If You Say So: What Your Speech Says About Your Skill

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How would you feel to find out that your level of skill in an MMO wasn’t measured by how long you’ve been playing, your character’s level, or even by how many enemy players you’ve ganked, but by the words you use when talking about the game? A recent study argues that your language—particularly your knowledge of genre-specific vocabulary—is the most important sign of your expertise with an MMO.

The journal Computers in Human Behavior recently published the article “Heterogeneous knowledge distribution in MMO player behavior: Using domain knowledge to distinguish membership in a community of practice”. The article says that previous studies in the expertise of MMO players only relied on “self-reported measures,”, which are all of the statistics that your game’s server records about your behavior (such as time played, experience points, PVP win/loss ratio, etc.). Because you could just as easily grind out your character without once talking to another person, these in-game statistics don’t tell the whole story. The problem with these self-reported measures is that they don’t explain how well you work with other players, which is arguably the most important part of any MMO. “Unlike in single player games,” the article says, “players acquire both skill and knowledge by sharing information with other players and helping them complete joint activities” (pg. 455).

But what does your language actually say about what you know? More than you’d think. After all, you can’t talk about “mobs”, “drawing aggro”, or “buffs” without actually knowing what those terms mean and how they play into the game. (Well, you could, but anyone who knew those terms would easily see past your ignorance and call you on it.) And even though different games have different terms for similar things, these researchers argue that players will tend to use the same terms across games. For example, World of Warcraft has the “Warrior” class while Black Desert has the “Warrior” and “Valkyrie” classes, but both of them can be referred to as “tanks”. The article says, “Given that a common language is part of the shared repertoire used by a community of practice, we believe that an assessment of participants’ competence with this domain-specific language can be used to identify practitioners within the population sampled” (pg. 461). In other words, your knowledge of non-game-specific MMO vocabulary indicates that you are an active member of a community, which is a way to measure your expertise. Even MMOs.com has an extensive list of MMO terms, many of which are shared between all MMOs.

How do They Know? (i.e. Methodology)

This study asked 552 participants a series of 54 multiple choice questions related to MMO terminology. Here are a few of those questions (answers at bottom of article):

  • These are specific rewards for killing monsters and completing quests, which are added to the total value for the character, and in some games, these can be reduced if the characters dies.
    1. Experience
    2. Quest Items
    3. Look
    4. Experience Points
  • This is when status effects or enchantments are removed from the target for the purposes of making the target weaker.
    1. Buff
    2. Debuff
    3. Status Effects
    4. Enervate
  • These are unique enemies, which are more powerful than other enemies, appear less frequently or only under specific conditions, but do give rare or powerful rewards.
    1. Bosses
    2. Elites
    3. Sergeants
    4. Higher Level

They then split people into two separate groups based on how they answered.

To be fair, the article does say that these measurements (called the “MMO Domain Familiarity Evaluation (MDFE)”) should be used in tandem with in-game statistics. Even though the researchers are arguing that the MDFE is the most valuable metric for gauging skill level, it can’t be used in vacuum. After all, just because you know the general MMO lingo doesn’t mean that you’re an ace at First Assault, especially if you’ve never actually played First Assault. There has to be some indication that you’re familiar with the game (or that you’ve played it) in order for this metric to be useful.

Conclusion

Different games have different quirks that have to be learned through tutorials, trial and error, and playing with other people. Eventually, though, once you learn the mechanics of a game (even a First-Person Shooter MMO, like First Assault), your familiarity with the vocabulary is your primary indicator of skill. Even games geared towards a more casual audience, such as Destiny or Tom Clancy’s The Division cater towards people who understand MMO vernacular and know what it means (for example) when you’re “pulling aggro” from a “mob” and need your “tank” to “taunt” the “boss” while your team’s “rogue” deals high “DPS” and your “healer” drops an “AOE” health grenade. And more importantly, this article demonstrates how the ways in which we talk about games indicates our ability to understand them, both academically and in everyday use.

Discussion

What do you think? How important do you find language as a determiner or of knowledge? If you have any examples from your own gaming history of times when communication was used successfully (or was the cause of major turmoil), we’d love to hear them, so please share them in the comments!

(And to be fair, I’m sure I’ve oversimplified this study and possibly left some things out, so please check out the article in its entirety by clicking here.)

(Answers to the above questions: d, b, a)

I run Maze Rats, a website dedicated to video game communities and education. I tutor writing and linguistics professionally and work part-time for a literary arts organization. In the early 2000s, I regularly went to LAN parties, where I was introduced to Ragnarok Online and MapleStory. Currently, I squeeze in a few minutes of game time when I'm not working or helping my wife around the house.