamers ................... 38

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1 Introduction
The study of how different social groups communicate is important, as this communication can
widely differ from the standard everyday language that we are familiar with, in our daily lives
we are constantly surrounded by a variety of it: at work, at home, on social media platforms
and more. Language varieties used and upheld by social communities for specific purposes are
usually known as jargons. It may not come as a surprise that the development of IT, social
media and access to the online world have led to the creation of new social communities, with
new forms of communication that are developing rapidly (Page et al., 2014). This accessibility
to the online world allows the possibility to communicate with people all over the world, often
with English as lingua franca (common language between the speakers). One phenomenon that
has emerged through digital technologies is videogames, which once was an interest only shared
between friends and families, at home or at the arcade. In modern times, between gamers (the
players), there is considerable interaction online, this occurs in videogames as well as through
forums, websites like Reddit and voice chat applications like Discord. In this thesis, this new
type of communication that has been developed is referred to as gaming language.

To briefly explain Gaming and what it means to be a gamer, gaming is a modern phenomenon
that has grown exponentially in popularity over the last decades. During 2018, there were 2.3
billion active players across dedicated platforms (Nintendo Switch, Sony Playstation or
Microsoft Xbox) and personal computers and portable devices like mobile phones and tablets.
Gaming had a turnover of 137.9 billion USD based on the numbers of the total of 28 countries
year 2018 (Wijman, 2018). To be a gamer does not mean to only play videogames. It also
involves relating to and expressing a type of identity, together with the group of people who
shares the same interest of videogames. Similar as for many other specific interests, gamers
use specific linguistic resources for communicating, often in an in-game setting when talking
about gaming or to describe gaming related events. Since many popular videogames are
competitively played between teams, it can be of decisive importance to quickly give and
receive information to one’s teammates. This information can be communicated virtually
through text or vocal communication but can also be used in an everyday setting between
persons. Following is an excerpt from a broadcast of the final game between Fnatic and Invictus
Gaming in the League of Legends 2018 World Championship:

9
 Now as Fnatic sets themselves up for maybe making a play against Shy […] does
hit the level eight Bwipo goes in. Broxah gonna be seen now. Moving back and
forth between the brushes maybe instead is Shy going back underneath the turret as
Ning waits around the tribush gets himself away doesn’t want anything to do with
this fight.

Even in this brief excerpt, there are several terms that for the uninitiated might be unfamiliar
and difficult to understand. There are phrases with meanings specific to gaming in general and
to League of Legends in particular. Names of players like Shy and teams like Fnatic are
expressed and the audience is expected to know about these terms. What is perhaps more
interesting is how common words like level, brushes, turret and novel words like tribush are
used by the casters (live commentators). These words and phrases have meanings specific to
videogames and can therefore be considered part of gaming language. This serves as an
indication of videogames as having its own jargon: specific linguistic indications,
manifestations and labels that serve a certain purpose in the communication.

I propose that the benefit of looking at gaming language could help us to learn and provide
more information and knowledge about the development and establishment of jargons in the
field of linguistics, in step with the success of IT and its growth. Language that communicates
with the help of chat tools have similarities to spoken language and it is used to quickly convey
a message. It rarely is intended to be saved for further use and requires minimal planning and
it reaches the receiver almost instantly (compare this to writing and mailing a letter). This type
of computer mediated language has developed a way to use symbols, figures or abbreviations
to convey how the writer is feeling or thinking (Gunnarsdotter Grönberg, 2013, p. 261). The
fast development of IT and the expansion of social media, a lot of communication now occur
online, and gaming language is not an exception due to the communication being mainly
computer mediated (Zähres, 2017, p. 4). The communication has come a long way since the
time when gamers sat and played alone or with friends at home or the arcade, without the
possibility to go online. This accessibility to the online world also allows the possibility to
communicate with people all over the world. We know that this language primarily occurs
online with the help of digital tools that allow this kind of communication and is mainly in
English as lingua franca, having youths and young adults as the main representation of users.

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The aim of this thesis is to investigate if there is a difference between Gamers’ and Non-
Gamers’ descriptions of videogame sequences. It does so by focusing specifically on Gamers’
lexicon of gaming terms compared to Non-Gamers’. This was investigated trough an elicitation
study where Gamers and Non-Gamers were asked to describe short video clips from popular
modern online games such as Overwatch (Blizzard Entertainment, 2016) and Fortnite (Epic
Games, 2017) to each other. The participants described video clips to their study partner, who
then had to guess which description fit to which video clip. With this study, I set out to answer
the following research questions:

• What lexicon characterizes gaming language?

• To what extent do Gamers and Non-Gamers use game-specific and genre-specific
words?
• To what extent do Gamers adjust their vocabulary dependent of the interlocutor’s
knowledge of videogames?

This thesis is structured as follows: I begin in Section 2 by reviewing previous research on

jargon studies and gaming words, looking specifically at gaming language as a manifestation
of a jargon. This is followed by a description of the method and the procedure in Section 3.
Section 4 presents the results, which are further discussed in Section 5. Section 6 will serve as
a conclusion and method discussion, as well as proposal for future studies.

2 Background
When you are a speaker of a certain discourse, you are enacting an identity and this identity can
differ depending on the specific setting, environment, or profession you are in. This specific
type of discourse is for instance, when a teenager is speaking to its mother versus speaking to
a friend. The teenager would most likely use more informal terminology to a friend than to its
mother. Imagine the scenario in which this teenager is reporting that their friend Sara has
recently become single: “Sara broke up with her boyfriend James” versus “Sara dumped that
dude”.

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Apart from differences in formality and register, there are also linguistic differences depending
on interests and lifestyle. In professional discourse, a speaker needs to be engaged in or
acquainted with a specific profession to be able to understand the conversation. An example is
when a doctor speaks to other doctors at a conference (Gee, 2014). This suggests that society,
and people’s interest and context and language are inseparable, they work together and are
important to the fact on how we form groups and find identities. Even so, language users tend
to not be conscious about their knowledge of a language or its properties (Boyd & Ericsson,
2015, p. 15). Therefore, gaming language is not an exception if we look at it with the previous
arguments.

Gaming is an interest (and for some, a profession) that is tightly connected to a specific
discourse and identity. Despite this, the communication of gamers has been a relatively
untouched area in linguistics. To the extent it has been investigated, studies have mainly
investigated if playing videogames in a second language would affect vocabulary learning (Gee,
2003; Rankin et al., 2006; Behbahani, 2013; Wu et al., 2014). However, there are few studies
that focus particularly on gaming language. This section will look at previous research of
videogaming and language and manifestations of group identity and specific knowledge.

Section 2.1 will present a study by Álvarez de Mon and Álvarez-Bolado (2013) that investigated
new words (or the development of new meaning to an old word) in Spanish press articles
evaluating videogames. They found that about one third of frequently used words in the corpus
developed new meanings within the target domain. An example is the word personaje
(‘character’), that in the videogame corpus referred to a player-controlled creature, where the
player could possibly decide on in-game actions or to impersonate the character. Their findings
suggest that videogame terms get established with specific meanings or attain specific
utilizations distinct from their colloquial meaning in Spanish.

Section 2.2 investigates gaming language with focus of sociolinguistics, specifically jargon
studies which acts as the main background of this thesis.

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2.1 Previous research on gaming terms - Neology
Álvarez de-Mon and Álvarez Bolado Sánchez (2013) conducted a data driven study in which
they investigated if everyday language words adapted a new meaning (what the authors refer to
as neosemanticism) in the specific domain of video- and computer games. They did so by basing
their study on a journalistic corpus called CiberPaís (1998-2008, published by the newspaper
El País), a medium that covers the genre of Communication and Information Technologies
(ICT). The authors primarily focused on press articles that were categorized as games. The
readers of this newspaper were the youngest readers of Spanish information newspaper (33%
under the age of 35). For their study, the authors decided to only use new videogame releases
from the physical and digital publications.

In order to detect neologism (the word or phrase that coin a new meaning), the study primarily
used a qualitative analysis of context and tools like Wordsmith Tools 4.0 1. They extracted
keywords from a reference corpus (Corpus de Referencia CiberPaís, CRC) and a domain
specific corpus (Corpus de Videojuegos CiberPaís, CVC). Both corpora are described in the
study from the perspective of genre as examples of non-expert versus expert communication,
even if both are considered specialized in the perspective of context. In order to identify these
neologisms, the authors added four levels of context (basing three of these on previous studies
by other authors) to their study:
• The first level of context: The text included in the corpus is related to the specific
domain of videogames.
• The second level of context: Involving genre and medium, in which the texts were found
both digital and printed in CiberPaís and since CiberPaís being a journalistic corpus,
the writer is also an expert in the specific domain of videogames.
• The third level of context: Which involves continuity, in which the interpretation of the
first utterance in a conversation gives information about the second utterance that might
come, in this case a continuity of context.
• The fourth level of context, added by the authors themselves: The context affects the
surrounding words and are important to distinguish the meaning between the new
concept in the specific domain and the terms in the reference corpus.

1
Wordsmith Tools 4.0 is a software tool mainly used by linguists to detect patterns in a language.

13
In the study the authors reported that the most common terms from the list in which these words
developed a new meaning (different from their everyday language meaning) within the
videogame domain were título, aventura, personaje, plataforma and rol. These terms are
described as originally from other domains like computer technology and narrative but even so,
according to the authors these terms differ from Spanish computer technology as they take on
a different meaning in the domain of videogames.

The result from the study showed that: Título were frequently used when referring to a game
but it was also reported as referring to electronical products which were related to activities
with no gaming involved, such as cookery, sports or music but with educational purposes. The
term was found in the CVC corpus to be used as a synonym for videogame based on the criteria
of lexical cohesion.

