C y b e r s p a c e
 is  the  "place"  [...]
 between the phones.
 Bruce  Sterling  (1992)
lingo
Being a dictionary in progress of the the cyberian language. Helpful online reference works are: The New Hacker's Dictionary, NetLingo, acronymfinder, Ka-BOOM!, Wordspy, Wikipedia, The Jargon File, Science Fiction Citations.

1
1337 acr. for "leet", being an onomatopoeic spelling of "elite".
a
abbr. abbr. of "abbreviation".
acr. abbr. of "acronym".
b
BB abbr. of "bounding box".
c
cg abbr. of "computer graphics".
CGI 1. abbr. of "Common Gateway Interface". 2. abbr. of "Computer-generated imagery". CGI "is the application of the field of computer graphics [cg] (or more specifically 3D computer graphics) to special effects. CGI is used in movies, television programs and commercials, and in printed media. Real-time computer graphics, such as those in video games, are rarely referred to as CGI. [...]" [via entry Computer-generated imagery at Wikipedia]
CGI Joe n. A programmer who specializes in the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) scripts that accept and handle input from most Web page forms. [via Wordspy]
cyberia syn. of cyberspace. Cyberia might have been coined by writer Douglas Rushkoff, see his book "Cyberia: Life in the trenches of hyperspace" (Rushkoff 1994). Alas, the term popped up at least three times more in the very same year: On 12 January 1994 Interplay released Xatric Entertainment Inc.'s action-adventure computergame Cyberia for the DOS-platform. Additionally, according to Jonathan Duffy's BBC-News article Will internet cafés survive 10 more years? on 02 September 1994 "what is widely believed to be the UK's first internet café, Cyberia, opened in a back street in London's West End." And just to make the confusion complete: Arturo Escobar's article "Welcome to Cyberia. Notes on the anthropology of cyberculture" (Escobar 1994), very influential within sociocultural anthropology, and seminal to cyberanthropology, was published in the June 1994 issue of Current Anthropology.
cyberpunk Something like a literary genre. "The word "cyberpunk" was coined by Bruce Bethke in 1980 [...]" [via JahSonic]
cyberspace n.
d
darknet ('därk-net) n. The collection of networks and other technologies that enable people to illegally share copyrighted digital files with little or no fear of detection. Also: Darknet. [via darknet.com and Word Spy]
DCC abbr. of "Direct Client-to-Client protocol".
e
easter egg "The term "easter egg", as we use it here, means any amusing tidbit that creators hid in their creations. They could be in computer software, movies, music, art, books, or even your watch. There are thousands of them, and they can be quite entertaining, if you know where to look." [via eegs.com]
eeg abbr. of easter egg.
f
FPS abbr. of "first-person shooter". A FPS is "a computer or video game where the player's on-screen view of the game world simulates that of the character, and there is some element of shooting involved. According to this simple definition, a game like Battlezone, or many flight simulators would be included. However, in the early 1990s, the term came to define a very specific genre of game with a first-person view, almost always centered around the act of aiming and shooting with multiple styles of weapons and limited ammunition. [...]" [via entry First-person shooter (highly recommended!) at Wikipedia]
fps abbr. of "frames per second" - More often then not, the exact differentiation by upper- and lower-case between FPS and fps just is not made. What is meant has to be deduced from the context.
frag "is a computer game term, used in first-person shooter deathmatch. A frag is a killcount; one gets a frag if one kills ("frags") another player. In some games, one also loses a frag for killing oneself (called a "suicide", even if unintentional), for example, by falling a long distance or discharging a rocket directly into a nearby wall.
    One does not usually lose frags for being killed by another player. This leads to the game theoretical consequence that one should engage in combat with another player unless severely outmatched because the potential benefit (one frag) outweighs the potential harm (lost time for respawning and the opponent, who may not be ranked first, getting a frag).
    In this context the term "frag" is used to replace 'killing' or 'dying' as these terms are final - whereas first person shooters usually allow instant reincarnation. The usage of the term fragging is also a response to advocates of computer game censorship, who argue that violence in games can cause violence in real life. Most fps game players maintain that the obvious fantasy of computer games acts as a barrier preventing this cause-effect relationship. The term 'fragging' rather than 'killing' thus becomes a semantic indicator of the distance of the violence from any real act.
    Fragging is sometimes contrasted with "gibbing", or blowing the enemy player into smithereens. When one shoots another player's character, they have been fragged. When one shoots another with a rocket launcher, and little bits go flying everywhere, they have been gibbed. (The smithereens are called 'gibs'.) Both can be referred to as 'frags', however. [...]"
[via entry frag at Wikipedia]
ftp abbr. of "file transfer protocol".
g
gamic is a combination of 'game' and 'comic', meaning a computer-generated graphic novel based on screenshots made in a computergame. Related to machinima.
GIS abbr. of "Global Illumination System"
h
html abbr. of "hypertext markup language"
http abbr. of "hypertext transfer protocol"
i
int. missp. abbr. of "intentional misspelling".
IM abbr. of "instant messaging".
