Thursday, September 23, 2010

Video Games' Influence on Language

I've been searching for articles about the influence of video games on popular culture, primarily on language, but it seems like the topic hasn't been researched enough to provide the solid evidence that some people demand.  The closest thing I found was a blog written by a student at Stanford University but even that is still a work in progress.

Increasingly over the past few years there have been a number of words from gamer lingo that have managed to slip out into pop culture (although I haven't been around long enough to know the exact origin of each).

- Noob
- Woot
- 1337
- Fail (as an interjection)
- pwn
- epic (not poetic kind)

...and possibly more that I'm also not aware of.

Many people that have picked up these words have no idea they came from video games. They may have never even played one in their life. I'm anxious to study this phenomenon more in depth and figure out not only how these words go from the virtual world to reality, but also why some words make it and others don't.

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