Personaje were referred to creatures or characters that were controlled by the player with the
possibility to decide on different actions, taking place in the game.

Aventura refers to a category if videogames that often does not involve any plot but there are
riddles that the player needs to solve with the help of clues, often given by the in-game
characters.

Rol is mentioned by the authors as being an anglicism (loan word) in general Spanish, however,
it does adapt a new meaning in the domain of videogames. In the CVC corpus this term refers
to the player taking on and impersonates one or several characters, but more than one player is
often required. In the domain of videogames this specific game genre is referred to as
roleplaying game (‘juego de rol’).

In the CVC corpus, plataforma referred to a specific videogame genre, although it was the only
neologism out of the five that is used within the domain of computer technology.

The authors concluded that these terms, in the context of videogames, became neologisms
proven by the contextual evidence. Several of the terms could also be considered terms in other
domains such as computer technology or narrative. However, the meaning of these terms in the
domain of videogames specialized their meaning due to the context of the new environment.

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The conclusion of their study confirmed that the specific domain of videogames involves two
different groups of communities: the technical or as they call them specialists (examples are
game developers, game designers or game narrators) and the other group consisting of gamers
that only play videogames and therefore according to the authors, cannot be classified as
specialists. The authors concluded that it is difficult to classify many of the terms in the study
as terms or to consider their definition technical (in the field of computer terms), since those
are common words in general Spanish.

2.2 Sociolinguistics and variation

A jargon is characterized mainly as a lexicon used within a group or community that share a
level of interest and knowledge about a specific domain. A jargon can for instance be a law
discourse or hair dressing discourse. When speaking of jargons there are several different
classifications of them such as technolects (from Greek tékhnē: art, craftmanship, skills) and
minilects (Laurén, 1997; Nordman, 1994). A technolect is often referred to as a specialized
language used within a profession. The language used by legal practitioners is an example of a
technolect (Mattila, 2006). Similar to technolect is what Laurén (1997) refers to as minilects. A
minilect is also a sociolect, as much as it is a technolect, because it can be used by a non-expert
in any field (Laurén, 1997, p. 16). Whereas a technolect is typically used by an expert in a well-
defined field, a minilect is less restricted and does not require expertise knowledge. According
to Nordman (1994), a minilect could therefore be, for an example, the language of food recipes
(Nordman, 1994, p. 53). There are others that would describe jargon as a professional discourse,
in which you enact an identity in a professional setting, connected to profession, interests etc.
For someone outside this professional setting, it would be difficult to understand the
terminology, even if one would search for explanations on the internet (Gee, 2014). Therefore,
it serves a purpose in the formation of social communities and a persons’ identity.

Jargon is the language spoken between groups and communities in society that share a level of
interest or knowledge towards an interest. What all the different jargon types have in common
is that they capture linguistic variation and there are several different classifications and level
of how advanced these are. Rey (1991) states that it is not only the terminology, language use
or system that characterize a jargon, but also that the linguistic expressions create a coherent
and systematic conceptual world, which assists us in organizing, sorting and filter impressions.
15
Language helps us to understand the differences of these, meaning that one need to understand
that it also involves social functions in different contexts (Laurén, 1997, p. 9-11; Rey, 1991, p.
9).

This thesis uses the general term jargon to enwrap these different kinds of classifications.
Despite the different approaches to define a jargon, it is quite difficult to find a definition of it
since the linguistic variation must be defined extra-linguistic, such as group identity and
interests. It cannot only be determined by linguistic aspects and we must take into consideration
the context in which the jargon is supposed to be used in and why. For instance, maritime speak
might be inappropriate and ineffective to use in a restaurant kitchen as the terminology is not
fitted to the context.

There have been few attempts to define jargon, even if the Prague school treated jargon with
interest (Laurén, 1997). An early attempt follow Havránek’s discussion of specializations of
language, who claim that it is…

… impossible and incorrect to try to raise any one functional dialect or style [i.e.
jargon] to the status of a criterion for the others (Havránek, 1932/1983, p. 35).

Havránek states that to convey specific information to another person in a specific setting, one
cannot use another terminology from another jargon. For example, when a gamer is to speak
about videogames and gaming in general, they are socially expected and communicatively
helped by speaking in jargon. For instance, the word jungle used in multiplayer online battle
arena games like League of Legends (Riot Games, 2009), does not share the same meaning as
a jungle of land or of wildlife and trees. Instead, it refers to the forest-like area where a player
can find magical creatures, their camps and obtain their powers. Even if the gaming term is
based on the word jungle, its meaning is nevertheless distinct from its general and colloquial
meaning.

To capture how words can be used with more specialized and specific meanings, Havránek
suggested a gradual difference and a division of jargons that depends on the type of
communication: intelligibility – definiteness – accuracy. This can be seen as a gradual scale
and sometimes for communicative purposes, there is a level of definiteness in which case you
will receive more specific information. In exchange you lose more general intelligibility: the

16
more specific and exact that you are and the more you move to the accurate side of the spectrum,
the closer it gets to act as a technolect.

For instance, in an everyday conversation a person might ask a recent friend about their
nationality but this person is actually interested in their friend’s ethnicity. The friend might
understand that ethnicity is intended, since both already know that they are Swedish and instead
of telling their nationality (Swedish), they might answer with their ethnicity (example:
Lebanese).

1. A: What is your nationality Zara?

B: (Oh, you already know that I have lived my whole life in Sweden, right?) My
family is from Lebanon.

However, when applying for a travel visa, this distinction between nationality and ethnicity
does have a big impact regarding if you are granted permission into the country that you plan
on visiting. This shows how we are moving on to a more specific division on Havránek’s
gradual scale, because using a more general communication in situations like this is not enough.

A consequence from Havránek’s characterization is that one way of communicating is not better
than others; rather, it depends on the specific purpose of how it is to be conveyed. To have a
specific purpose for what you are supposed to communicate (say, among sailors at sea) can put
requirements on the linguistic aspects. For an example, if you got to be more specific, the words
will be specific according to their functional utilization as in what is the use of it, what is the
purpose and aim of using it? To put this into perspective, a term with a specific meaning in
gaming, such as raid, can be used outside of this context with another and more common
meaning. In, (1) the word raiding does not mean that the person raiding the fridge is in a large-
scale dungeon with multiple other players trying to defeat monsters. Instead, the person is
looking through your fridge for something to eat. As for example (2) DNA in science is a well-
established term of a string of genetic inheritance. Outside of a scientific context, it can be used
in an example like (2) with the general meaning of social inheritance rather than the biological
sense (i.e. a molecule that carries information about genetic inheritance).

1. He is raiding my fridge!
2. He has the DNA of a golfer.

17
I have now reviewed that there are different types of jargon and that it is difficult to clearly
define a jargon. A jargon can be classified in several –lects such as a technolect that involves a
higher level of specialized knowledge - in contrast to intelligibility. We can thus say that a
jargon is used in a specific setting with a specific aim of the communication.

Ensslin (2012) have specifically looked at videogame discourse and proposes a definition
similar to minilects: it is more suitable to describe this as ludolect than a technolect or a
sociolect. Section 2.1.1 discusses ludolect in relation to jargon studies.

2.3 Ludolect
According to Ensslin (2012), the language of gamers (which she also describes as gamer slang)
involves different levels of linguistic knowledge and expertise. It is not a technolect but some
gaming languages might be closer related and would be more akin to the terminology of game
developers. Ensslin coins the term ludolect (etymoligically based on the Latin word ludus
(’game’) and the Ancient Greek word λέγω (lego, ’I say/I speak’)2. The term ludolect describes
how respectively (game) languages are shaped by a set of rules and constraints (Zährez, 2017).

Ensslin characterizes ludolect by considering gaming language as existing along a spectrum. At

one end is a common language that can be expected to be known by most speakers. This is what
the author refers to as General Media Discourse: terms that are commonly used in media such
as in television and often used by journalists. For example, a television advertisement might
describe a videogame as an action game.

At the other end of the spectrum are jargons which are used in specific occasions and in certain
contexts, like the terminology of game developers. For instance, they might use technical (or
accurate in the terminology of Havránek) terms typically used by players or journalists, like
binary operator. Such a highly specialized language (like a technolect) requires the speaker and
the listener to have a considerable amount of shared knowledge of the field where it is used.

2
The choice of ludolect is clearly inspired by the term often used synonymously with game studies: ludology
(Frasca, 1999).

18
Ensslin suggests that video game discourse range from highly accessible to highly specialized.
In Section 2.2, I described Havránek’s (1932/1983, p. 35) discussion of intelligibility –
definiteness – accuracy, and how words can be used in different specialized meanings. He
suggests a gradual difference of jargons that depends on the communication. The closer you are
to accuracy (like Ensslin’s highly specialized discourse), the more specific you are in the
communication, but this leads to a loss of general intelligibility (like Ensslin’s highly accessible
discourse). In-between these two stands ludolect, which differs from both and is characterized
by how it can enter the more general side of the gradual scale, this scale is shown in Table 1.

Table 1. Ludolect in the gradual scale of highly specialized (left) to highly accessible (right).

Highly specialized Highly accessible

Developer jargon Ludolects General media discourse

Quicksort FPS (First-Person Shooter) Protagonist

Binary operator MMORPG (Multi-Massive Narrative-driven

Online Roleplaying Game)

3D accelerator card Noob (Newbie, new player) Action game

A highly specialized jargon (like a technolect) requires the speaker and the listener to have a
shared knowledge of the field where it is used, like in the example of digital development.
Whereas a more highly accessible jargon includes terminology that we are used to see in across
various media that is more general and accessible. At the highly specialized end of the spectrum,
Ensslin locates terms used by videogame developers. For instance, they might use a technical
(or “accurate” in the terminology of Havranek) term like binary operator. This term would not
be typically used by a player or a journalist. On the opposite side, Ensslin locates General media
discourse: terms that are commonly used in media such as television and by journalists. For an
example, their television advertisement might describe a game as an action game.

