OCTOBER 22, 2013
The Vocabulary Of Losing Control
Players have a large and specific vocabulary for the state in which their play stops being governed by their judgement. Tilt is the best known of these words, but it is only the entry point into a set of terms that describe gradations most outsiders would flatten into a single idea.
Words that describe a direction
What is notable about the vocabulary is that it is almost entirely about motion rather than condition. Players talk about spiralling, chasing, running it up, digging, being stuck. The words describe a trajectory and a slope. Very few of them describe a place someone has arrived at, which suggests the language was built by people who were still moving when they needed it.
There is also a striking absence. The vocabulary is rich in terms for the process and nearly empty of terms for stopping. Quitting a session has one flat word. Everything leading up to it has twenty.
Humour as distance
Much of the language is funny, deliberately. Self-deprecation is the standard register of forum posts and table chat about losses, and the joke performs a specific function: it puts distance between the speaker and the thing being described without requiring them to stop doing it. A person who can make the loss funny is demonstrating that they are not overwhelmed by it, which is easier than not being overwhelmed by it.
This is worth noticing rather than diagnosing. It is not a symptom and it is not evidence about any individual. It is a description of how a community talks, and the shape of the talk turns out to be one of the more revealing artefacts the online era left behind.
Language records what a group needed to be able to say. A vocabulary with twenty words for the slope and one for the exit tells you where the attention was, and it is not a neutral distribution.