Lexicography

After so many pages of dense theorizing concerning nigh-inaccessible ideological positions using elitist vocabulary, I thought I’d go on to something a little less stressful next: lexicography—the compilation of dictionaries.

Lexicography is one small part of lexicology (the study of the structure and history of a particular language), which itself falls under the scientific umbrella of linguistics. We’ve already met sociolinguistics in the context of anthropology; other major subfields include phonetics, syntax, semantics, and translation, none of which touch on virtual worlds very much (which isn’t to say that they shouldn’t). Three other subfields of linguistics do have something to say about virtual worlds, however: cognitive science and computational linguistics (which I file with artificial intelligence), and language acquisition (which comes under education). This leaves lexicography, with a dash of lexicology as a context.

Virtual worlds are great for learning foreign languages. They’re great for learning your mother tongue, come to that. They’re also great for the development of new terms. This is why lexicographers are interested in them.

There are two opposing stances on the purpose of dictionaries. One, the prescriptive view, is that dictionaries tell you what words actually mean, as opposed to what certain individuals might think they mean. By ensuring that everyone uses the same words in the same way, clarity is maintained and the subtle interrelationships between words are upheld. The contrary, descriptive view, is that dictionaries are for recording words as they are used, its not being the business of the lexicographer to make judgments about the “correctness” of usage.

As an example, a prescriptive dictionary will tell you that the word “enormity” means “extreme wickedness” (as in “when the enormity of his murderous deeds sank in”), whereas a descriptive dictionary will add that it means “huge scale” (as in “when the enormity of her tennis victory sank in”). Initially, as they struggled to formalize spellings and dialect terms, dictionaries were prescriptive. There were even “dictionary wars,” in which rival lexicographers vied to have their version accepted as definitive—sometimes for very political reasons ¹.

Nowadays, though, dictionaries are mainly descriptive. They do give the “correct” meaning of a word, but report it as “archaic” if it is; upstart new meanings come in as “informal.” Pedants may lament the passing of prescriptive dictionaries, but languages do change. The word “enormous” meant “extremely wicked” back in the 1500s.

So, how do modern dictionaries define virtual worlds? Basically, they don’t. This is not surprising for two reasons:

• Players disagree over what virtual worlds are called (which is why I began this book by defining the terms I’d be using).

• Virtual worlds are an online phenomenon that lexicographers don’t necessarily know exists.

There are many hundreds of dictionaries around, of course, and some undoubtedly do have references to virtual world terms if not virtual worlds themselves. I’m certain that the mighty Oxford English Dictionary ² does, because one of their lexicographers phoned me to ask me where the acronym “MUD” first appeared in print ³. In general, though, definitions have been limited to specialist lexicographies. The first time I saw “MUD” was in a 1991 dictionary of personal computing ⁴, which referred only to MUD1 and not MUDs in general; it did, however, have a definition of MUG as an abbreviation for “multiuser game” (although apart from directing the reader to the definition for MUD, that was the sum of it).

Doubtless this situation will change as lexicographers latch on to the fact that virtual worlds are played by more people than read their dictionaries, and are therefore worthy of consideration. If they do, they may be tempted not only to define concepts such as “virtual world,” “avatar,” and “permanent death,” but also to look at the words that players use in everyday communication.

This is where, finally, it gets interesting.

Players of virtual worlds often develop new words (or, as with “avatar,” new meanings for old words) to label things that they find important. The same applies for any subculture, of course; indeed, one of the signifiers of a subculture is the development of its own jargon. Knowledge of jargon terms can be used to erect barriers between a subculture and its mainstream culture; if someone doesn’t know what a term means, or misapplies it, that flags them as an outsider. Academics, for example, will frequently drop the names of other academics in conversation to sum up viewpoints or ideals in a single word; this isn’t deliberately to be exclusive, but if you don’t know the work to which they’re referring then it can have that effect. For example, if I were talking to someone I believed was an expert on identity issues in virtual worlds, I might in the course of the conversation refer to Sherry Turkle’s work expecting them to know what I meant; if they replied “Sherry who?,” I’d maybe wonder if they were indeed the expert they professed to be.

The use of jargon terms can define membership of a community. This can go two ways:

• The community excludes people who don’t use its jargon.

• The community includes people who learn its jargon.

For virtual worlds, we want the second of these: Newbies arrive, they don’t understand many of the terms, but in being taught them by members of the community they feel they are being accepted into the community (which is true—they are). It’s therefore in the interests of virtual world developers to ensure that there is a certain amount of jargon in their worlds, to help act as community glue.