Ludolect, however, differs from both according to Ensslin. It is in-between a technolect and a
highly accessible language. Ensslin suggests that there is a diversity of ludolects where some
of them are closer to being more specialized and others much closer to common varieties. These
can also appear different if it is game- or genre-specific jargons. Table 2 shows how the degree

19
of specificity increases from general gaming (left) to the genre MMORPG to a specific game
within the genre, like World of Warcraft (right).

Table 2. Varieties of ludolects in a gradual scale of general vocabulary (left) to specialized vocabulary (right).

More specialized vocabulary More general vocabulary

World of Warcraft MMORPG General gaming

Lich King Raid boss Boss

Zul’gurub Instance Map

Amani War Bear Mount Carriage

The terminology in the general gaming category is more accessible for all kinds of videogame
genre, in contrary to the category of World of Warcraft’s vocabulary is, which is specialized
according to its specificity of the game. Meanwhile the middle category of MMORPGs
terminology presents words used within this specific genre.

2.4 Semantic fields

Related to jargons and social communities’ lexicon is the theory of semantic field. The theory
of semantic field is a way to study the structure of specific lexical fields, in which this field
describes the relationship of lexical items (lexemes: words that can be included in a lexicon).
Semantic fields are also used in other disciplines like anthropology, to create a better
understanding of communities and their beliefs.

A widely known semantic field was first described by Kroeber (1909), who identified lexical
items of the kinship structure, which has been of importance when classifying family structures.
An example of a kinship structure is demonstrated in Figure 1a in the form of a tree diagram,
that was adapted from Kroeber (1990) by Hatch & Brown (1995), that I have re-illustrated for
this thesis.

20
Figure 1a. Tree diagram over kinship structure (re-illustrated from Hatch & Brown, 1995, p.
34)

Kroeber’s kinship structure, as shown in Figure 1a, demonstrates how a semantic field can be
described, starting from the semantic field of kin, showing male family members on the left
side of the tree and the female family members on the right.

In 1930 it was said that Jost Trier (1931) introduced the lexical field theory in which he argued
that words and their meaning got acquired by the relationship of other words that were within
the same type of semantic field. John Lyons (1977) argued that words that are associated belong
within the same semantic field. In Figure 1b, I have illustrated a tree diagram that demonstrates
how the semantic field of, for example furniture, can manifest.

Figure 1b. Tree diagram over the semantic field of furniture.

Crystal (2010, p. 108-110) however, have been arguing that there are three issues when one
would try to put every word into a semantic field:
• Firstly, there are words like noise or difficult that are not obvious as to which semantic
field they should be assigned.

21
 • Secondly, some words like orange might instead be suitable in several semantic fields,
in this example the field of colour or fruit.
• Thirdly, the difficulty that Crystal discusses is how one should define one lexical field
in relation to another field and its constituent lexemes.

If I would take videogames as a demonstration of a semantic field, I have illustrated a

representation of it, that is shown as a tree diagram in Figure 1c.

Figure 1c. Tree diagram over the semantic field of videogame.

The above tree diagram in Figure 1c. demonstrates that we would have videogames at the top,
which branches out to different types of genres and from there games. These then branch out to
different types of game related words, meaning it all fits under the same semantic field.

2.5 Predictions
Based on the previous research on jargon studies, gaming terms, semantic fields, -lects, and
Ensslins definition of ludolect, presented in this background, the following predictions were
made:

1. Gamers will use gaming terminology when in a social setting with another gamer.
The first prediction in this study is based on the previous research of how people tend to speak
differently when speaking to another person in a specific setting, as you are enacting a different
identity. Gee discusses how social languages allow us to express different identities, for
example: being a teacher, a doctor or in this particular study, a gamer (Gee, 2014). People that

22
enjoy playing videogames enact an identity as a gamer due to their interest in videogames and
being in a social setting with another person who shares the same interest will enable these
people to talk with each other with terminology, known within the community of gamers about
videogames.

2. Non-Gamers will not use gaming terminology when describing games to the listener.
The second prediction is based on what Gee (2014) discusses: when you are not within a
specific social community or discourse, it is difficult to use the terminology as this requires a
certain level of expertise which you learn by being within this specific interest.

3. Gamers will minimize the use of gaming terminology when speaking to a Non-gamer.
The third prediction is based on what Laurén (1997) and Hávranek (1932/1983) discusses
regarding context of where you use the language. Both authors discuss the importance of using
the right language in the right kind of setting to communicate with someone. For instance, it
would not be suitable for a gamer to speak in gaming terminology with someone who does not
know anything about videogames.

3 Method
This section will outline the method of this present study. For this thesis I wanted to use a
method with controlled variables to ensure that the participants, material and setting would be
suitable for the aim of the study, therefore the conclusion was to design a method, combining
different research methods. I chose to proceed with an elicitation study in combination with a
task and a questionnaire. When designing this method, I focused particularly on empirical
investigation as my preferred scientific research technique, meaning that it was designed to
demonstrate real daily life conversations.

In sociolinguistics it is common to collect data in order to understand how language and

terminology is used in society rather than creating introspective reports (Sundgren, 2013;
Coupland & Jaworski, 1997; Gee, 2014). For instance, attempts to describe the difference of
speech characteristics and linguistic variation between social classes like upper-class or lower

23
working-class3 have been made within the field of sociolinguistics (Wardhaugh, 2006, p. 146-
151).

3.1 The Pear Movie

In order to investigate the lexicon of Gamers and Non-Gamers, I chose to design a method in
part inspired by the so-called pear movie. It is a mute short film proven useful for elicitation
studies (Chafe, 1980) due to its simple story that was designed to receive universal experiences
and stimulate emotions as well as morals. With this method, it is common to ask the participant
to re-tell the story of the movie to target specific description of the content.

This type of method is an excellent way to collect specific data with the help of tools like
microphone or/- and a video recorder, like for an example when you are to investigate
grammatical structures in a language, verbs and nouns, morphology etc. The participants often
need to respond to questions (during or after watching the video material) but other than that,
the descriptions do not have to follow any specific rules, allowing the participants to freely
describe what they have just seen. This type of method is commonly used within semantic
studies but have also been used in studies like The Spencer Project4.

3.2 The Hawthorne Effect

Another important aspect that I had to keep in mind when designing the method was the
Hawthorne effect, also known as the observer effect, coined by linguist William Labov, which
describes how people have a tendency to change behavior when they know that they are being
observed (Labov, 1972, p. 209; Coupland & Jaworski,1997 p. 69-70).

3
William Labov did a study of linguistic variation in New York City (1966) by setting up ten social classes ranging
from low-income workers to upper middle class.
4
The Spencer Project, full name Defining literacy and in different languages was a project active between 1998
and 2001 that aimed to investigate how students of different ages, with different languages and living in different
countries would create monologic texts, specifically modalities and different genres.

24
In order to collect relevant data, I designed a questionnaire mainly to let the participants self-
assess if they were a Gamer or Non-Gamer (I let the participants answer the questionnaire at
home), and the study was designed to minimize the observer effect. In an effort to do so, I kept
in mind the importance of circumstances and designed the method accordingly in order to create
a casual situation, in this particular study, letting a third party, and not myself, hold the
conversation with the informant, hence why I decided on dyads (Wardhaugh, 2005, p. 153).

Although a setting at the university in a secluded recording room was not the best choice (as it
is not a usual setting for a relaxed chat) when trying to avoid the observer effect, I made an
effort to minimize it when the study was to be conducted, by letting the participants
communicate as freely as possible, asking them to present themselves and giving them the
opportunity to get know each other over a break and some snacks, hopefully allowing a
friendship, at least temporary to grow.

3.3 Final study design

The research questions I wanted to address includes the lexicon of gamers and whether gamers
adjusted how they convey information depending on the interlocutor’s knowledge of video
games. In order to investigate these questions, I created an elicitation study that was combined
with a communicative task to receive spontaneous descriptions and to study the interaction
between Gamers and Non-Gamers. The study consisted of a communicative task where Gamers
and Non-Gamers described clips while being video- and sound recorded. The participants were
split into pairs which were assigned depending on their self-identification as a Gamer or Non-
Gamer: Gamer/Gamer, Gamer/Non-Gamer and Non-Gamer/Non-Gamer. I based this self-
identification on criteria that will be described in 3.6. The choice of this method would give us
a clear contrast between the different groups, thus this would give us the spontaneous and
underlying knowledge of gaming terminology that the participants might or might not be
consciously aware that they know about, rather than giving them a list of words that have been
picked out. That would not give us the same manifestation of their own knowledge, even if it
perhaps would had been more practical.

Prior to conducting the study, I ran a pilot study with six participants (i.e. three pairs). During
the pilot study, the sound in the clips were disabled. After deliberating I decided to enable the
25
in-game sounds in order to provide the participants an opportunity to describe what they heard
as well (no instructions about having to describe the sounds were given). To conclude, the in-
game sounds in the final study were enabled.

3.4 Alternative methods

When conducting a study, there will most often exist alternative methods. For this study, I could
have let the participants play the games instead of watching video clips of gameplay and from
there I could have looked at the communication between the participants. However, conducting
a study like this would have been much more time-consuming since participants would need to
play several games, learn the basics of the games as well as finishing the rounds which can take
up to an hour or longer.

