Gaming Slang & Chat Terms

By Treesz · Updated Oct 12, 2026

Gamers have their own vocabulary, and a lot of it is tone. The same two letters can be a polite handshake or an insult depending on when you type them. This glossary explains eight terms you see in text chat, voice chat and forums: what each one means, where it comes from where that is known, and how to tell the friendly use from the hostile one. Four more terms with their own articles are summarised at the end.

Slang changes from game to game, so the examples come from several. If a word here is used differently in your game, trust the local meaning.

Term	Short meaning	Tone	Where you see it
GG	Good game	Friendly, sometimes sarcastic	End of a match, or a surrender
One-shot	Kill or be killed by a single hit	Neutral	Shooters, RPGs, raids
Party wipe	Everybody in the group dies	Frustrated, sometimes funny	MMOs, co-op games
Proximity chat	Voice only works between nearby players	A feature, not slang	Survival, horror and social games
Pwned	Utterly defeated	Trash talk or joke	PvP, forums, memes
Queue dodge	Leaving a match before it begins	Disliked	Matchmade team games
Scrub	A player who limits themselves with imagined rules	Insult, but with a specific meaning	Fighting games, competitive play
Alt	A second character on the same account	Neutral	MMOs and RPGs

GG (good game)

GG stands for "good game". It is typed at the end of a match to say that the game was fair or fun, whoever won. The habit is old: one of the earliest recorded uses is from an October 1999 article about gaming etiquette on the Internet Chess Club website, and StarCraft (1998) made it widespread. Among South Korean StarCraft professionals it became a formal act: the losing player types "gg" to concede, like tipping over a king in chess, and the winner replies with "gg".

Variants and what they signal:

GG at the end of a match: sportsmanship, usually sincere.
GG WP ("well played"): more explicit praise for the opponent.
GG typed in the middle of a match: either a surrender ("we have lost, let's end it") or a sarcastic comment on a mistake. Context decides, and the sarcastic version is often meant to annoy.
GG EZ ("easy"): widely seen as toxic, because it mocks the loser. It can be reported as toxic chat in many games.
GG after a boss kill or a cleared raid: a celebration among teammates, common in MMOs.

How to react: answer "gg" or "gg wp" and move on. If someone types "gg" and nothing else early in a match you are still playing, do not assume they quit; some of the team may be struggling and the others may still be trying. A match is only over when the game says so.

One-shot

To one-shot something is to kill it with a single hit. The term works in both directions: you can one-shot an enemy, and you can be one-shot. It is used for:

Weapons and abilities that kill on one hit. In shooters, sniper rifles are the classic one-shot weapons. In VALORANT, for example, the Operator sniper rifle can kill an enemy with a single shot to the body, depending on their shields. Headshots in many games are one-shots because of a damage multiplier (see hit detection).
Burst builds. In RPGs, a character built to deal huge damage in a single attack is called a one-shot build.
Boss mechanics. In MMO raids, a "one-shot mechanic" is an attack that kills a player instantly if they get hit by it, such as standing in a marked area at the wrong time. Raid groups learn these first.
One-hit knockout moves. The Pokémon games have moves that knock out a target in one hit if they land, such as Fissure and Sheer Cold, and they are known as OHKO (one-hit KO) moves.

One-shots matter for strategy because they change how you play around them. If the other side has a one-shot weapon, you avoid long straight lines of sight, play around corners and use cover. If you have one, you wait and hold a position instead of chasing. And if a boss has a one-shot attack, the right answer is to know the telegraph: the visual or sound warning before it lands.

Party wipe

A party wipe (or just wipe) is when every member of a group dies in the same encounter. The name comes from tabletop role-playing's "total party kill" (TPK). In an MMO or co-op game, it normally means the fight is lost and the group must regroup and try again.

Why they happen:

A mechanic nobody handled. One player fails a task, and it kills everyone, or the healers cannot keep up.
Chain reactions. One death means less damage or healing, which causes more deaths. A wipe often comes from a cascade rather than a single mistake.
Too little preparation. Missing consumables, the wrong gear for the fight or a missing role.
Enrage timers. In many raid fights, a boss becomes much stronger after a set time. If the group is too slow, the boss "enrages" and wipes the group.

What groups do after a wipe: they release or resurrect, run back or use a resurrection ability, rebuff and reset. In raid progression, wipes are expected: groups count their attempts (pulls) and talk through each one. A fast wipe to reset a fight that has gone wrong is called wiping on purpose, and it saves time compared with struggling through a lost fight.

Good habits: stay calm in voice chat, name the cause in one sentence ("tank died to the first cleave") and avoid blaming. The next attempt starts with the same people.

Proximity chat

Proximity chat is voice (or text) chat in which you can only hear players close to you in the game world. The farther away someone is, the quieter they get, until you cannot hear them at all. It is a design feature rather than a slang term, and it makes voice part of the game world instead of a separate channel.

How it is used:

Survival and sandbox games such as Rust and DayZ use it so that meeting a stranger means actually talking to them, with the risk of a threat or a trade.
Co-op horror games such as Lethal Company (2023) and Phasmophobia use it to create tension: you can only hear a teammate if they are near, and monsters can react to noise.
Roleplay servers use it to make characters speak to people nearby, not across the map.
Social and party games use it to let several conversations happen at once in the same space.

