I've noticed recently that language takes an interesting turn in online gaming, no matter what game you play. You see interesting lingo and slang being thrown around within the first few weeks of beta testing, even; we begin to name things that cannot be quickly defined, or easily defined at all, with easy words that are recognized by all who have played the game for a while. We have ‘nub’ - which comes from ‘n00b’ - which comes from ‘newb’ - which comes from ‘newbie’ - which comes from ‘new player’. We have ‘camper’ - a faux-humorous name for a person that entrenches themselves in a certain spot and doesn't move for extended times. Many of these terms and colloqialisms of language that we've come to accept as normal in our gaming world evolved for simple practicality - it was just faster to say one word than a whole sentence. There are, however, words that defy description in their unreadability - in fact, there's a whole language for it.

Leetspeak is not a new concept by any means. It first began in the old IRC chatrooms of yore when people got bored with the normal speech and created their own - the vestigial addition to our language called leetspeak. Soon, this language seeped into the first online games - mostly FPS's - and slowly became the mark of the FPS fanboy.

What's interesting, though, is that despite the fact that it has become such a huge part of the gaming community, nobody has ever seriously used leetspeak as a replacement for language. While the minor colloqialisms - ‘ding’ for leveling up, ‘frag’, ‘owned’, ‘noob’, etc. - all became a staple of our vocabularies online, and in some cases, offline, leetspeak has never been seriously used. It was, at its inception, a dead language, referred to obliquely by the experienced gamers on servers. You rarely, if ever, see someone converting all of his speech into leetspeech. If you do, it doesn't last long, because he will shortly be called an idiot.

So why do we do it? Why do we use all these false letters, abbreviations, punctuations and symbols for our words? Is it cool? Certainly not. While we occasionally say things like 0wn3d, l33t, etc., it's always with the undertone of mocking. We use the language to mock the language, basically, and for nothing else at all. It was created worse than dead; it was stillborn.

What interests me more than any of this, however, is the fact that the evolution of leetspeak follows closely the evolution of language in babies. We see something we can't explain, and we quickly ascribe a new, shortened word to it - much the same way babies will, upon seeing an airplane cruising through the sky, ask what the big birdie is doing. Rather than try to explain what we are seeing to people, we use a simple word that gives the basic concept and leaves the details to the more experienced listener - for who would use such a term on someone less experienced than they? It begs the question - how do we think of the internet? Is it a community? Yes and no. It's a community of communities, a vast plethora of changing and fermenting websites, each with their own userbase, social structure and purpose. Ours is a land of lands, a kingdom filled with smaller kingdoms. Hence, we form our own language seperate from the world's; we have our own national identity. We are the world's lost continent - we are the netizens.