Another alternative method could have been conducting individual interviews, something that
I considered in the beginning of this study, as it would have been a more practical approach.
This idea stayed as just a pre-phase idea due to the fact that participants and their personalities
could have affected the outcome as some participants could be hesitant to speak in such a setting
(Coupland & Jaworski, 1997, p.102-106) and it is not a method that, from an empirical scientific
research method, in regards to the aim of this thesis, would have been efficient due to it being
difficult to first of all, ask any questions about a lexicon that we know very little about in the
time when this thesis is written. Secondly, keeping in mind that I wanted to collect data from
real life conversations and also minimizing the observer effect made me decide to not proceed
with individual interviews (Labov, 1972, p. 209; Coupland & Jaworski,1997 p. 69-70).

3.5 Material
Gameplay from four different online games was recorded. The clips were 20-25 seconds long
and had in-game sounds (but no vocal communication between the players). Moreover, using
clips recorded specifically for the study ensured that participants had not seen them before, thus
the participants could not have been having previous experience from a third party video seen
on social media.

26
The video stimuli were in the form of short gameplay sequences. Four clips were recorded from
four different games (i.e. 16 in total): League of Legends (Riot Games, 2009), Overwatch
(Blizzard Entertainment, 2016), Fortnite (Epic Games, 2017), Hearthstone (Blizzard
Entertainment, 2014), see Figures 2a-2d (for screenshots from all clips, see Appendix 3). These
games were selected for two reasons: the games are known to most gamers and are used in
competitive settings. The gamer participants could therefore be expected to know them well
enough to provide detailed descriptions with gaming-specific terminology.

Figure 2a. Fortnite clip, screenshot. Figure 2b. Hearthstone clip, screenshot.

Figure 2c. League of Legends clip, screenshot. Figure 2d. Overwatch clip, screenshot.

3.6 Participants
I wanted to find participants that identified themselves as either Gamers or Non-Gamers. To
find these participants, they were primarily recruited through social media and videogame
communities. In order to find representatives of the two possible identifications, I decided to
use a judgement sample (sampling - finding a group of representative speakers) which means
that I chose the participants based on a set of criteria. The step of sampling is important as the

27
conclusion can only be as good as our sample (Wardhaugh, 2006, p. 154-155). The criteria for
the participants were as follows:

• No background in the field of linguistic studies.

• Native or fluent speakers of Swedish, to ensure that the communication between the
participants would not be faint.
• 18 years or older in order for the participants to participate with their own consent and
not their parents’.

Additionally, for Gamers and Non-Gamers the following respective criteria were used:
Gamers
• Should have a big interest towards gaming. This criterion was based on the participants’
own evaluation and self-assessment.
• Play video and/-or PC games on a weekly basis.
Non-Gamers
• Should not have a big interest towards gaming.
• Not play any videogames at all or have previous experience of actively gaming.

There was a total of 18 participants ranging between 18 and 32 years old (8 females, 10 males)
with mean age of 24 years. Based on their previous background with gaming (see Appendix 4),
the participants were split into two separate categories: Gamer (G) and Non-Gamer (NG). To
verify their self-assessment as Gamer or Non-Gamer, I created a questionnaire. The questions
were formed as such: general information such as gender and where they live, as well as how
many different popular video games the participants have heard of, play or played themselves
and how many hours they spend on videogames. Some questions were targeting the Gamers in
which I wanted to collect data based on their own opinion regarding in-game communication.
Participants were combined into pairs of three different groups (six participants/three pairs per
group):

GG: Gamer/Gamer
GNG: Gamer/Non-Gamer
NGNG: Non-Gamer/Non-Gamer

28
The participants were never matched with someone they were previously acquainted with.
Since the participants did not know each other before the study, they were asked to briefly
present themselves and state whether they were participating in the study as a Gamer or Non-
Gamer.

The questionnaire was designed to collect participant data such as general information like age
and where they live but the main reason was to let them self-assess if they are a Gamer or Non-
Gamer. The questionnaire also included questions like how often the participants play
videogames and how many different videogames that they got experience from or heard about.

3.7 Procedure
The study was conducted at Lund University, Sweden in a silent environment. Before the study,
participants got to meet with their dialogue partner. Both participants were asked to read
through and sign the consent form (see Appendix 1). The pair was then provided with written
instructions (see Appendix 2) and introduced themselves with their names and if they signed
up as a Gamer or Non-Gamer. Before the study began, the participants were given the
opportunity to ask questions.

The participants took turns filling one of two roles: Informant and Observer. The Informant re-
told two clips from a game to the Observer (who were not shown the video clips). The
participants were asked to describe the clip as if they were describing a video to a friend. The
Observer was then shown one of the two clips and had to decide whether the clip corresponded
to the first or the second description. The reason as to why I decided to add a task was mainly
to actively engage the Observant but also to encourage a natural and fluid dialogue between
participants.

The participants performed one trial round each. After 4 rounds of a total of 8 clips (2 clips
from each four different games) a short break followed before the participants switched roles.
The study took about 40 minutes, including a break. All sessions were recorded for video and
sound. Below is a transcript of one round, between a Gamer and Non-Gamer participant.

29
Informant: Watches Clip 1 > Describes Clip 1 > Watches Clip 2 > Describes Clip 2
Observer: Listens to Description 1 > Listens to Description 2 > Watches one of the two
described video clips > Guesses whether the Clip matches Description 1 or 2.

Gamer participant describing Clip 1:

Det är ett kortspel och de har korten på ett bord. Jag tror att det bara var ena spelaren som
hade kort på sin sida. För att man har, den ena spelaren, dens perspektiv som man ser det
ifrån är underst och den andra är över. Och det första som händer är att kortet då, de säger
till kortet att attackera den andra spelaren och då kommer det upp på skärmen direkt, det står
secret och så är det lite grönt. […] Det är ett spel som heter Hearthstone.

’It is a card game and they have the card on a table. I think that it was only one player that
had cards on its side. Because one has, the one player, its perspective that you see it from is
below and the other above. And the first happening is that the card then, they tell the card to
attack the other player and then it appears on the screen directly, it says secret and then there
are some green. […] It is a game called Hearthstone.’

Gamer participant describing Clip 2:

Det är samma spel. […] Och man ser hur den spelaren säger till sina kort som ligger på
bordet som är hundar att attackera den andra spelaren. Det var det enda han gjorde, han
hade liksom många hundar på bordet. De, eller hon, hen.

’It is the same game. […] And one can see how that player tells their cards that is lying on the
table, that are dogs, to attack the other player. That was the only thing he did, he had kind of
a lot of dogs on the table. Them, or she, they.’

Non-Gamer participant guessing:

Jag tror detta är det första klippet som du beskrev.
’I think this is the first clip that you described.’

The following pictures are screenshots from the video recording of participants from the study
and how the setting and study looked like. (Permission granted to use these images).

30
 Figure 3a. Informant watches video clip. Figure 3b. Informant describing video clip.

Figure 3c. Observant watches video clip. Figure 3d. Observant deciding video clip.

Both Gamers and Non-Gamers did not have any problems to carry out the study and participants
in both groups stated that they got a clearer view of gaming language and the important role it
might play and how, especially for participants in the Gamer-group, they had not consciously
paid attention to how they have used gaming terms before. After the study, the participants
filled out a questionnaire about their gaming habits (see Appendix 4). During a structured post-
test interview, participants in the Gamer-group found it harder than expected to describe games
to a Non-Gamer and much easier to convey information to another gamer. Non-Gamers on the
other hand, found it hard to keep up with the content of the clips. They mentioned that their
focus tended to linger towards details of the environment, characters or to how the items looked
like rather than to focus on the gameplay.

3.8 Data processing and analysis

In order to find means to compare Gamers and Non-Gamers descriptions, content words (i.e.
nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs that reveal mainly content information) were extracted
from their descriptions. Since the occurrence of the specific gaming terminology is not frequent

31
in everyday spoken language and it is used in a higher grade of specificity, I chose to focus on
content words, rather than looking at grammatical aspects.

The recordings were orthographically transcribed, and all content words were extracted and
added to an Excel document, I decided to do this on my own to ensure that nothing got left out.
The content words were marked as either as a gaming term or non-gaming term and for this
particular study, I used the following criteria, in part based on jargon studies to do so:

• The language must be somewhat connected to digital games, operated by a CPU

(Central Processing Unit).
Example
1. Mount – A mount is a transportation creature or vehicle in many MMORPGs (Multi-
Massive Online Role-Playing Game).
2. Inventory – A common name for your bag or pocket in which you store objects.
3. Loot – A common name for the objects or materials that are collectables and it
usually appears after defeating an enemy or strong opponent.
4. Raid – A dungeon or maze-like area in which the player enters alone but mostly as
a team and the goal is to defeat enemies and a boss.
5. Level – A level is a type of measure of a player’s experience and power. The higher
the experience, the higher a player’s level.

• Information content that is based on the game genre and its gameplay…
Example
1. League of Legends – The name of a MOBA (Multi Online Battle Arena) game.
2. Ping – A way to announce a position or warning on a map to your team mates, which
often can involve sounds (like an alarm).
3. NPC – Non-Playable Character that is part of the game’s storyline and conveys
information to the players or hands out tasks. An NPC can be found in several game
genres where the player uses an avatar.
4. Quest – A quest is a task handed out by an NPC (Non-Playable Character) so that
the player needs to pursue a specific goal in order to receive in-game currency,
consumables, items or gears.

32
 5. PVE – Player versus Environment. It is a type of in-game battle in which a player
mainly fights with monsters that can be found in the game environment. It is often
seen as a description of what type of game genre the game is classified as.

