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On one question I saw users using the word "mobs" - I have never heard this term, and got me thinking - is there glossary of game and gamedev terms that anyone has come across?

ps. what are mobs?

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Might want to make this CW since it will be a list. – Bryan Denny Aug 3 '10 at 16:56
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imho this looks more suitable for gaming.stackexchange.com mobs stand for monsters afaik, ks for kill steal, pk, player kill... but you may get a more complete list at the gaming section – Prix Aug 3 '10 at 16:58
It's not at all unusual for communities to develop their own glossary in their meta site. See: meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/40353/… for reference. – Robert Cartaino♦ Aug 3 '10 at 21:30
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@Robert the issue is that gaming jargon is very game-specific and is very disjoint from game developer jargon. The phrase the OP is asking about is more of the former category. – coderanger Aug 4 '10 at 2:45

closed as off topic by David McGraw, coderanger, Ben Zeigler, Noctrine♦ Aug 5 '10 at 0:31

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3 Answers

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This holds a pretty nice list of what you are looking for: http://mmoterms.com/full-mmorpg-terms-glossary

There are still game specifics, etc...

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A mob is a "mob ile" unit. It was popular at least in the DIKU and derivative MUD's, but may have been used elsewhere, too.

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This is actually a fairly significant issue. A few years ago I was working on an MMO where most of the engineering had played one MMO, while most of design had played a different MMO. There wasn't a lot of people who had played both. As such there was a lot of terms that one group or the other assumed were rather common but were specific to that one game/genre. Without the common language and common dictionary talking about design is much harder as so many concepts can be shortened to a quick abbreviation. Anyone who has played an MMO with an aggression system will instantly know what you mean by 'taunt' even if the MMO doesn't use that as a term. If you come from a JRPG background though, the concept is fairly meaningless.

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That may be common on the player's side, using short words to describe something, but i dont think a company would use these terms on the development side specially. They would communicate using the proper words and from that create a new words for their games for example fire blast which is a fair used name becomes Doom's Blade which a player would later make into hey how much dmg your DB does so these are fairly player terms for gaming imho. – Prix Aug 3 '10 at 18:36
Well I think that's a problem that should be handled on a team or project basis. Just make a wiki page or something that says what terms you're using and make sure everybody's bought in. – Tetrad♦ Aug 3 '10 at 18:53
just makes my point, that a development team will talk things over... – Prix Aug 3 '10 at 21:18

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