T w e n t y S i d e d

I just want to say I’m really grateful to those who logged into Guild Wars and looked me up and offered help. I’m also flattered by all the people who want to start a Twenty Sided guild or otherwise hook up in the game. I hope my refusals for help did not seem rude. Really, if you find me in the game I love to hear from you.

I just want to say that yes, it would be great to hook up and play with the friends I’ve made here. I haven’t taken anyone up on the offer just yet because I don’t want to launch some enterprise only to realize four days later that the game just isn’t doing it for me, or that I’d rather be playing something else. My personality is such that I’d probably keep playing out of guilt, and that won’t do any of us any good.

I’m also just not that great of a playmate. In Guild Wars I’ve been playing for an hour, then jumping to another window (and let us praise developers who can make games that Alt-Tab gracefully) to write a bit about the game.

I also think that in order to do my writing I kind of need to experience the early game content solo.

If I end up sticking with Guild Wars, or playing some other MMO, then I’ll probably start joining up. I’m too introverted to actually run a guild, but I’d join one if doing so would let me play with a group of non-idiots.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

I was on the phone the other day with a friend, who was explaining a bit about how leveling works in WoW. I just didn’t get how “the game begins at level 70”, since that’s when you hit max level.

I was still trying to wrap my head around it when I asked, “So you still keep ‘growing’ in power even after you hit max level?”

He replied, “Oh yeah. If you just ran into Karazhan as soon as you ding 70, you’d get completely pwned. You have to work your way-“

“Hang on a second”, I stopped him, “Did you just say ‘pwned’?”

“Yeah I did.”

“I’m sorry. But you gotta put a quarter in the dork jar.”

This was the first time I’ve heard the word used conversationally, although I’ve seen it written a thousand times.

Language is, of course, changing all the time. Just during my teenage years several words were hijacked by teenagers: Cool, Wicked, Radical, Awesome. All of them were stripped of their original meanings and repurposed as synonyms for “something I like or which I find interesting”.

Pwned is an interesting one. (Doesn’t it look funny to properly capitalize it and punctuate around the word like that?) A few years ago people started using “owned” to mean “defeated”. Probably this arose from something like, “He owns your ass”, giving the idea that not only did the other person win, but they so fully dominated that the loser was helpless. That phrase was shortened to simply “owned” and then morphed into “pwned”, a typo of the same which rose up when 1337speak was all the rage, and which is now mostly used ironically.

I’m only 36, so I don’t quite have enough time as an adult to properly judge, but it seems like language is becoming more volatile due to the internet. Even ignoring the onslaught of new technology-related words, it seems like English is morphing faster than it did when I was younger. Words are coming and going faster and shifting their meanings more abruptly. Maybe I’m just a little less malleable than I used to be, and so the changes seem swifter, I’m not sure. Maybe someone closer to fifty can appraise this and compare things to how they’ve been over the last thirty years.

And now apparently people walk around saying the word pwned in day-to-day speech.

What a bunch of llamas.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.