• … words that are specific to the game or game genre: names, tools, positioning etc.
Example
1. Bot lane – Bot lane is the lower path on the in-game map in MOBA (Multi-Online
Battle Arena) games.
2. Illidan Stormrage – The name of a boss in World of Warcraft MMORPG (Multi-
Massive Online Role-Playing Game).
3. Headshot – A headshot is when the player one-shot an enemy in the head, most used
in FPS (First-Person Shooter) games.
4. Boost – To boost is to help another player gain experience in a faster pace than usual
and it is used in any type of game genre with a level system.
5. Hearthstone (item) – An item that the player can use in the game World of Warcraft
that allows the player to teleport to an inn.

• Involves and presupposes common knowledge between the speaker and listener.
“I played CS yesterday!” – Presupposes that the listener knows what “CS” stands for,
Counter Strike.
“Their jungler is bot lane” – Presupposes that the listener understands that “the jungler”
means the enemy player who is positioned in the forest-like area in the game.
“Looking for a tank” – Presupposes that the listener understands that a tank is not a
vehicle in this case, it is a playable character whom got a lot of defense abilities and
health points and hence, can receive a lot of damage and act as a shield for the team.

One can expect some gaming terms to be closely related to the standard language in which a
Non-Gamer could most likely understand its meaning. For instance: Teamfight – A battle
between two teams. The word itself already indicates that it involves a team and some type of
fight or battle. These words are commonly used when playing videogames, thus being important
in the overall communication between the players. I expect that these terms and their semantic
meaning in the domain of videogames, might be different from the standard language, similar
to the study of neologism by Álvarez de Mon and Álvarez-Bolado (2013), therefore I decided
to include these.
33
After the terms got extracted, I categorized these as either gaming or non-gaming terms,
regardless if it was a Gamer or Non-Gamer who expressed it. If it was marked as a gaming term
expressed by a Gamer participant, it was also marked as a gaming term if a Non-Gamer
participant expressed it.

For general words, such as jungle, mirage (a playable court in Counter Strike: Global Offensive
(Valve Corporation, 2012)) or leveling that easily could be put into a grey zone, I reasoned as
such that if the term described a detail in the game that is of importance to the gameplay, I
marked it as a gaming term.

4 Results
In this section, I will present the differences between Gamers’ and Non-Gamers’ use of gaming
terms and how and if the gamer participants adapted or adjusted their lexicon when speaking to
either Gamer or Non-Gamer. I begin with a presentation of the production of gaming terms
across the groups.

4.1 Gaming terms: Production across groups

As expected, Gamers produced gaming terms to a considerably larger lexical density than Non-
Gamers (see Table 3). In total, the participants used almost 4600 content words, evenly
distributed across Gamers and Non-Gamers. Out of the total amount of content words,
approximately 9.27% gaming terms were produced by the Gamer group, respectively 1.69% by
the Non-Gamer-group, as seen in Table 3.

Table 3. Amount of gaming terms (n) and content words across all participants, divided into respective Gamer or
Non-Gamer. (n = amount of gaming words that occurred in the total amount of content words.)
Group Gaming terms Total content words
Gamer 9.27% (n = 212) 2286
Non-Gamer 1.69% (n = 39) 2303

34
Table 4 presents that Gamers produced gaming terms close to six times the amount of the other
two groups. Gamers/Non-Gamers produced a higher amount of content words meanwhile the
Gamer/Gamer group produced the least followed by Non-Gamer/Non-Gamer group, following
the same structure for non-gaming terms where Gamer/Non-Gamer produced the most.

Table 4. Amount of content words across the three groups.

Pair Gaming term Non-gaming terms Total content words % gaming terms of content words
GG 180 1151 1331 13.52%
GNG 41 1740 1781 2.30%
NGNG 30 1447 1477 2.03%

Table 5-7 presents the amount of gaming terms that each dyad in each group uttered as well as
the total count of content words. The participant identification codes are shown as A1-6 for
Gamer/Gamer, B3-6 for Gamer/Non-Gamer and finally C1-6 for Non-Gamer/Non-Gamer.

Table 5. Amount of gaming terms and content words in the Gamer/Gamer-group and how many gaming terms
each participant used.
Gamer / Gamer
Dyad Gaming terms Total content words Participant 1 Participant 2
A1+A6 66 283 A1 = 32 gaming terms A6 = 34 gaming terms
A2+A5 60 463 A2 = 38 gaming terms A5 = 22 gaming terms
A3+A4 54 585 A3 = 36 gaming terms A4 = 18 gaming terms

Table 6. Amount of gaming terms and content words in the Gamer/Non-Gamer-group and how many gaming
terms each participant used.
Gamer / Non-Gamer
Dyad Gaming terms Total content words Participant 1 Participant 2
B1+B5 13 385 B1 (G) = 11 gaming terms B5 = 2 gaming terms
B2+B6 15 770 B2 (G) = 9 gaming terms B6 = 6 gaming terms
B3+B4 13 626 B3 (G) = 12 gaming terms B4 = 1 gaming terms

Table 7. Amount of gaming terms and content words in the Non-Gamer/Non-Gamer-group and how many gaming
terms each participant used.
Non-Gamer / Non-Gamer
Dyad Gaming terms Total content words Participant 1 Participant 2
C1+C6 22 747 C1 = 10 gaming terms C6 = 12 gaming terms
C2+C4 6 283 C2 = 4 gaming terms C4 = 2 gaming terms
C3+C5 2 447 C3 = 2 gaming terms C5 = 0 gaming terms

When split across the dialogue pairs, it was found that the Gamer/Gamer pairs were responsible
for most gaming terms (see Table 3 and 7). The other pairs (Gamer/Non-Gamer and Non-
Gamer/Non-Gamer), produced a similar amount of gaming terms. This shows that a) gamers

35
adjust their vocabulary when speaking to a Non-Gamer, and b) there is a generally higher
amount of gaming terms used by Non-Gamers.

4.2 Gaming terms: Types and Tokens

In this section, the 15 most common gaming terms from both groups will be presented. These
are shown in Table 8 and 9 (for a full list of the gaming terms that occurred, see Appendix 5)
with a short description of how I describe the words in relation to gaming and the material from
the study. We will look at what kind of gaming terms that appeared (types) as well as how often
these individual words were used (tokens).

Table 8. Gaming terms and their frequency across Gamers.

Gaming term Description of the term based on the author’s Occurences
interpretation of the study stimuli
secret an ability hidden for the enemy player in HS 10
hunter playable character in HS 8
bot lane the lower road on the map in LOL 6
death match the deciding round between two or more players in FN 5
explosive trap a specific playable card in HS 5
nami a certain character with special abilities in LOL 5
mage a character gifted with magical powers in the fantasy genre 5
djungel a forest-like area with monster camps in LOL 5
(jungle)
team mate your allied playing in your team 5
teamfight a clash and fight between two opposite teams 4
elemental a mythic force that can be used by magical beings 4
shaman a character that is spiritual and practices consciousness 4
lol abbreviation for League of Legends 4
pickaxe a tool for gathering materials in FN 4
hound a specific card with dog like characters in HS 3

Table 8 presents that gaming terms produced by the Gamers, tended to be in English. What
seems to be a pattern is that the words were names of characters (nami), attributes (secret), tools
(pickaxe) or weapons (explosive trap) that described important information about the game
itself. Another notable result is that the word secret appeared the most in this group, followed
by hunter. In this data, there is a scarce amount of gaming terms that describe the environment
in-game.

36
Table 9. Gaming terms and their frequency across Non-Gamers.
Gaming term (NG) Description of the term based on the author’s Occurences
interpretation of the study stimuli
secret an ability hidden for the enemy player in HS 8
hound a specific card with dog like characters in HS 4
mage a character gifted with magical powers in the 3
fantasy genre
end turn ending the player’s turn and switch turn to the 3
enemy player
lol abbreviation for the game League of Legends 2
first person shooter a shooting game played from your viewpoint 2
förstapersons-perspektiv seeing the camera angle from your viewpoint 2
(first person perspective)
point of view from a specific player or character’s viewpoint 2
close up viewing from a very close camera angle 1
pubg abbreviation for the game PlayerUnknown’s 1
Battleground
wow abbreviation for the game World of Warcraft 1
förstaperson often refers to the camera angle 1
(first person)
actions deeds that someone or something acts upon 1
devil’s mark a specific playable card in HS 1
andrahands-perspektiv seeing the camera angle from another person’s 1
(secondhand perspective) perspective

Table 9 presents Non-Gamers’ most produced gaming terms and presented are words like
secret, followed by hound and mage. There were several instances of words that described the
camera view from the player’s perspective, like first person shooter, which in this specific
example is the name of a game genre as well. Games that were not part of the study (pubg,
wow) as well as attributes in specific games (devil’s mark) appeared as well.

The distinct difference between the two groups is that Non-Gamers used more general gaming
terms like point of view and mage. By contrast, Gamers used more genre-specific terms like bot
lane (a term specific to Multi Online Battle Arena games) and game-specific terms like nami
(the name of a character in League of Legends). What both groups had in common is their
frequent use of the word secret.

Table 10 and 11 show the frequency of how many times the 15 most common gaming terms
were used by Gamers or Non-Gamers when speaking to either another Gamer or Non-Gamer.

