Every field, whether it be for hobbies or for work, has its own set of words that nobody outside of the field would understand. Video games are not an exception to this. This struck me most when I tried to talk to my parents about the game I was playing. There was no common ground for me to even begin to explain what was going on in the game, and it was obvious they weren't going to understand what I was saying.

Most of these difficulties come from the way video game terms have simply appropriated other words. "Parse", "raid", "skills", "health", and "damage" to name a few. All of these terms have their own dictionary definitions, but in a game they referring to something far more specific. While someone who doesn't know these terms in their context might be able to follow a conversation about how much damage your attack did, they wouldn't if you tried to explain how you were doing a high-end raid where you used a set of skills to damage the boss' health bar to half in a few seconds and that you parsed top of the party at the end of the fight.

As is obvious, it can get really confusing really quickly.

So I will make an attempt to explain some of the more common terms of video games in a way that, hopefully, makes sense.

The most common term that can be found related to almost any game is health(or HP). In most games everything that can be fought(and some things that can't) has something called a health bar. This is a bar that lowers as damage is inflicted. Once the health of something hits 0(the bar is empty), then that thing is dead, unconscious, or otherwise incapacitated.

Damaged Health Barupload.wikimedia.org

Damage is inflicted by a variety of different ways: attacks, skills, spells, etc. This is where things start to get specific to certain games, but essentially damage is done by attacks. The person playing the game(player) uses attacks on a variety of enemies and the enemies do the same, both trying to empty the other's health bar.

www.publicdomainpictures.net

The only other word I can think of common to almost every video game is spawn. This refers to the place that something in the game appears at. For example, if, when you start a game, you appear in a forest hut, then that would be your spawn, that place you appeared at. Enemies also have the same thing. If an enemy spawns outside of that forest hut, then that is where it appeared.

Thank you so much for reading and I hope you learned something from this!