IRC abbr. of "Internet Relay Chat".
j
JA abbr. of "Jedi Academy" - a computergame by LucasArts.
JKII abbr. of "Jedi Knight II - Jedi Outcast" - a computergame by LucasArts.
k
k abbr. of "ok".
KOTR abbr. of "Knights of the Old Republic" - a computergame by LucasArts.
l
LAN 1. abbr. of "local area network", meaning a computer network covering a clearly circumcscribed area like a house or a small group of buildings. 2. abbr. of "LAN-party", meaning an organised event bringing together gamers at one physical location where a LAN is installed temporarily in order to play online games together. LAN-parties usually are held at gyms. The number of attending gamers varies between dozens up to several thousand. In most cases some hundreds are attending. Normally there are computergame tournaments at LANs, too.
LMB abbr. of "left mouse button".
LOTR abbr. of "Lord of the Rings".
m
machinima "(a portmanteau word for machine cinema and/or "machine" "animation") is both a film genre and a collection of associated production techniques. The term concerns the rendering of computer-generated imagery ([CGI]) with ordinary PCs and the 3D engines of video games (typically first person shooters [FPS]) in real-time (on the computer of either the creator or the viewer) rather than offline with huge render farms.
    Machinima is an example of emergent play, a process of putting game tools to unexpected ends, and of artistic computer game modification.
    The real-time nature of machinima means that established techniques from traditional film-making can be reapplied in a virtual environment. As a result, production tends to be cheaper and more rapid than in keyframed CGI animation. [...]"
[via entry machinima at Wikipedia]
meatspace "MeatSpace is a somewhat tongue-in-cheek term used in opposition to the term CyberSpace. MeatSpace refers to the physical world, the world in which meat lives and works and moves." [via JahSonic]
MMOG abbr. of "massively multiplayer online game"
MMORPG abbr. of "massively multiplayer online role-playing game"
mod abbr. of "modification". "Mod or modification is a term generally applied to computer games, especially first-person shooters and real-time strategy games. Mods are made by the general public, and can be entirely new games in themselves. They can include new items, weapons, characters, enemies, models, modes, textures, levels, and story lines. They also usually take place in unique locations. They can be single-player or multiplayer. Mods that add new content to the underlying game are often called partial conversions, while mods that create an entirely new game are called total conversions.
   Games running on a PC are often designed with change in mind, and this consequently allows modern computer games to be modified by gamers without much difficulty. These mods can add an extra dimension of replayability and interest. The Internet provides an inexpensive medium to promote and distribute mods, and they have become an increasingly important factor in the commercial success of some games. Developers such as id Software, Valve Software, Bethesda Softworks (the TES-Construction Set), and Epic Games provide extensive tools and documentation to assist mod makers, leveraging the potential success brought in by a popular mod like Counter-Strike.
   Mods can significantly outshine or continue the success of the original game. Playing a mod might even become more common than playing the unmodded original."
[via entry Mod (computer gaming) at Wikipedia]
modder. "The term 'modder' is sometimes used to refer to a person who creates a mod, but also to describe those using mods. The latter is especially true in cases where someone in a multi-player game is using a mod which gives them advantages in game play. Examples might include an auto-targeting modification in shooting games or a mod which allows the player to move faster than others. Such mods are generally considered 'cheating'." [via entry Mod (computer gaming) at Wikipedia]
MOO abbr. of "MUD object-oriented"
MP abbr. of "Max Payne" - A wordplay on "maximum pain" and probably "Max Headroom", a cyberpunk-cult gestalt of the 1980s.
MP1 abbr. of the computergame "Max Payne" (Remedy 2001)
MP2 abbr. of the computergame "Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne" (Remedy 2003)
MPF abbr. of "Max Payne Forums" (www.maxpayneforums.com).
MPHQ abbr. of "Max Payne Headquarters" (www.maxpayneheadquarters.com), seen from my vantage point the former core-website of the Max-Payne-modification community. The website was defunct from ????? to ????? and during this period was substituted by Max Payne Source (MPS, maxpaynesource.com) by communal effort. Then MPHQ went alive again and MPS vanished. Since 31 December 2004 MPHQ again is gone. Meanwhile the domain is sold and serves other, commercial purposes. MPS almost instantaneously went alive again, but until today only its forums are online—and those are not at all frequented yet.
MUD abbr. of "multi/multiple-user domain/dungeon/dimension" "MUD is derived from the expression Multi User Dungeon [ fn 2:MUDs are also frequently known as Multiple User Dungeons, and in Richard Bartle’s "MUD FAQ part 1" (1999), both Multiple and Multi is used for the first part of the acronym.]. This acronym was made by the creators of the first MUD, Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw. Bartle explains the origins of the acronym: "I am WELL aware what "MUD" stands for, and maybe once every two months have to tell someone. The "D" does stand for "Dungeon", but not because the original MUD (which I co-wrote) had a dungeon in it; rather it was because there was a hacked-p version of Zork going the rounds at the time, which bore the name "Dungeon". We thought that this program would act as the archetype for single-player adventure games, so we called our game "Multi-user Dungeon" in an effort to convey some feeling of what the program did. As it happened, the genre was promptly called "Adventure games" after the Colossal Caves game "Adventure", so we were wrong in that aspect. By then, though, we had our acronym." (Bartle 1999) Some have attempted to exchange the word Dungeon for Domain or Dimension, in order to make the phrase sound more dignified." [via Mortensen 2003: 12-13]
n
necroposting means posting to e.g. a forum-thread where the last post was made a long time ago. Posting into a "dead thread". In some forums necroposting is seen as a violation of netiquette.
