The clan I play Counter-Strike with has been going out more and more to different servers, playing other clans. (Why are they called clans? Beats me. But they are.) The differences between various clans is really amazing. Our entire clan got banned from one server because they decided we were obviously cheating. More like they obviously suck. That one's gotten ugly, complete with them editing posts members from our clan made on their forums (our clan members did not, in fact, post entries about their sexual desires for their own sisters). Reading their posts, you realize that, really, they're just a bunch of 14 year olds who flunked out of school. At least they flunked out of English, given their spelling and grammar.
Others are far more mature, both some that we are much better than and those who are much better than us. They are Polite, gracious, and wanting to learn or willing to help us learn. There's a world of difference between deciding that the person who just killed you 'must be hacking' and asking how they did it so you can become a better player. I wonder what makes the difference between the two approaches. Is it age? Probably it's not quite that simple; I've met people my own age in this game who you would never guess were older than 14 from how they handle themselves. And I've met 15 year olds who are more mature than some of the adults, although that seems more unusual.
I also find myself amazed by the use of the English language. Or, rather, the total abuse of it. Some of it is intentional. There's a kind of 'hacker-speak' that's emerged where common words are deliberately misspelled, or numbers are substituted for letters, but in a basically consistent pattern. For example, an 'elite' player is referred to as 'l33t'. One recent change I've noticed is referring to someone 'pwning' (owning). I asked once, in IRC, where the hell these came from - who was it that decided that misspelling 'own' as 'pwn' was cool? A friend jokingly postulated that perhaps it was as simple as someone mistyping it once, then trying to cover it by claiming that it was cool, and then it caught on. He was joking, but maybe it really is that simple. At any rate, hacker-speak seems to be practically an entire dialect. There are even web pages that translate normal English into 'hacker-speak', although they don't seem to do a perfect job. I would find a translator that did the reverse more useful. Truth be told, hacker-speak looks pretty damned silly to me. But perhaps that's just my own bias ;)
Worse than hacker-speak, though, are people who genuinely have no clue how to use the English language. They can't spell, confuse every possibly homonym (they're - their - there, our - are, your - you're, etc.), and mangle grammar beyond anything I've ever seen. This isn't a dialect, this is just idiocy. While I can read through a fair amount of mistakes like this and still get the meaning, there are more and more posts that I read that are so badly mangled that I honestly haven't the slightest idea what the author is trying to say. Just none. It's kind of terrifying, in a way - do these people really write like this all the time? Are they just being lazy in the online postings? These are the same people who make comments like, "how in the hell do u have the time to type all that" in response to postings of more than 150 words. One person seemed to think that a friend of mine and I must have been using a computer program to write so many words (~500 words in three separate posts from us). Some people, I guess, really are this ignorant. Scary indeed.
Posted by Mike at August 8, 2002 04:30 PM