What to know:

Everyone near you hears you, including enemies. In a game with stealth, silence is part of play.
Walls and distance matter in some games and are ignored in others. Test it.
Report abuse as in any voice chat, and use the mute options. Proximity chat can also be switched off or limited in the settings of most games that offer it.
Keep your microphone settings in order. Open microphones pick up music and background noise. Push-to-talk usually fixes that.

Pwned

Pwned (pronounced "poned" or "pwned" to rhyme with "owned") means thoroughly defeated, dominated, often in a humiliating way. It is a deliberate misspelling of "owned". The standard explanation is a typo, since the P and O keys sit next to each other on a keyboard. A popular story traces it to a Warcraft game where a message was supposed to say a player "has been owned" but said "pwned", but no firm evidence exists for that or any other single origin, so treat it as folklore.

How it is used:

As trash talk: after a kill, a win or a one-sided fight.
As a joke: about yourself after a ridiculous death ("I got pwned by a chicken").
Outside games: in security, "pwned" can mean that an account or a system has been compromised. That is a related use, from the same root.

Tone rules: among friends it is playful. Aimed at a stranger after a loss, it is taunting, and like "gg ez" it can draw a report. It feels dated, but it is still understood; "rekt" (see below) is the version that replaced it in many circles.

Queue dodge

Queue dodging means leaving a match before it starts, after the queue has popped: during the accept screen, in a champion or agent select, or in the lobby before a game loads. Players do it to avoid a map or mode they dislike, to escape a bad team composition, to avoid a player they do not want to play with or because of a technical problem.

Games usually punish it. Common penalties:

A lock-out from the queue for some minutes or longer, growing with repeat offences.
Rank or rating loss in competitive modes.
A low-priority queue for the next matches. See priority queue.
Lost currency or rewards.

Why the penalty exists: a dodge wastes the time of the other players who accepted the match, and a large number of dodges makes queue times longer for everyone.

If a technical problem makes the match unplayable, fix the connection before queuing again; repeated dodges after a bad connection cost more than one disconnect. Check your game's rules for the real numbers, because penalties differ by title and change with seasons. See also queue position for how waiting in a queue works.

Scrub

In competitive gaming, scrub has a more specific meaning than "bad player". It was made popular by the game designer and Street Fighter player David Sirlin in his essay series Playing to Win. In his use, a scrub is someone who limits themselves with made-up rules that nobody asked them to follow. His standard example is calling a move "cheap" even though it is a legal part of the game, such as a throw that beats a blocking opponent. Because of those self-imposed limits, the scrub can never really compete, whatever their skill.

That makes the word different from similar ones:

Word	Means	Key difference
Noob (newbie)	New to the game	Will improve with time
Scrub	Limits themselves, blames "cheap" tactics	A mindset, not a skill level
Tryhard	Puts in maximum effort	See tryhard
Smurf	An experienced player on a new account	Plays below their real level

Typical scrub behaviours, as seen from outside: refusing to use a strong weapon, character or tactic because it is "cheap" or "boring", blaming the game's balance for every loss and rejecting advice. The fix, in Sirlin's view, is to learn the full rules and treat every legal option as part of the game.

Note: the word is an insult in most chat. Call someone a scrub and you will usually start an argument, not a lesson. If a teammate is struggling, say what to do instead ("try the shield, it stops that attack").

Alt

An alt is a second (third, tenth...) character that you play on the same account, as opposed to your main, the character you play most. MMOs and RPGs are built around the idea, because a new character gives you a different class, a different role, or a fresh start in a new season.

Common reasons to make alts:

Try another class or role without losing your main's progress.
Gather and craft. An alt can carry crafting skills or sit in a city as a "mule" that stores items.
Faction or realm access. Some alts exist to use another faction, or to join friends on another server.
Play for fun. Some players enjoy levelling more than the end game.
Twink. In World of Warcraft, a twink is a low-level character kept at the top of a level bracket and loaded with the best gear available for it, used for PvP in that bracket.

A few related words that are easy to mix up:

Alt vs smurf. An alt is another character on your account. A smurf is a skilled player using a new account to play against low-level opponents, a word known from League of Legends and Counter-Strike. Studios often tolerate alts and treat smurfing differently.
Account sharing. Lending your account to someone else is not "an alt" and is usually against a game's terms of service.

Games increasingly help alt players. World of Warcraft: The War Within (2024) added Warbands, which share some progress, reputation and a bank across all characters on your account, so a new alt does not start from nothing. Check what your game shares between characters before you decide which one does a task.

Terms with their own articles

Tryhard describes a player who puts maximum effort into winning, even in casual play. Used positively, it means dedication; used as an insult, it means someone taking a casual game too seriously, a "sweat".
Clan tag is the short tag in front of a player's name that shows membership of a clan, team or guild. Games limit it to a few characters, and some tie it to a guild system.
LFG, LFM and LF#M are the group-finding calls in MMOs: looking for a group, looking for more players, and looking for a specific number more. Many games now have a built-in group finder as well.
Rekt is a stylised "wrecked", used like "pwned" for a crushing defeat or to celebrate a clean play.