Some argue that the brutal and ruthless nature of the game itself encourages rudeness. In fact, the first-person shooter is the most intense, graphic and explicit genre: in these games, players go around shooting each other in virtual scenarios that range from World War Two battlefields to sci-fi spaceships. If gameplay can be considered a language, the FPS has a very limited vocabulary. The interaction with other players is mostly limited to shooting – alternative forms of negotiation with the Other are not contemplated. The kind of language you hear during a game of Halo, Battlefield or Call of Duty evokes the crass vulgarity one can find in movies depicting military lives, such as Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. This should not surprise, considering the close links between military culture and the videogame industry [note 1]. However, the focus of this short article is not the military-entertainment complex. What I would like to discuss, instead, is the figure of the “Angry Gamer”, a player of videogames that expresses his frustration in vocally and physically obnoxious manners.
Lara Cowell on 16 Mar 14"Sorry" is one of more than 10,000 American words Germans have borrowed since 1990. Language experts here say English is the main foreign language that has influenced German over the past six decades. This cultural infusion is pervasive, with English used by journalists, by scientists and even at the highest levels of government. To some language experts, like Holger Klatte, the widespread Americanization of German is problematic. Klatte is the spokesman for the German Language Society, which has 36,000 members worldwide. "Languages do tend to affect one another, but the influence of English in Germany is so strong that Germans are having a hard time advancing their own vocabulary," he says.