nerd "'Nerd' is a term invented by Dr. Seuss in 'If I ran the zoo' in 1950, where it represented a small comically angry-looking and unpleasant humanoid creature - 'And then, just to show them, I'll sail to Ka-Troo And Bring Back an It-Kutch a Preep and a Proo a Nerkle a Nerd and a Seersucker, too!' Initially popularised in the 1970s as a reference to uninteresting persons, as the information technology revolution turned playful hippies into serious businessmen, later films such as 'Revenge of the Nerds' [1984] granted them intelligence as bespectacled, but unathletic maths student wizards (in opposition to the athletic and sportive jovial 'jock') who turn the world upside down with their wizardry." [via Houtman & Zeitlyn 1996: 2, fn 1—hyperlinks added by me]
n00b acr. for "newbie".
NPC abbr. for "Non Player Character", that means characters in a computergame which are not steered by a human being, but by software. In this context NPC is synonymous to 'bot', and opposed to 'avatar'.
o
OS abbr. of 1. "Operating System" 2. "Open Source"
OSS abbr. of "Open Source Software"
p
p2p acr. for "peer-to-peer". "Peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing is among the most efficient of the efficient technologies the Internet enables. Using distributed intelligence, p2p systems facilitate the easy spread of content in a way unimagined a generation ago. This efficiency does not respect the traditional lines of copyright. The network does not discriminate between the sharing of copyrighted and uncopyrighted content." [Lessig 2004: 17-18]
POTD abbr. of "picture of the day".
POTW abbr. of "picture of the week".
pr0n int. missp. of "porn".
prefab abbr. of "pre-fabricated object".
q
Q3A abbr. of the computergame "Quake 3 Arena" (ID Software 1999).
r
r abbr. of "are".
RAS abbr. of "Remedy Archive System".
RMB abbr. of "right mouse button".
s
spawning 1. "In video games, especially first-person shooters [FPS], spawning is the creation of a player's avatar in the game and respawning is the recreation of that avatar after the avatar's death. This occurs at the beginning of the round or immediately after being killed. Most games have "spawn points" scattered throughout the map, though in levels designed for team play, there may simply be two areas, one for each team. Some players will lie in wait around spawn points to kill players as they spawn, a practice known as spawn camping. Spawn points for in-game objects other than players are often used and abused in a similar fashion in other types of games, such as massively multiplayer online role-playing games." 2. "Spawning is also sometimes used in computer gaming in reference to installing a multiplayer-only version of a piece of software on a computer." [via entry Spawning at Wikipedia]
speed run "A speed run is a video of a player striving to complete a video game in as fast a time as they can manage. Sound easy? It's not! A large number of tricks are usually used, possibly skipping whole areas of a game in the process, and there will always be mistakes." [via Speed Demos Archive]
sup abbr. of "what's up?".
t
TC abbr. of "total conversion". "A total conversion, in the computer gaming sense, is a mod (short for "modification") of an existing game where the end result bears little resemblance to the original on which the conversion was based. Many games provide players with the ability to edit the game's many elements: levels, sounds, enemies, and so on. Most modifications are limited in scope, resulting in a partial conversion. Total conversions are less common, mainly because of the large amount of development and man-time needed to bring a whole project together. [...]" [via entry Total conversion at Wikipedia]
textz Text which is distributed by violation of copyright laws. The term was built in the style of the much older warez.
TPS abbr. of " third-person shooter". "A third-person shooter is a computer game in 3-D where the camera view is outside and usually behind the main player character. This is in contrast to the in-character view of first-person shooters [FPS]. Many modern FPS incorporate a optional third person view such as Mafia and others. Which title is used for a game when both views are avialable varies. Many RPGs are third-person shooters, and many other games such as flight simulators and many driving games have a third person view available. [...]" [via entry Third-person shooter at Wikipedia]
u
u abbr. of "you".
UI abbr. of "user interface".
URI abbr. of "universal resource identifier".
URL abbr. of "uniform resource locator".
URN abbr. of "uniform resource name".
UT2K3 abbr. of the computergame "Unreal Tournament 2003" (Epic Games & Digital Extremes 2003)
UT2K4 abbr. of the computergame "Unreal Tournament 2004" (Epic Games & Digital Extremes 2004).
w
warez cracked software which is distributed by violation of copyright laws.
walkthrough a description of how to get through a computergame.
WIP abbr. of "work in progress".
y
yse int. missp. of "yes".
previoustop
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online since: 01 December 2004
last update: 28 March 2006

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