The video game shame file

Stuff that make us ashamed to be a gamer...

11. L33TSPEAK



Just when gaming was starting to make inroads into the mainstream, a splinter group of stuck-up elitists started to pretend they were communicating with broken keyboards. Apparently 'too cool' for the alphabet, they substituted letters for vague number-based substitutes in a two-fingered salute to grammar. (As a former English teacher, this really gets my goat.)

While it originated with computer hackers, Leetspeak quickly spread into the gaming community at large; making us all look like complete jackasses in the process. If you regularly pepper your online chat with ‘pwned’, ‘Noob’, ‘w00t’ and ‘Sux0r’ you’re part of the (gene pool) problem.

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