Linguistic jargon of the student gaming community at AUB and its role in the construction of gamers’ identity, social interaction and community membership.

Abstract

The present study focuses on the linguistic jargon of the student gaming community and its role in the construction of gamers’ identity, social interaction and community membership. According to Ensslin (2011), researching video games has been a hot topic over the past ten years because the gaming industry has turned into one of the most successful industries in the US, Europe and Japan. Gaming is now an activity that is not only enjoyed by isolated groups, but by thousands of social groups. Video games have had an immense and permanent effect on human culture, and their role in people’s everyday life and society is increasing (Richards, 2010). For this reason, video games are extensively becoming a prominent cultural phenomenon. The popularity of internet games has led to the creation of a gaming jargon (such as ‘noob’ and ‘RPG’), and as a result, the gaming community has built up a collection of specialized terms and expressions that are mostly incomprehensible to outsiders (Rhoads, 2007). The purpose of the present study was to identify and categorize the gaming terms and expressions used by gamers of the student gaming community at the American University of Beirut (AUB), as well as determine the gaming language’s effect on the gamers’ identity, social interaction and community membership. This wascarried out by conducting an ethnographic study of a class called ‘Fiction Writing’ at AUB that involves the writing of narratives of video games and that has been taught during spring 2019 by Dr. Tariq Mehmood Ali. The class consists of 15 students that are gamers and that have learned how to create their own game and write its rules. Data for the study was collected through the following three methods: (1) participant observation in the weekly class for the whole semester; (2) corpus analysis of the papers that participants wrote for the class (data extracted from (1) and (2) allowed me toidentify thespecial gaming terms gamers use); and a survey that ta