For example, newbies to worlds like EverQuest will hear people referring to “mobs.” In the real world, the word “mob” means a large, unruly crowd; in virtual worlds, a “mob” is a computer-controlled monster. When players learn what a “mob” is, it draws them one step further into the community.

Some virtual world jargon comes from related subcultures. “Rooms” get their name because that’s what people called them in adventure games such as Zork. A good many words hail from the general computer hacker subculture, the jargon of which is maintained as the Jargon File ⁵ (published in book form as The New Hacker’s Dictionary ⁶). This work not only defines many commonly used words and phrases, but it is packed with interesting background notes and information; in places, it almost amounts to an historical record, rather than a mere noting of usage.

There are two comparatively large ⁷ dictionaries of terms that are used by players of virtual worlds. One of these, the Encyclopedia of MUDs Dictionary ⁸, covers textual virtual worlds in general; the other, the MUDspeke Dictionary ⁹, collates only those terms that have found favor in MUD2. There is some overlap between these, partly because of their common heritage and partly because of external factors. Some terms are more exportable than others, and are therefore more inclusive or exclusive.

Looking at the various terms that have found favor in virtual worlds, they can be classified along their lines of general utility as follows:

• Those exported into mainstream culture. “Wtf” (what the f**k?) has appeared in mainstream U.K. newspapers and magazines, as has “bot” (an intelligent conversational agent). Both began in virtual worlds.

• Those exported into a wider subculture. IRC users use “afk” (“away from keyboard”), “brb” (“be right back”) and “bbl” (“be back later”) because players of virtual worlds did (not that many IRC users know this).

• Those exported into other virtual worlds. “Rehi” (“hello again”), “mobile,” and “rl” (“real life”) are endemic across virtual worlds, but began in MUD1.

• Those not exportable to other virtual worlds. MUD2 players know who “the twins” are, but players of other virtual worlds wouldn’t because they don’t contain the objects to which the term refers.

• Those not exportable to the same virtual world at a different time in its history. Terms that mention characters by name are particularly prone to lose resonance over time. Others, however, inexplicably cling on. MUD2 players will say they “fetched” when their modem chokes on them, solely because a long-deceased specialist piece of client software that one incarnation of the world used would display the unhelpful message “fetch error” when this happened.

• Those that look exported but were probably reinvented independently. Mobile phone users don’t key in “b4” (“before”) or “thx” (“thanks”) because virtual world players did; they do it because it takes less time (which is precisely why virtual world players did it).

• Those that were exported but were reinventions in virtual worlds. People today use the word “newbie” because MUD1 players invented it, however unbeknown to those players they were merely reinventing a word that had been used in select British fee-paying schools for years.

As I noted in Chapter 3, from a game designer’s point of view a certain amount of jargon is a good thing. Too much can act as a barrier to newbies, of course, but too little can weaken a community’s hold on its members. Although I don’t recommend the out-and-out inventing of terms for the players to use, there’s no harm in ensuring that any idiosyncratic vocabulary that has arisen to fill a need during development of the game is passed on. Players use words like “shard” and “zone” because that’s what the designers and programmers called them. Members of the live team can, by frequently using a term (especially one invented by the players), make that term “official”—thereby greatly increasing its acceptability. Understanding any new term adds to a player’s stake in a virtual world. Jargon is your friend: Treat it well.

In her analysis ¹⁰ of the use of jargon in virtual worlds, Diane Shortt suggests that as more and more people play these worlds, specialist terms will seep more and more into the mainstream—just as hippie terms from the 1960s are now part of everyday speech. She sees this as an inevitable consequence of the increasing popularity of virtual worlds, but notes that players do express regret that “their” language is becoming less “theirs.”

Whether this seepage is a good thing or a bad thing, I’m not sure. On the face of it, it looks like it should be bad because jargon makes for community. However, if there are so many people playing these virtual worlds that their terminology has become mainstream, why worry?

A final note: As the “fetch” example illustrated, words can preserve history. For some virtual worlds, this may indeed be the only way that their history is preserved. Historians have yet to show any interest in virtual worlds at all—there’s no History section in this chapter—and yet some of these worlds have the potential to last almost indefinitely ¹¹. When culture is only maintained by word–of mouth, the words in those mouths are important. Dictionaries can be the gatekeepers of history; would your virtual world benefit from one?