If You Wrote a Vocabulary List for Today's Young People, Games Would Supply More Than Half the Words | 100 Big Questions About Life

Area-of-effect blasts, pulling aggro, grinding for levels, landing crits with the cheats on — we use them so often we have almost forgotten they all began as gaming terms.

By episode four of Palace of Desire (《大明宫词》), Empress Wu Zetian is holding court and the ministers are in an uproar. The veteran official Shangguan Yi and the chief eunuch Wang Fusheng deliver their petition to Emperor Gaozong's face, demanding that he depose her — and are routed by a well-prepared Wu Zetian, who gives ground, then picks them off one at a time. If you happen to be rewatching this hit drama from 2000 on Bilibili with the bullet comments turned on — the viewer remarks that scroll across the screen — you will find the audience discussing the plot like this:

• "Awkward, the pig teammate just fed the enemy a kill";
• "Thought a King had shown up, turns out he's only Bronze";
• "An all-N/R lineup, and they still want to break an SSR's barrier";
• "Wu Zetian's combo wipes the whole team in one go, GG";

...

Even if you have never played Onmyoji or Honor of Kings, the plot plus whatever you have absorbed on social media is probably enough to get the joke.

There are plenty more examples of people using gaming memes to talk about plot. Take Sense8, the high-voltage series Netflix canceled because it cost too much to make: every time one of the telepathically linked characters reveals a particular skill, someone comments, "There's our healer! And a priest! And an assassin! And a marksman too!... Now we can go raid the boss."

Or Red (《红色》), a highly rated Chinese drama about the war against Japan, in which the heroine, before springing one of her Home Alone-style traps on Japanese soldiers, always visits the graves of her parents, who were killed by the Japanese. The bullet comments explain this as "saving her game before she pops her ultimate" — which makes perfect sense, since what is a save point if not something shaped exactly like a gravestone?

Every generation has its own shared phrases, the ones everybody catches without explanation. People who lived through the Cultural Revolution instinctively reach for the language of revolutionary big-character posters: "down with," "wipe out," "monsters and demons." Elders raised in the planned-economy years call a company a "work unit" or "the state," and call quitting a job "being taken off your post." And in the forums and chat rooms of the Web 1.0 era, early netizens talked to one another in banzhu, ou, xiami and jiangzi — mishearings and phonetic puns standing in for "moderator," "I," "what" and "like this."

John McPhee, author of Draft No. 4 (《写作这门手艺》), argues that words carrying this kind of generational stamp need a shared frame of reference to be understood — especially as metaphors, where perhaps only someone who grew up in the same era, reading the same books and watching the same films, can follow what you mean. His colleague at Princeton, the writing instructor Frank Bruni, calls them "collective vocabulary."

When politics presses hard on daily life, official language from the top down, or the political commentary around it, becomes the main source of that collective vocabulary. The revolutionary language above is one case. A more recent one is 2016, the year of Brexit and Donald Trump's election, when Oxford Dictionaries, Merriam-Webster and Collins all recorded a sharp jump in the use of words like "Brexit" and "post-truth," and each, on its own, chose a heavily political word of the year.

Politics aside, a generation's collective vocabulary usually comes from the cultural products people consume every day (culture in the broad sense, entertainment included). In John McPhee's day that mostly meant newspapers, books and films. For this crop of young people, add anime and manga (tucao, for snarky griping; naobu, for filling in the details in your head), variety shows ("diss"; zhenxiang, for admitting something is actually great after all), idol culture (aidou for idol, "da call" for cheering someone on), livestreaming ("consider it arranged"), bullet comments ("brace yourself, this gets intense"), social networks (liking posts, awkward small talk) and, of course, games.

The gaming industry has grown explosively over the past decade: more people are playing, and they are putting more time and money into it. Newzoo, the leading market research firm covering games, expects the number of active players worldwide to pass 2.3 billion in 2018, with market revenue reaching US$137.9 billion.