37
Table 10. Frequency of how many times the 15 most frequently used gaming terms by Gamers occurred between
Gamers (G)/Gamers (G) and Gamers (G)/Non-Gamers (NG).
Gaming term Occurences G - G Occurences G - NG Total occurences
secret 5 5 10
hunter 8 0 8
bot lane 5 1 6
death match 5 0 5
explosive trap 5 0 5
nami 3 2 5
mage 5 0 5
djungel
(jungle) 4 1 5
team mate 5 0 5
teamfight 2 2 4
elemental 4 0 4
shaman 4 0 4
lol 4 0 4
pickaxe 2 2 4
hound 3 0 3

Based on the data in Table 10, there is a clear indication that Gamers produced the majority of
the gaming words when consciously knowing that they spoke to another gamer and adjusted
their use of gaming terms when speaking to someone who is not. The word secret was used
between Gamers/Gamers and Gamers/Non-Gamers equally.

Table 11. Frequency of how many times the 15 most frequently used gaming terms by Non-Gamers occurred
between Non-Gamers (NG)/Non-Gamers (NG) and Non-Gamers (NG)/Gamers (G).
Occurences NG -
Gaming term NG Occurences NG - G Total occurences
secret 7 1 8
hound 4 0 4
mage 3 0 3
end turn 1 2 3
lol 2 0 2
first person shooter 1 1 2
förstapersons-perspektiv
(first person perspective) 2 0 2
point of view 2 0 2
close up 1 0 1
pubg 1 0 1
wow 1 0 1
förstaperson
(first person) 1 0 1

38
actions 0 1 1
devil's mark 1 0 1
andrahands-perspektiv
(secondhand perspective) 1 0 1

The Non-Gamer group had a higher occurrence of gaming terms when speaking to another Non-
Gamer than to a Gamer (Table 11). As presented in Table 6, there was one dyad of Non-
Gamer/Non-Gamer participants that produced a much larger amount of gaming terms than the
rest of the Non-Gamer group.

4.3 Differences between Gamers’ and Non-Gamers’

descriptions from the study
As expected, Gamers did adjust their vocabulary when speaking to a Non-Gamer participant.
During the study, a notable fact is that most Gamers tried to teach a Non-Gamer the basics of
the game or what in-game items, attributes, areas or characters were named or called, what
type of function they had or what they entailed. Following is an example where a Gamer
explained the game that the Non-Gamer just described:

Det var andra klippet du beskrev. Det är ett spel som heter Fortnite, det har exploderat, det
är väldigt populärt just nu, det är väldigt många ungdomar som spelar det man kan spela det
på mobilen, på datorn, på konsol och det är gratis. Det handlar om att man hoppar ner på en
ö och så ska man vara den sista som överlever, antingen själv eller i lag.

’It was the second clip you described. It is a game called Fortnite, it have exploded, it is very
popular right not, there are a lot of youths that plays it, you can play it on your phone,
computer, console and it is free. It is about that one can jump down on an island and then you
are supposed to be the last on surviving, either alone or in a team.’

Non-Gamers tended to focus their attention on the environment, describing its similarities to
the real world. They also mentioned the angle of where the observer was seeing the game from.
For League of Legends clips, Gamers would describe a specific forest section filled with
monsters with the term djungel (2). The word jungle is the conventional word used by League

39
of Legends players to designate this specific area. By contrast, Non-Gamers frequently used in
the woods, forest or field (1) in their descriptions:

1. Vi är i en skogsmiljö kan man säga fast i någon slags glänta.

‘you can kinda say that we are in a forest environment but in some kind of clearing’

2. Du befinner dig på i, i en såkallad djungel.

’you are in a so-called jungle’

The semantic meaning of the terms did differ as jungle (‘djungel’) was used differently between
a Gamer and a Non-Gamer. Gamers used jungle as a means to describe the area previously
described in League of Legends, whereas Non-Gamers applied it in the sense of describing a
jungle-like area in the environment.

5 Discussion
In this section, I discuss the results in relation to the aim of this thesis. As a reminder, this study
aims to investigate the following questions:

• What lexicon characterizes gaming language?

• To what extent do Gamers and Non-Gamers use game-specific and genre-specific
words?
• To what extent do Gamers adjust their vocabulary dependent of the interlocutor’s
knowledge of videogames?

I will discuss these questions in the following sections with question one as our main framework,
before reviewing the predictions in Section 5.4, followed by my own proposal of a model that
can help describe the lexicon and jargon of a social community like gamers, taken into
consideration what I have discussed regarding the data from this study.

40
5.1 Specializations
As presented in Table 3, the amount of gaming terms that the Gamer participants uttered were
a lot more compared with the Non-Gamer participants data. There is a clear difference when
Gamers are describing videogames or gaming to another Gamer, in contrast to a Non-Gamer,
and was characterized by common words that had established another meaning in a videogame
setting, such as jungle.

In Section 2, I presented Havránek’s (1932/1983) discussion of specialization in languages in

which you cannot use one jargon instead of another, and that jargons got a gradual difference
of intelligibility – definiteness – accuracy, in which the more accurate side of the spectrum
shows a higher level of expertise in the specific jargon. Like Havránek, Laurén (1997) discusses
how technolects and minilects are different types of jargons in which technolects are closer to
an expert language, and minilects do not require expertise in the domain.

In Section 2.3, I discussed ludolect coined by Ensslin (2012) in which the author puts ludolect
on a scale of more technical speech (highly specialized) and speech that is more accessible.
What all these three have in common is that all jargons got a gradual scale of more complicated
terminology connected to the interest of the language speakers, to a more general terminology,
closer to a daily standard language.

The distinction can be made by categorizing all the terms in the study to specific semantic fields,
that are assigned to a level of specialization. In other words, a game-specific semantic field
would be closer related to the technical end of the spectrum than a genre-specific field.

5.2 Semantic meaning

• To what extent do Gamers and Non-Gamers use game-specific and genre-specific
words?

If it is possible for a Non-Gamer to understand the description made from one Gamer to another,
comes down to whether the Non-Gamer understands the context of it. To put it into perspective,

41
if we look at a game of poker, someone who does not have any knowledge about the game will
have a hard time understanding terminology such as check-raise on turn.

Moreover, established terms in gaming language can have another meaning than in the daily
standard language that we are familiar with (e.g. secret), similar to the study by Álvarez de Mon
Rego and Álvarez-Bolado Sánchez (2013), who discovered that many familiar words in general
Spanish had another meaning in the domain of videogames, see Section 2.1.

For instance, presented in Table 10, both groups used the word secret the most and in this
specific case, the word does not only mean that one is kept from knowledge of something. In
the video clips of the game Hearthstone (2014), there were instances where the player had a
playable card that was hidden until a specific action happened, and when it did, the card got
into play and a big pop-up image with the word secret appeared over the screen. This image
showing up on the computer screen also provides an explanation as to why Gamers produced
the word irrespectively of talking to another Gamer or Non-Gamer.

In Section 2, I described how the development and expansion of IT and social media have
allowed the use and creation of computer-mediated communication. These types of
communications are supposed to be a way to quickly convey a message, and in the results, there
were instances of abbreviations like lol (League of Legends) and fps (e.g. first-person shooter),
a characteristic related to online languages (Gunnarsdotter Grönberg, 2013; Zähres, 2017).

5.2.1 Semantic field

Based on the results from the study, there is a clear difference between Gamers’ and Non-
Gamers’ data in Table 8 and 9. Gamers produced a larger amount of game-specific terms, like
hunter, bot lane and nami, in contrast to the Non-Gamer participants that used terms that were
mostly genre-specific like mage, first person shooter and point of view. This is an indication
that gaming language include different types of semantic fields, which I will argue in Section
5.5 that these semantic fields can behave more specialized, the further the lexicon branches out
(see Figure 1c).

42
5.3 Production of gaming terms
• To what extent do Gamers adjust their vocabulary dependent of the interlocutor’s
knowledge of videogames?

The Gamers produced a larger amount of gaming terms than the other two groups of
Gamer/Non-Gamer and Non-Gamer/Non-Gamer, up to five to six times more. This finding is
not surprising, as we have already covered this fact in the background of this thesis, that social
communities often use a specialized type of language when communicating within the said
community. This result demonstrates how a speaker of a certain discourse, in this case gaming
language, can decide to adjust their language depending on the receiver of the information. In
other words, there is a change in the lexicon, but also, the speaker takes on another identity
more suitable for the context (Gee, 2014).

Non-Gamers use of gaming terms tended to be focused on the environment in the game, or the
camera positioning. A notable fact presented in Table 11 is that Non-Gamers use of gaming
terms, in majority, occurred together with another Non-Gamer, which is a surprising finding.
However, there was a dyad that behaved anomaly, which I will present in Section 5.3.1, that
could be the possible reason as to why I received this data.

Gamers, however, uttered a higher amount of gaming terms that described crucial information
for the gameplay, in other words, Gamers had a larger production of game-specific terms when
speaking to another Gamers (even if these game-specific terms did occur a few times with a
Non-Gamer participant), see Table 10 (Havránek, 1932/1983; Laurén, 1997). This finding
indicates that Gamers’ lexicon become more specialized when speaking to another participant
within the same social community.

The results also present how most of the gaming terms, tended to be in English. Since the study
was carried out in Swedish, it was not a surprising finding that the morphology of the Swedish
language got applied to these words, as this is in the linguistic field, very common for loan
words in general. The difference between Gamers’ and Non-Gamers’ descriptions, is
manifested in the lexicon and not in grammatical patterns, speech pronunciation etc.

