Neal Whitman recently produced an excellent post-and-a-half on gamers' English. Being an occasional gamer (exclusively of the console-based variety), and perhaps having slightly more experience than Prof. Whitman in this domain, SC figures he'll toss in his two coins ([after which only 98 more are needed to get an extra life -- ed.]). Prof. Whitman writes on the subject of bosses:
But as it turns out, this is one case where Doug has picked up the meaning perfectly from his fellow language users, and I was the odd one out. I've learned from a few Google searches that boss is the standard term for serious enemies in video games, whom (or which) you have to defeat before you can go any farther. Video game designer Greg Costikyan confirms that the term's been around since at least the early 90s, and the guy at the local video game store says he's been hearing it since even before then.
SC can confirm this usage from personal experience going all the way back to 1986 and Super Mario Bros. The game was notable for having the same boss at the end of every level, King Bowser. The catch to this fact was that in the first seven of the eight worlds, "Bowser" was actually one of his henchmen in disguise. And of course, as all gamers of the time will recall, each fake boss was followed by the unfortunate news that "our princess is in another castle". It made one wonder why none of the bearers of that news could simply direct Mario to the right castle ([or me -- Luigi]). True connoisseurs of '80s Nintendo will recall that the typology of bosses eventually became finer-grained. With the release of Metroid, the term "mini-boss" was introduced to distinguish the monsters Ridley and Kraid, both of whom had to be dispatched in order to gain access to the final level of the game, where one battled the true boss, Mother Brain. SC objects to the example provided in the linked "mini-boss" article; while the Hammer Brothers were considerably more annoying than other mid-level enemies in Mario games, defeating them only enabled continued progress, whereas the Metroid use of the term clearly established defeating a mini-boss as the success condition for clearing a level. And that brings us to another bit of gaming lexical semantics, which SC has long meant to post about.
The terms "world", "level" and "stage" have long been used in a rather loose synonymy. In Super Mario Bros., there were eight distinct "worlds", each partitioned into four separately timed trials. The screens that would come up between segments of play appeared to identify each part as a world; 1-1, 2-2, 8-4, etc. Certainly, the usage of the time appeared to endorse the notion that there were 32 "worlds" -- "I just can't seem to clear world 8-3 [pronounced "eight-three"] no matter how many times I try". The source which I've used for previous gaming definitions treats "level" and "stage" as synonymous (and helpfully points out that this usage shouldn't be confused with the classic role-playing definition of level, as a metric of skill or experience). It also defines level/stage as areas which "with few exceptions are ordered by increasing difficulty", and so "level one" is generally an easier part of a game to complete than "level ten". But this is by no means always true; in the classic Bionic Commando, the areas of the map are not numbered in a sequence corresponding to either their necessary order of completion or relative difficulty. As far as your host is concerned, Area 10 was a lot harder than the final Area 12.
The relationship between bosses and levels has long been rather complicated. In games where the object is to go from point A to point B on a map, where point B is presumably of greater strategic importance to the villain, it makes sense that a trusted servant of exceptional abilities would be stationed somewhere in the vicinity of point B to ward off those coming from A. Even in games where traversing the map is hardly done in a straight line, this logic can explain why a boss might be placed in a sensitive location (to guard a treasure, run a military operation, etc.). But it is not at all clear why the boss' physical well-being should be tied to the location's continued existence. As the very funniest satire of games ever written puts it:
Wait! That Was A Load-Bearing Boss!
Defeating a dungeon's boss creature will frequently cause the dungeon to collapse, which is nonsensical but does make for thrilling escape scenes.
(The post title is borrowed from this They Might Be Giants song; SC really needs to stop with the cheap song-lyric puns for titles.)
What I've actually found to be most interesting about gamer-speak is not really in the vocabulary used, but in the way tense tends to be used in role-playing games, particularly the face-to-face, table top kind. It's one of the few places you'll find simple present tense being used for non-stative verbs on a regular basis. People in my gaming group only roled their eyes at me a little bit when I pointed that out. We're all geeks, after all, I was just the only linguistic geek there.
Posted by: Dana | November 20, 2004 at 07:57 PM