At home, the China Gaming Industry Report for January–June 2018, released jointly by the Game Publishers Committee of the China Audio-Video and Digital Publishing Association and Gamma Data, puts sales in China's gaming market at 105 billion yuan for the first half of the year — 3.1 times the figure five years earlier and 11.8 times the figure a decade earlier. The player base reached 527 million, about 1.6 times the figure five years earlier and 8.7 times the figure a decade earlier, with 448 million of them playing on mobile.

Our cohort of young people grew up more or less in step with the gaming industry: Subor consoles and arcades as kids; single-player PC games and online games in middle and high school; console games, mobile games and livestreamed esports now (some of them the same people all the way through, some not).

Early hits like Street Fighter, Contra, The Legend of Sword and Fairy (《仙剑奇侠传》), Red Alert and Counter-Strike (CS) never came close to a national audience, strictly speaking, and none of them produced a breakout meme on its own. But they did deliver a basic education in gaming vocabulary: anyone who so much as dabbled in these games, or heard about them, would not blink at health bar (HP), KO, NPC or side-quest dungeon. In the online-gaming era that followed, players learned partying up, healers, hacks and grinding monsters for levels. Console games gave us "took an arrow to the knee" and "leap of faith."

Once mobile games arrived, far more people could fit in a couple of rounds in scraps of spare time, wherever they happened to be. At its peak, the phenomenal Honor of Kings reached 100 million daily active users; during this year's Spring Festival, an average of 100 million people opened the game and stayed in it every day. It was these players who took "farm quietly, don't get cocky" and "hold steady, we can win" — phrases that started in the DotA and League of Legends communities and were later written into Honor of Kings as in-game voice lines — and pushed them in front of everyone else.

More people are stepping briefly out of real life and into game worlds, and the words they pick up there — game mechanics, jargon, or memes that circulate among players — are seeping correspondingly further into everyday life.

But a bigger audience is not the only reason. We have far more cultural products to consume than before, and not every hot keyword from a large fandom gets a chance to become a generation's shared vocabulary. Teresa Teng is beyond question part of the collective vocabulary of people from the 1960s and 70s; Cai Xukun is certainly not part of the collective vocabulary of people from the 1990s and 2000s.

When Idol Producer (《偶像练习生》), idol culture's phenomenal hit, wrapped up, iQiyi's official count put its plays at 2.8 billion. Fandom words like zou hualu ("walk the flower path," meaning to debut successfully), "pick" and tuanhun ("group spirit") briefly became internet catchphrases too, but they stayed tied to specific settings and rarely made it into ordinary conversation.

There is now an enormous stock of "jargon" and "dialect" born inside particular fan communities. According to Shao Yanjun, a Peking University Chinese-department professor who studies internet literature, in her recently published book Breaking Down the Wall (《破壁书》), only the most vigorous of these "dialects" break through the barriers between tribes (or, in the more fashionable phrase, "break out of the circle") to become internet catchphrases; a few even break the "wall between dimensions" and enter mainstream speech.

Words from gaming stand out for how closely they map onto daily life and how much they explain. People like to say life is a play — "play" as in drama, though "play" as in game fits just as well. A game's progression and life itself have plenty in common: you cannot reload a save file in life, the analogy everyone reaches for, and work is just grinding monsters for levels.

You can take the traits of a game character or a player title and apply them to real people, yourself included. For example:

• The common one: a beginner in any field is a "noob" or a "newbie";
• while the unreliable colleague who is always dragging everyone down is a "pig teammate."
• The young department head parachuted in from headquarters, backed by money, is an "RMB player" — the kind who pays to win.
• Villains one and two in a TV drama are simply called "the big boss" and "the small boss."
• The school administrator at the service window who keeps sending you to collect one document here and get it stamped there, and only lets you pass once you have every required item, is a textbook three-dimensional "NPC."
• A sports commentator whose prediction for a match comes true in exactly the opposite direction is a "poison milk." Many non-gamers probably first heard the word from the sports host Liu Yuxi, but it is a genuine gaming meme: characters who heal teammates are usually called nannies, literally "wet nurses," and when an enemy boss lands a particular debuff on one of them, the healing skill drains teammates' health instead. That is "poison milk."
• The friend who drills the fundamentals and then flattens every opponent can be called the "Sword God of Ten-Li Slope." This piece of gaming lore comes from a Taiwanese player of The Legend of Sword and Fairy who never found the right boat out of the starter village and so spent half a year on Ten-Li Slope, the game's first monster-grinding map, killing low-level enemies until he had taken the protagonist Li Xiaoyao to level 71. People have revered him as the Sword God of Ten-Li Slope ever since.