43
5.3.1 Non-Gamers/Non-Gamers behaving anomaly
The results in Table 7 presents an unexpected large amount of gaming terms in the Non-
Gamer/Non-Gamer-group. This was due to one dyad that behaved differently from the other
participants, producing 22 out of a total of 30 gaming terms. In the questionnaire about their
gaming habits, these two participants were found to have a generally larger knowledge about
gaming than the other Non-Gamer participants. These participants had previous acquaintances
with videogames, mostly due to friends being gamers or they had tried online games before
(proven by the questionnaire). Their experience with videogames explains why they produced
more gaming terms than the rest of the Non-Gamers. If the data from this dyad would be
removed and the participants exchanged, the result would most likely prove that the Non-
Gamer/Non-Gamer-group produced less gaming terms than the other two groups (following the
same pattern as the other dyads’ results in the NGNG-group), resulting in GG-grouping to
produce the most gaming terms, followed by the GNG-group and lastly, the NGNG group. This
is an indication of how important it is for a speaker of a certain discourse to convey information
correctly to the receiver and therefore adjusting their speech.

5.4 Review of the predictions

In this section, I will present the results based on the predictions presented in Section 2.5.

1. Gamers will speak with gaming terminology when in a social setting with another Gamer.
2. Non-Gamers will not use gaming terminology when describing games to the listener.
3. Gamers will minimize the use of gaming terminology when speaking to a Non-Gamer.

In prediction 1, that gamers would speak with gaming terminology in a social setting with
another gamer, was clearly the case. If we look at the difference of gaming terms used by the
two groups of Gamers and Non-Gamers, we find that the Gamers produced a larger amount of
gaming terminology with another Gamer. If the participants had known each other’s
backgrounds of videogaming better, the amount of gaming terms produced would most likely
have turned out even higher. This is mainly because that the participants would probably be
more confident in using gaming terms if they knew that their study partner understands the level
of specificity.

44
Regarding prediction 2, Non-Gamers produced similar amount of content words in contrast to
Gamers, but approximately 5.5 times fewer gaming words were used. However, there were still
a few gaming terms produced by Non-Gamers. This means that this study cannot verify this
prediction. Although, these gaming terms that occurred could be explained by being much more
accessible, like Ensslin’s General media discourse described in Section 2.3 (Ensslin, 2012: 67).

The results did however verify prediction 3. Gamers in grouping Gamer/Non-Gamer used much
fewer gaming terms in contrast to the Gamer/Gamer-group, most likely due to the participants
in the Gamer/Non-Gamer-group were aware that their study partner had very little as to none
experience of videogames. Just as Havránek (1983) discusses regarding adjusting your speech
depending on the context (see Section 2.1), the communication adjusted depending on the
context, purpose and environment that the speaker and listener were residing in. For instance,
the participants were asked to introduce themselves as Gamer or Non-Gamer, which led to the
participants adjusting their vocabulary to who they were speaking with.

In Section 4.2, I noted that the Non-Gamer/Non-Gamer group produced a surprising amount of
gaming terms. As it turns out, a single pair deviated from the rest of the group5. If the pair would
not have deviated from the rest of the group, the amount of gaming terms in contrast to the other
two groupings would have been even fewer.

5.5 The Bridge of Gaming Lingo

Based on the result of the study and inspired by Ensslin’s (2012) scale of ludolect (see Section
2.2), and Havránek’s (1932/1983) discussion of specialization of language (see Section 2.1), as
well as what I have presented regarding semantic fields in Section 2.4, I would like to present
my own illustration and model of specialized language, with gaming language as an example,
based on results from this study.

Gaming language is a type of jargon, where there are technical and accessible varieties among
gamers. To put this into perspective, a technical gaming jargon would be that of a professional

5
These two participants produced 22 out of 30 gaming terms in the Non-Gamer-group.

45
player, meanwhile an accessible gaming jargon would be similar to Ensslin’s General media
discourse. I would avoid treating this as a cline from highly specialized or highly accessible,
since the gaming language might not be specialized and technical in the same way as for
instance, the medical speech used in a hospital. Gaming language is not behaving as a highly
specialized type of technolect: it is used in a social setting with the intent to communicate with
other gamers than of a setting of science where research data is mainly presented and in medical
jargons where the right term is of essence. With Ensslin’s proposal of ludolect (Ensslin, 2012),
gaming language might be applicable to sport jargons, as sports are games as well, however,
the difference between those is the use of military type of speech in most competitive team-
based videogames. I would therefore argue that the semantic fields are different and by putting
all “game” terms into the same semantic field, we encounter the issues of what Crystal (2010)
discusses regarding words that can be put into several semantic fields and words that are
difficult to categorize.

Jargons and their flexibility can be exemplified with the help of gaming language, as shown in
Figure 3. This illustration shows that a jargon like gaming language behaves more elastically
than already existing classifications. If this is applicable to other jargons, however, remains an
open question for future research. I would expect that this model would be more applicable to
for instance sport jargons than medical terminology, since the former is, just as gaming
language not as specifically accurate as the latter.

Figure 4. An illustration of the flexibility of jargons with the help of gaming language as
demonstration.

46
The illustration shows two persons, P1 (Player 1) and P2 (Player 2) standing on a bridge
(gaming language as a whole), similar to the gradual scale of Ensslin’s ludolect. L1-3 and R1-
3 illustrates what could be called environments where the language user is residing, for instance,
context and their level of knowledge within it. These environments are different levels of
specialized gaming jargons, where the language users (P1 and P2) are in the suitable
environment for them. On the left end side, we have more specialized (technical) environment
of a Pro (professional) jargon and on the opposite side the Noob (newbie, new player) jargon
which as mentioned previously is similar to Ensslin’s General media discourse.

As the two are having a conversation about games, P1’s level of environment is more
specialized (L2) than P2 (environment R1). For this reason, P2 cannot meet P1 in the L2
environment because the level of gaming language is too advanced for him. But what they both
can do is to meet halfway. P1 will therefore most likely adjust its vocabulary so that P2 can
understand the information. It can be difficult to know exactly how much P1 got to adjust its
vocabulary which forces P2 to eventually learn new terms. Just like in the study conducted for
this thesis, the result showed that Gamers tended to adjust their vocabulary depending on the
interlocutor’s knowledge of videogames. Both Gamers and Non-Gamers did their best to
convey information to each other, which made Gamers use as few gaming terms as possible
and Non-Gamers the few they did know about. They met halfway.

Similar to what Ensslin said about ludolect having varieties, gaming jargons that are game
specific is represented with a new bridge, inspired by the tree diagrams over semantic fields.
Even if P2 were first located in environment R1, P2 now resides in R1 because P2 have a bit of
expertise of a game specific terminology. How did this happen? Let us imagine that P2 is in a
position where they are very skilled and dedicated players of a specific game title, World of
Warcraft for an example. Then it would not matter if P1 was more pro in one field, if P1 have
very little as to no knowledge of the game P2 was playing. The same procedure starts over again
where they meet each other halfway in an environment that is suitable for both. In this case,
since the knowledge gap in the game specific setting is much broader, P2 will have to move
closer to P1 meanwhile P1 advances one tier by improving their vocabulary of gaming terms.

This model proposes that Gamers adjust their vocabulary within gaming language but need to
meet the other person on the bridge, who does not have as much experience, since it involves

47
users with different levels of knowledge, in other words, the speaker and the receiver needs to
understand the semantic field and the lexicon within this specific semantic field in order to fully
understand each other. Similar to what I discussed in 2.1 regarding Havránek’s (1932/1983: 35)
gradual difference and division of jargons, my model proposes that one need to adjust their
speech depending on the context of the communication and the level of expertise the listener
has in it. This is fully supported by the data from this study in which Gamer participants adjusted
their lexicon in order to convey correct information to the Non-Gamer participants.

The more accurate, the more it behaves like a more technical language. It also proposes that
gaming language have genre- and game-specific jargons in which the Gamers are in different
environments, again, depending on their level of expertise in this specific game. In other words,
I propose that gaming language got several different types of jargons with their own semantic
fields and should not be put into already existing classifications, like the domain of computer-
technology or ludolect. Like proposed by Álvarez de Mon & Álvarez-Bolado (2013), gaming
language is a specialized language as well as a general language and involves users with
different levels of expertise. In step with the digitalization in our modern world, I am positive
that languages created online, like gaming language, will expand, and gamers will create new
types of jargons, creating new and bigger semantic fields and expanding its lexicon.

6 Conclusion
In this section, I begin with a short overview of the analysis from the discussion and continue
with a method discussion. Finally, I present a few proposals for further research.

The study found that the gamers speak differently depending on whether they are talking to
another Gamer or to a Non-Gamer. The data indicates that gamers adjust their vocabulary from
a much more common and accessible gaming terminology, to a more specialized terminology
depending on the listener’s knowledge and experience of videogames, similar to what Havránek
proposed of the importance that one uses a language depending on its aim and specific setting
and what Ensslin (2012) proposed as a gradual scale of highly technical to highly accessible
languages.

48
As to the lexicon of a Gamer’s compared to Non-Gamer’s description of videogame clips and
how the lexicon is characterized, the following concluding remarks have been proven by this
study:
The Gamers produced more specialized terms, these terms can be put into two different
semantic fields: genre-specific and game-specific. However, when speaking to a Non-Gamer,
the Gamers adjusted their speech and use of words, therefore switching lexicon to a daily
standard language that the Non-Gamer participant could fully comprehend.

The standard language in gaming language seem to be English and since the study was carried
out in Swedish, some of the words took on the morphology of Swedish. This is, however, very
common with loan words from English.

This study has shown that language users that have knowledge of a specific semantic field can
use the terms to their advantage in order to improve the communication when speaking to
another language user of the same social community, or instead decide to use standard language
when speaking to someone outside of the social community. This is from a linguistic
perspective an interesting finding since it proves how flexible language users are and how
important it is to them that the information they convey will be clearly understood by the
receiver.

