In our newest editorial, Benny "Legend" Potter takes a look at the ability (or lack of) online gamers have when it comes to spelling, grammar, or any other form of sensible communication.

I Read Real Goods; Im All Edumacated

L4M Udas Lower Cleric/Chanter Speed Run.  If you understood that you are either a top army translator, or an MMO Gamer.  I'm going to start this discussion by stating that for a genre of gaming that requires 90% reading of quests, communication, and just plain "chit chat", we are the laziest typists around.  We abbreviate everything, trim off the grammar, fail to read simple things, and basically and quite frankly fail at basic elementary school communication skills.  So in a more light-hearted take on my usual ranting, lets start with the first elementary school skill: your writing ability.

Any game I play is filled with shortened versions of instance/quest names, three letter versions of each class and teen girl speak such as lol, lmao, brb, or afk.  Now don't get me wrong, I'm not exempt from these things.  I'll spend all day shouting my shortened versions of things.  I'm notorious for typing LOL, or LMAO even if its not funny, and my wife likes to laugh at me for it too.  To top this off, we type faster than most of our heads can process or something.  How many times have you messed up something like replacing "lets" with "lest", or the infamous "teh" instead of "the".  As a matter of fact, it has become so ingrained into the way I type that most likely this article was littered with misspellings and incorrect grammar.  But my hero Fox has corrected it all for me before your eyes all exploded from reading this.  So the question of course is: why does this happen?  Was it a gradual thing?  Do you really save that much time typing like that?

Well first off, and correct me if I'm wrong please, but I remember back in the day things in Everquest and initial Final Fantasy XI we actually spelled out what we were about to do.  Conversations were properly spelled out, and things like lol and lmao were brand new and no one truly understood what it meant.  But as time has gone on, and encounters' names began to exceed the space for them on a in-game map, people began to shorten them.  So I guess the simple way to look at it is the fact that people began to get lazy.  Instead of typing out something like "I need 40 people for a dynamis windurst, looking first for two tanks, and five healers." it became too simple to say "3/40 Dyna-Windy Need Tank/Healer."  The biggest issue though is that things didn't REALLY get simpler and in a conversation I just had with some World of Warcraft friends we basically spoke in these now shortened terms because we're too lazy to type anything larger.  Let's analyze this a little further, "So how goes your respecing (re-specialization)?  Oh its going well, I took my pally (paladin) and respeced(re-specialization) it into ret(retribution) so I could just DPS(damage per second) the next ICC(ice crown citadel)."  As you can see, entire conversations can boil down to these abbreviated and destroyed sentences.  Personally after playing an MMO, I almost feel like a teenage girl going five text messages a minute.

So at this point you're probably saying, "So whats your point?  We all do it, its faster, its easier and everyone understands it."  Well first off, not everyone does understand it.  Ever come back to an MMO after a long hiatus, after a few patches or expansions?  You're completely lost and can't understand what anyone is talking about.  It's like walking into France, and you just spent the last year studying Italian.  Secondly. after playing non-stop MMORPG's it'll spill over into your real life world.  Example: the other day my wife and I were cleaning the bedroom and something popped up on the television and I got into one of those standing there dumbfounded modes.  When she asked me what I was doing without even thinking about what I was saying I replied with "brb hun."  Have any of you come across any funny stories where your l33t speak came across into the real world?

The second most basic elementary skill would have to be reading.  Right now you're probably saying, "well duh, I'm reading your article.  Where can you possibly be going with this one?"  This article will most likely take you between five or ten minutes to read.  Most quest text, or tutorial text in any MMORPG is about 1/20th of this article's length.  If you're reading this article you've spent more time reading this than you have reading 90% of your quests.  Now I do know that there are some players who truly enjoy the lore of their games, and will actually read their quest text.  But I've asked 10 players each from World of Warcraft, Aion, Vindictus, and Champions online, and I got back that five out of the forty players I asked (about 6%) ever read the quest text and not just check the objective.  So in effect, you're not really reading anything long and taxing for your brain.  Combine that with the fact you're reading and understanding the l33t speak as they call it, and abbreviated versions of things like lol; how much real reading do you honestly think you get out of it?  I know that no matter what my game is, I've always blitzed through my quests and after I was all done began to ask myself, "why did I kill such and such monster?"  That's because I never read my text that comes with the game.  I need newest shiniest in-game cut scene, and just go look up the lore afterwards or ask one of those five people who actually did read the quest text.  Doesn't anyone remember where these MMORPG's came from?  Normal RPG's where you had to wade through eighty hours of in-game text and read the equivalent of three best selling novels!

I guess what I'm getting at is that MMORPGs are destroying the work our school system has instilled into us about reading and writing.  So your homework today my loyal readers is to go out, find one quest a day in your game and actually read the text, trust me, you'll feel smarter afterwards.

-Benny “Legynd” Potter

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