You can also use a game's progression and modes to describe the course of a life, and game mechanics to describe things that happen in ordinary days. Drawing on the QDaily Research Lab survey "Which gaming words are already part of your everyday speech," we have put together the following 15 common gaming keywords and how people use them:

1. Easy mode: why is everyone else's life on easy mode while mine is set to hell

So that players of different abilities each get a suitable experience, most games let you pick a difficulty level at the start. Early single-player games generally split it only into easy and hard; later came the familiar three tiers of normal, nightmare and hell, or, as in The Witcher 3, four levels named in plain speech: "just here for the story," "want to break a sweat," "want to draw some blood" and "die with no regrets." As difficulty climbs, the character survives less and monsters hit harder. On easy you can beat the final boss without much effort; on the highest setting the protagonist has no plot armor at all and goes down the instant a starter-village monster brushes against them — much like me, grinding away in Beijing, Shanghai or Guangzhou, never buying the priciest apples at 9.8 yuan a jin (about half a kilo) at the fruit stall. Two of a kind, we are.

2. Starter village: three years into the job and still stuck in the starter village — is there any hope for me

The starter village is a game's opening map, usually built for onboarding, with easy quests and low-level monsters. "Still hasn't left the starter village" carries a frustrated sense of never having got the hang of things. Ease up and keep at it — you might be the next Sword God of Ten-Li Slope.

3. Side-quest dungeon: don't want to grind the main quest at work, want to open a side map and farm the travel dungeon

Side quest is a storytelling term: unlike the main quest line that carries the running plot, side quests tend to stand alone, with a complete short story and extra rewards. A dungeon is a special, separate map, first used to spread players out and lighten the load on servers, later one of the core pieces of game content. Outside games, people mix "side quest" and "dungeon" together loosely, meaning to set yourself a small, fairly easy task with a small reward at the end: a vacation is the travel dungeon, dating is the romance dungeon, and buying diet cat food for the overweight cat at home is the fretting-parent dungeon.

4. Full-HP revival: back-to-back nights of overtime have drained my health bar; going to bed early tonight and hoping for a full-HP revival tomorrow

A game character's hit points (HP) usually show up on screen as a red trough, also called the health bar. When the number drops too low and you are about to die, the bar is empty, or you are on sliver health — easy pickings for monsters or enemies. Swallow a recovery item, usually a red bottle, and you get health back; a bigger jar refills everything you lost at once and brings you back from the dead. Using HP to describe your physical state is so self-evident it is not worth an example.

5. Affection meter: confessing before you have farmed enough affection — if it fails, whose fault is that

In dating sims and multi-ending RPGs, this is the key number governing where your relationship with each character goes. In-game, you raise affection by trading gifts at the right moments, staying in touch, not oversharing early or hounding people, and moving forward only once you have their approval — always choosing the more sincere, more clearly stated option when a line of dialogue comes up. People love to say that dating-sim players cannot find real partners, but apply these mechanics with some judgment and, while you still cannot romance whomever you please, it is more than enough to keep a friendship growing in a healthy direction. Who knows, maybe once the affection meter is full it will actually happen.

