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Networked games and language

Thinking about the way One Hour One Life constrains the use of language by putting limits on message length (to represent the limited linguistic capabilities of young children) made me think about some other ways MMOs play with language.


In World of Warcraft, every player character (except for low-level pandaren, but they can’t interact with characters other than each other) is a member of one of two factions: the Alliance or the Horde, as determined by their race. All Alliance characters speak a language called Common, and all Horde characters speak Orcish. More race-specific languages like Gnomish and Troll exist as well, but they are rarely used. When you type a message into chat, you can choose what language to say it in from the list of languages your character speaks. When a character in your vicinity says something in a language you don’t speak, the game runs it through a cipher so that you see what looks like nonsense. This creates the illusion that the two sides speak different languages without depending on what languages the players actually speak. This helps emphasize the difference between the two factions in the narrative and also makes it more difficult for opposed players to flame each other.


In particular, when a Horde character says “lol” in Orcish, it displays to Alliance players as “kek.” Additionally, whenever any character says “lol,” they automatically do a laughing animation. This means that, for example, if you’re playing an Alliance character and you get ganked by some higher-level Horde, and then one of them remarks upon the absurdity of your death with a simple “lol,” you see them laugh while saying “kek.” It is easy to conclude, then, that kek is Orcish for lol, without having to do any intentional testing. As a result, kek has taken on the meaning of lol in some internet communities.


Interestingly, players usually don’t seem to try to circumvent developer restrictions on messaging in major ways. Someone could easily write a WoW addon that converts a message into a form that the unknown language cipher will convert back into the original message, for example, so that they can talk to the other side. But that hasn’t been done, or at the very least, it isn’t popular. People could also communicate long messages as small children in One Hour One Life by splitting them into multiple short messages, but in my time playing that game, I never saw anyone do that. Maybe players want to stick with the developer’s intent for restrictions on messages, or maybe they’re just too lazy to figure out how to get around these systems.

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Jesse Martinez
Jesse Martinez
Nov 26, 2018

I love the idea of doing linguistic analysis within MMO's (there's gotta be some literature about this, right?), and your post made me think of a couple other interesting issues of language in networked games.

Though I'm admittedly speaking with little knowledge of WoW's player communities, I have to imagine it's not an exclusively English-speaking player base; and I know in my experience with MMO's, there's often a need for players who don't speak the predominant language to be able to identify players who they can actually communicate with. (In my experience, I had a significant number of native Spanish-speaking friends on MapleStory, which was a wild time that definitely taught me a lot about linguistic minority player communities.) Does…

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peterforberg
peterforberg
Nov 25, 2018

There's interesting implications to these emergent languages (or at least, this emergent communication) where "kek" has become something entirely separate from WoW in certain online communities. Games like WoW, One Hour, and The Ship are interesting in the way that they broach communication with constraints. I mention The Ship because, like a lot of networked FPS games, it has a dialogue system built into the game that can be used to communicate in character. Whenever I've played it, I've always been on TeamSpeak or Discord, so I've never had to communicate solely through these channels. But, in certain contexts, there's these meta-layers of communication that can come from networked games, with in-game systems being usurped by voice chats or, alternatively,…

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alexfriedman115
Nov 25, 2018

As a fellow longtime WoW player and someone interested in the topic you proposed, I would love to share some further examples about this. In the early days of wow when fewer players littered each server and literally no external source to talk to opposite faction players, players would make new characters, run to a certain location and die, leaving their corpse (and eventually just a skeleton) on the ground. Players would do this intentionally dozens of times so that their collapsed corpses spelled out messages containing return flame, vulgarity, or anything else their anger fueled minds could think of. First of all, I think that is both incredibly funny and incredibly impressive, that one or a group of players…

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