Massively Multiplayer Online Gamers’ Language: Argument for an M-Gamer Corpus

Abstract

The past few decades have seen a steady, and sometimes rapid rise in the production and consumption of Massively Multiple Online Games (MMOGs), spanning a global arena. Players from a wide variety of demographical, economic, geographical, cultural and linguistic backgrounds congregate under the banner of MMOGs and spend a considerable amount of time interacting and communicating with one another, in the context of playing and socializing through such playing. It is only logical then, to see such players become part of larger and extended socio-communal landscapes, wherein they may appropriate multiple roles in conjunction with their MMOG player roles, such as teachers, learners, family members and workplace cohorts. It is also equally logical for a curious mind to speculate the effects of the communication and language characteristics of such gamers on themselves, and the greater communities they may inhabit, investigate the realms of such possibilities, and appropriate knowledge garnered from such investigations to share. That is precisely what this study and paper is about. In this paper, I report the findings of an investigation of the communication and language characteristics of MMOG players, using 23 participants for interviews and journal writing, as well as multiple online documents. The findings suggest that MMOG players share some unique communication and language patterns, based on which they can be justifiably categorized as a sub culture with their own corpus. Additionally, researcher and practitioner implications are also discussed.