6. Skill tree: picked the wrong major, put my points in the wrong skill tree, and now landing the job I want after graduation means starting over

A game character's growth depends on sensibly spending the skill points earned from grinding monsters and leveling up. The tree structure separates trunk from branches, letting you stack achievements from basic to advanced in order and unlock big gains in stats and abilities. Get the weighting or the sequence wrong and you may struggle to clear later levels — the same logic as choosing humanities or sciences, deciding which after-school classes to take, or which industry a civilization develops first.

7. Map cannon: it's not aimed at you — I mean everyone in this room is...

A skill that deals damage across an area is called AOE (area of effect). When the damage radius is big enough to cover the whole scene the player is standing in, it is also called a map cannon. In everyday use it means an indiscriminate, hostile swipe that tars a whole group with one brush.

8. Popping the ultimate: the central bank popped its ultimate; the central bank popped its ultimate again

Originally, releasing the skill with the highest damage and the longest cooldown. The phrase has since inflated, and now mostly serves as self-encouragement or as tactical intimidation that no longer works — domestic phone makers write it into their press releases at every launch to taunt Apple, as if to say, just you wait, you are in for it now. Everyone is still waiting, eyes going dry.

9. CD: the socially anxious reporter's skill is still on CD after the last interview; she needs a couple of days before the next trip

Short for cooldown. Modeled on the interval it takes to reload a gun, it is the minimum wait between two uses of a skill or item. Any human activity that requires screwing up your courage or building up drive and stamina can have a CD, including but not limited to workplace socializing, getting up early on the weekend, and peeling a pomegranate by hand.

10. Buff: a cup of Arabica buffs you instantly, the essential holy item for going out to pillage

An auxiliary effect used in combat to strengthen a character. Applying a positive effect is buffing; applying a negative one is a debuff. Coffee, tea and milk tea are all vital buff items for keeping yourself alive through a weekday afternoon — though be warned that too much milk tea also comes with the debuff of excess body fat.

11. Critical damage: the fragile single dog takes another 10,000 points of critical damage

In a game's combat system, the chance of adding extra damage when you land a hit is the critical rate, and the extra damage itself is a critical hit. February 14, Qixi, Christmas, Children's Day, the Dragon Boat Festival, the Double Ninth — every holiday, in other words — single friends switch on their public-affection radar and catch every suspicious couple interaction with perfect clarity, and their mental defenses register 10,000 points of critical damage. Fortunately the number is large but not fatal: sleep it off and you are a fine lone fighter again the next day.

12. Whaling: sang like that and still made the cut — must have whaled for the producers

From the Japanese kakin, meaning to pay in, it refers to buying virtual property such as items with real money. In games that charge for items, whales enjoy a crushing advantage over the free, bare-handed players, who can only fight back by pouring in enormous amounts of time — what players call working the liver. Whaling has therefore also picked up the negative sense of paying to take a shortcut.

13. Krypton-gold dog eyes: it blinded my krypton-gold dog eyes

An old meme. "Krypton gold" here is the rarest metal in World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade, khorium; "krypton-gold dog eyes" refers to the Hardened Khorium Goggles, a precious piece of gear that happens to look rather ugly. Saying something blinded your krypton-gold dog eyes means what you are looking at is so high-grade, so terrifying or so absurd that even goggles that valuable cannot take it — the same indirect technique the classical poem Mulberry by the Path uses on Qin Luofu, conveying how remarkable she is without describing her directly.

14. GG: whenever something goes badly wrong, the first reaction is always GG

GG, for Good Game, comes from esports etiquette: at the end of a match the losing side types "GG" to concede and praise the winner's play, and the winner types "GG" back to say the win was gracious. It has since come to mean that something is over and did not end well — a way of saying, well, that's it for us.

15. Running cheats: what is it like to live a life with the cheats on

Originally it meant using a cheat program to gain an advantage. Now it describes the first shared bike you unlock working fine, the car you hail sending a driver less than 2 kilometers away, getting the last bowl of wontons at a restaurant everyone is queuing for — a life going so smoothly you start to suspect a cheat program is running. It expresses a kind of disbelieving admiration.

Cover image and illustrations by: Zheng Shuya