Tag Archives: video game

Lavender Town Syndrome

Nationality: United States
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 2/17/13
Primary Language: English
Language: French

The informant is a college student from Reno, Nevada.

This supposed “syndrome” is a piece of online lore which comes from the Pokemon video games for Gameboy. The informant first stumbled upon a website about it while he was in high school. However, he played the games when he was seven or eight years old. In the game, the player travels from town to town, advancing towards the end. One of the towns is called Lavender Town. In it, there is a tower full of ghosts of wandering souls of Pokemon who have been murdered. When the player enters a new area, the music changes. Each town has its own song, and the informant recalls Lavender Town’s being particularly creepy.

This song is central to the lore which has become an online legend. According to the legend, when the first prototypes of the game came out in Japan in February of 1996, there was a spike in illness of children who bought and played the game. These “illnesses” supposedly made them mentally unstably, resulting in a spike in suicides and violent behavior. According to the legend, the high frequencies used in the song resulted in these physiological changes. The informant does not actually believe the legend is actually true, mostly because it is posted on a page called “creepypasta Wiki”, a page for stories that are generally made-up internet hoaxes. Still, there are entire forums filled with lengthy theories about missing frequencies and ghosts in the machine. The following is a link to the song, as heard in the final, U.S. version:

 

World of Warcraft Legends – SuperAIDS

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Barista - Starbucks
Residence: Lake Forest, Illinois
Performance Date: 3/16/2013
Primary Language: English

My informant used to play World of Warcraft for a period of about 5 years, and during his time with the game, he has come across several stories.  The two stories he told me about were the SuperAIDS story and the Leeroy Jenkins story.  This story is about SuperAIDS.

According to my informant, SuperAIDS was the player given nickname of a debuff [essentially a curse] that a particular boss character would inflict upon the players.  This debuff would deal damage to the inflicted player and would spread to any nearby allied units.  The debuff could be cleansed by a particular class and be stopped.  However, this debuff would sometimes get on a player’s pet, and one of the ways to deal with this was simply dismiss the pet rather than wait for someone to cleanse it off, because it’s really hard to see if it’s on someone’s pet and just as hard to target the pet.  So players with pets would simply dismiss them and be done with it.  Unfortunately, the debuff didn’t go away, so when they went back to major cities, and summoned their pet, the debuff would still be there.  Once players figured out this was happening, they got their pets infected and brought them into the major cities and started spreading the disease intentionally.  The disease would spread rapidly between players and would kill almost anyone who wasn’t highest level.  Normally this would just be considered a prank but the disease would also spread to NPC’s [non-player characters].  The major problem with this was that NPC’s regenerate their health when out of combat and this regeneration outpaced the rate of damage from the disease.  So the disease would kill almost any player who came into contact with it, but it would never get off the NPC’s.  This is perhaps how the name SuperAIDS came about, because it didn’t go away.  Anyway, this meant that, as the disease was spread, more and more areas of the game became essentially uninhabitable because your character would just get infected and die over and over.  This persisted for about a week until the devs were able to patch the game, eliminating the disease from the NPC’s and preventing the disease from leaving the raid encounter.  And even though the game of WoW is played in several different servers, because the players all communicate online, nearly every server experienced this in some way.

Folk Speech

Nationality: Mexican, Norwegian
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 2008
Primary Language: English

Folk Speech – Videogaming

Woot!

Woot is a word used in popular teenage culture as an expression of happiness or agreement much the way one would use Yay or Woohoo. The word was originally created by online gamers, but quickly found its way into the vocabulary of non-gamers online. People are now even saying it in everyday conversation. A non-gamer friend of mine began using the word in everyday conversation in August 2007 after picking it up on online message boards. Players of the game Doom first created the word woot. It is actually an acronym for “we own the other team”.  Woot was a way of quickly saying that your group was showing dominance in the game. Since it was only used as an expression of victory it became a way to express happiness like the word yay.

The formation of special words and acronyms is not uncommon among a subgroup of a society. In this case the word woot came out of using an acronym to reduce typing. Words such as these allow a group to assess a person’s knowledge of the group. Someone who is a member of a group like this will know the terminology common in the group. I think woot is an acceptable expression for online, but when people use it in everyday face-to-face speech it is annoying. The expression is very informal and kind of nerdy.  I think the jump of woot into popular speech shows the increased influence of the Internet on younger people. Many young people know and can use a plethora of online abbreviations and expressions such as lol, rofl, ttyl, l33t, and gtg. Woot has even become the name of a very well known online retailer. Woot.com is a retailer that sells only one product each day. Usually it is an electronic good, but regardless the product is always sold at a highly discounted price. This website was the first one deal per day type website. Woot.com has been profiled in magazines like Time, PC Magazine, and Motley Fool.

Video Game Celebration – American

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Nationality: African American
Age: 15
Occupation: Student
Residence: Lyndhurst, Ohio
Performance Date: March 12, 2009
Primary Language: English

When playing the popular XBOX game Halo, after a person kills their opponent he or she should go over to the corpse of his opponent and repeatedly crouch above him. This is known as “corpse humping.”

Nicholas told me that this is done frequently when playing Halo online. It is a sign of disrespect to one’s enemy. He says it is done by him and his friends as a way of celebrating their kill and not so much to disrespect someone. Sometimes people get highly offended when they see that their corpse is being humped. This can lead to shouting matches, nasty texts, or revenge killings (within the game of course).

The act of corpse humping is also sometimes referred to as tea bagging, which is when a person puts his testicles into the open mouth of another person, much like dipping a tea bag into a cup of hot water. The corpse humping mimics that act and that is the reason so many people take offense to it. I asked Nicholas when the first time he learned about corpse humping was and he told me it was the first time he played an online deathmatch in Halo. After being killed, the person that killed him humped his corpse for an extended period of time while taunting Nicholas via text about how he was being teabagged. Nicholas fought fire with fire by killing and teabagging his assailant.

He later started doing it as a way of celebrating an especially challenging duel, but his opponents still frequently take offense to having their corpses humped. I think corpse humping is a way to assert dominance over one’s opponent. When a person’s corpse is being humped they are completely helpless. They have to wait a certain amount of time for their character to re-spawn (reappear). During this time they are humiliated and helpless. By frequently humping corpses one is making a statement about his superiority and challenging others to take him on.

Here is an example of teabagging in Halo:
Halo 3: The Bag Boy (Machinima)