6.1 Method discussion

The choice of designing an elicitation method have proven to be efficient for answering the
questions in this thesis, however it did come with a couple of drawbacks, one of them being
that the participants could describe a clip in detail which caused the conversation to be very
long, causing a lot of time resource. However, this was not an issue since it enabled participants
to speak freely.

Another drawback were the clips. The video clips were very different from one another, which
led to very detailed descriptions and led participants to provide a lot of details in the early part
of the session, before the participants realized that there were such large differences of the
gameplay in the clips that it would not matter for the task if the clips were described in detail

49
or not. This could have been solved by making the clips and gameplay and game environment
more alike which perhaps would have led to more gaming terms being used.

A third drawback was the location. Instead of performing the study virtually, the participants
had to visit Lund University. This caused a lot of participants canceling their participation last
minute as well as participants not being able to attend due to work or lectures, limiting the
possibility to find participants in the area that could qualify as a participant. However, by
conducting the study in a quiet and controlled environment enabled the participants to not be
disturbed by their surroundings, making the data much more fluid.

6.2 Proposal for further research

Writing this thesis and conducting the study led not only to findings but also to more questions
and possible paths for future studies on other social communities and the importance of terms
and their meanings within specific domains as this thesis have presented that there is a semantic
difference in many terms.

My first proposal is to conduct a similar study like in this thesis and look specifically at
professional gamers’ and casual gamers’ lexicon, speed and frequency of words per second.

My second proposal is to study if gamers’ lexicon got the same kind of characteristics in
countries where English is not as common as a mother tongue or second language, like in East
Asian countries where videogames are highly popular. Does it differ from the gaming language
used in the Western world where the majority speaks English as their L2 (second language)? I
would expect that the lexicon might be similar to what the study in this thesis have shown but
that there might be a difference in choice of terms that lies closer to the participants’ mother
tongue, or use of expressions that are common in these countries but difficult to understand for
a foreigner, i.e cultural differences. From the present thesis, I presented that gamers produced
gaming terms in English most likely due to the default language of the games being English
and the access to the online world in which a lot of people speak English as lingua franca.

50
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Appendix 1

Information till deltagare i studien “Gamingspråk mellan gamers och icke-

gamers”

Syftet med denna studie är att analysera gamers och icke-gamers språkliga kommunuikation.
Studie är en del av Catarina Hsus kandidatuppsats inom Allmän Språkvetenskap vid Lunds
Universitet.

Studien följer de etiska riktlinjerna för forskningsprojekt vid Språk- och litteraturcentrum,
Lunds Universitet, Sverige.

Studieprocessen

Studien består av ett antal videoklipp där två deltagare per studietillfälle ombeds genomföra
en enklare uppgift vardera. Du som deltagare kommer med största sannolikhet dela med dig
utav din egen erfarenhet av ämnet. Studien kommer att bli video- och röstinspelad men Du
som deltagare är anonym.

Studien tar 30-45 minuter. Du som deltagare kan när som helst välja att avbryta studien utan
att ange något skäl.

Vad används informationen till?

Samtliga inspelningar kommer att transkriberas och analyseras. Datan kommer att
anonymiseras och är enbart tillgänglig för projektmedlemmarna (projektledare, handledare,
examinatorer) och lagras på extern lagringsverktyg (USB-sticka, hårddisk, SD-kort).

Ingen information som kan avslöja Din identitet kommer att rapporteras, varken i
kandidatuppsatsen eller presentationen.

Vi är intresserade av varje individs egna erfarenhet av gamingspråk och detta uttrycks i

språkanvändning. Information kring detta kommer att redovisas i uppsatsen.

Om du inte längre vill deltaga i denna studie, vänligen kontakta projektledaren för att få din
data borttagen. Detta är enbart möjligt innan resultatet från studien inte har blivit publicerad
eller presenterad.
53
Du är välkommen att kontakta projektledaren om du har några frågor eller funderingar.

Om allting stämmer och känns bra, vänligen skriv under denna samtyckesblankett på nästa
sida.

Härmed bekräftar jag mitt deltagande i studien “Gamingspråk mellan gamers och icke-
gamers” samt har förstått och accepterar det som står i detta document.

Jag förstår och accepterar att informationen eventuellt kan bli publicerad och användas för
kommande forskning.

Datum, ort Namn Signatur

Tack för Ditt deltagande!

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Appendix 2
Instruktioner till deltagare
Denna studie utförs i par, där ni vid studietillfället får reda på om er motpart definierar sig
som gamer eller icke-gamer. Detta kan eventuellt vara bra att ha i åtanke under
genomförandet av uppgifterna nedan.

Ni kommer att bli tilldelade varsin roll: Informant och Observant.

Därefter kommer ni att få se totalt 16 stycken videoklipp som fördelas lika mellan er.
Dessa videoklipp är 20-25sekunder långa.
Ni byter roller efter hälften av videoklippen.

I syfte att ni känner er säkra på era uppgifter kommer ni att få ett par testrundor innan den
riktiga studien startar.

Informantens uppgift:
Din uppgift som Informant är att enskilt se på ett videoklipp i taget.
Efter varje enskilt videoklipp: Beskriv händelseförloppet samt detaljerna kring händelsen och
involverade parter för den som är Observant.
Beskriv gärna så mycket som möjligt av det du uppfattade i klippen.

Notera att det inte är av stor betydelse om du inte kommer på ett specifikt ord eller
liknande, ta det som du tycker passar och beskriv utav bästa förmåga! Försök hålla ett
stadigt flöde.

Observantens uppgift:
Din uppgift som Observant är att noga försöka föreställa dig videoklippen som du får
beskrivet för dig av Informanten. Du får med andra ord inte se just dessa videoklipp.
Du får sedan efter att ha fått två klipp beskrivna för dig välja ut vilken som var vilken.

Exempel på procedur:
Informant beskriver videoklipp 1.
(Observant gör sitt bästa för att föreställa sig videoklippet.)

Informant fortsätter med att beskriva klipp 2.

(Observant gör ännu en gång sitt bästa för att föreställa sig videoklippet.)

Observant får nu se både videoklipp 1 och videoklipp 2 (dessa kan visas i annan ordning än
för Informanten) och ombeds peka ut vilken som var vilken.

55
Samma procedur börjar om, nu med två nya videoklipp till dess att den som är Informant
beskrivit totalt åtta videoklipp. Efter dessa åtta videoklipp byter ni roller.
Antal procedurer: 4 omgångar, totalt 4 videoklipp.

56
Appendix 3
Screenshots of all the games, from the clips used in the study.

Fortnite (Epic Games, 2017)

Hearthstone (Blizzard Entertainment, 2014)

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League of Legends (Riot Games, 2009)

Overwatch (Blizzard Entertainment, 2016)

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Appendix 4

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Appendix 5
All gaming terms uttered by the participants in the study, together with their frequency.

Gaming terms Total

Actions 1
Aggroar 1
Ambrosia 1
Ambushade 1
Ambushar 1
Andrahands-perspektiv 1
Attribut 2
Auto turret 1
Baita 1
Baren 1
Battle bus 1
Berserk 1
Blast gun 1
Blast gun-liknande 1
Blås jungel 1
Boss 1
Boss-karaktär 1
Bot lane 6
Brutal runda 1
Buffen 2
Caitlyn 1
Championsen 1
Charger 3
Close-up 1
Contestat 1
Creepsen 1
Death cam 2
Death match 5
Devil’s Mark 1
Dodga 1
Dome shield 1
Double 1
Elemental 3
Elementaln 1
End Turn 4
Explosive trap 5
Explosive trap-kort 1
Farmade 1

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Fight 2
Fighten 1
Fire elemental 1
First Person 1
First Person Shooter 2
First Person Shooter-
perspektiv 1
Force field 1
FPS 1
FPS-perspektivet 1
Förstaperson 1
Förstapersons 1
Förstapersons-perspektiv 2
Game 1
Gearas 1
Gears 1
Grapling hook 1
Gröna baren 1
Healad 1
Helad 1
Helade 1
Helar 1
Hoarda 1
Hoardad 1
Hound 7
Hound 7
Houndkort 1
Hunter 5
Hunter’s mark 1
Huntern 3
Items 1
Jungel 2
Jungeln 3
Jungle 1
Jungle-creepsen 1
Kastar 1
Kill 1
Kill feed 1
Lane 1
Lanen 1
LoL 6
Long range 1
Mage 5
Magen 3
Map 1

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Melee 2
Melee-vapen 2
Midlane 2
Mining pick 1
Minion 1
Minions 1
Misdirection 1
MOBA 2
Mobs 1
Nami 5
Nytt game 1
Orch hunter 2
Orch shaman 1
Over the shoulder 1
Pickaxe 4
Player versus player 1
Point of view 2
Potion 1
PUBG 1
Pusha 1
Pushar 1
Rankar 1
Resources 1
Respawn 1
Runda 1
Röda auto turret 1
Röda buffen 1
Secret 15
Secreten 1
Secret-kort 2
Secrets 2
Secret-slag 1
Shaman 3
Shamanen 1
Shoot off 2
Shooter 1
Shooters 1
Shotgun 3
Skin 1
Skinet 1
Snabbfire 1
Snabbfiring 1
Sneaka 1
Spawna 2
Spawnar 2

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Spawnsekvensen 1
Spell 1
Storm 1
Survivalspel 1
Swarmad 1
Tank 1
Team battle 1
Team fight 3
Team mate 2
Team maten 1
Team mates 2
Teamfighten 1
Third person 2
Trap 1
Trapar 1
Trap-card 2
Tredjeperson 1
Triple 1
Triple kill 1
Turbaserat 1
Twitch-streamer 1
Twitch-streamern 1
Utzoomad 1
Victory 1
Vladimir 1
WoW 1

72