Wie jede andere Industrie und Berufsgruppe haben auch die Entwickler von Videospielen ihre eigenen Fachausdrücke, um Leute und Eigenarten zu beschreiben, denen sie bei ihrer Arbeit begegnen.
Die fleißigen Leute von Gamasutra befragten einige Entwickler (die sich wiederum mit vielen Kollegen beratschlagten) und fanden heraus, dass quer durch die Videospielbranche etablierte Namen und Ausdrücke für Dinge existieren, die manchmal nützlich und manchmal auf tragische Weise lustig sind.
Hier sind einige Beispiele:
Joe Walmart: The lowest common denominator consumer that many publishers must cater to in order to mitigate financial risk. Coined to describe the powerful force that allowed Deer Hunter to become a market success. Can also be referred to as "Walmartian."
Data Wrangler: The human that tunes gameplay values for character types, items, and systems in the game.
Dice Humped: Consistently getting a poor result from a random number generator. Originally was used when playing tabletop games, but was expanded to be used as a warning thought experiment for any truly random number in a system. "What happens if the player gets dice humped?" It's a test if the designer actually wants things random or just distributed.
Graybox: The idea of making a game level without textures or high detail models, animations, etc. Just get it working, paced, and ideally, fun without any art requirements.
Grognardy: A game/universe/mechanic that is too niche/hardcore/nerdy. "That JRPG is too grognardy for Facebook, it'll never sell."
Pushing Buttons to Make Rainbows: Refers to a neighborhood of game mechanics and/or interactions where the psychological reward given to the player is disproportionately larger than the effort required on the player's part.
Scoping: A process where leads remove features from a game to meet deadlines.
Paper Awesome: As in, "Dude, that guy is paper awesome. He writes up all this crazy stuff and can't implement any of it."
Buzzword Compliance Pass: Adding a bunch of bullet-points to a presentation that have nothing whatsoever to do with the game but will certainly be brought up at the meeting by an exec, e.g., "I don't see anything on this update about leveraging social networking or microtransactions. How do you plan to ensure that your game has a high retention index?"
Peter Principle: The concept that all employees eventually get promoted to one level beyond their actual level of competency.
Pink Lightsaber: Something thrown in to give the IP Police a safe item to reject from your build because they operate under a directive to find at least one item to reject.
Puh. Das sind nur einige. Im Artikel auf Gamasutra finden sich noch etliche mehr.
A Game Studio Culture Dictionary [Gamasutra]
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