At least in WoW, the generic term for a good player was originally a pejorative. "Imba" - short for "imbalanced" - is pretty much the universal term for someone who does their job well. It was originally used to describe someone who played a character class or spec that was overpowered with respect to the other classes and specs in the game. "OP", interestingly, is mostly still a pejorative term.

In the main, however, there are few specific virtue terms in WoW at present. If you're lucky, you'll see a "nice tanking" or perhaps the more laconic "gj" at the end of a successful run... perhaps from one of the other four players in a 5-man instance. The others will drop group and go on their way without saying anything.

What is being praised is the lack of anything that would cause the other
players in the group to curse you. If you're playing a tank, you can
keep control of the mobs and refrain from being so ill-mannered as to
die. If you're playing a healer, then nobody gets close to dying...
even if they're continually standing in the fire / void zones / ice /
whatever the encounter designers have chosen for this encounter. If
you're a damage-dealer, you're topping the damage meters, not dying, and preferably moving out of the fire / ... (if you want the healer to like you) and not grabbing any mobs off the tank (if you want the tank to
like you).

Any of the heinous crimes of dying, causing a wipe, failing to hold
aggro, not going at breakneck speed through the instance, having to
pause to recover any resource, or only having just good enough gear to
run the instance will get comments like "ffs l2p n00b lol" - and a wipe,
these days, will generally cause a random group to disband.

"OP" = "overpowered" - "he's OP" means "his class or spec [or
occasionally gear] is better than the rest of us". WoW players can be
extremely bitchy. The same thing that's good in instances (someone else
having great gear, a good spec and being able to zoom through the
instance with no problems) is bad everywhere else, probably due to envy.
Blizzard are well aware of the players' envy of others' gear, and this year's April Fool of an Equipment Potency EquivalencE Number (or E.P.E.E.N.) at
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/underdev/equipmentpotency.xml is
particularly well thought-out.

Depends on the group. I think we need to distinguish:

1) groups that are thrown together for one job, last 15-60 minutes, and where the players may never see each other again (random groups are comprised of players from several different servers that are otherwise entirely separate);

2) groups that form for long-term challenges or social functions, such as raid and social guilds.

In 1, no, there are almost no virtue terms. In 2, the players get to know each other well, have repeated interaction, and the usual communication among colleagues/friends appears.

Peter: Thanks for this clarification. In the case of (2), my question remains: have no terms emerged for virtues relating to the play of the game, new terms - like imba etc.?

This said, I hear from other WoW players that there is a term, "booster", for a player who helps lower-level players advance. This sounds like a bona fide virtue to me! So there is some hope. :)

Osbo: Thanks for returning to the discussion!

"It's arguably a game mechanic based in how a game designer views his/her game should be played. It's an equivalent of a commandment."

Yes, but this strikes me as a slightly problematic issue... adhering to commandments might be virtuous if the commandments are moral, but the achievements themselves are essentially arbitrary and the compulsion to acquire them strikes me as an *addiction* which is surely not virtuous. And besides, any virtue that might adhere to following a commandment would not do so *as a consequence of following the commandment* but by the nature of what was commanded, and in this case it would surely be *more* virtuous to do the thing in question without promise of reward.

In the case of your powerbuff example, doing this of one's own volition may be virtuous, but if you do so because you want to gain an achievement this looks like simple greed!

I'm open to the argument I've heard elsewhere that there is a code of honour among "chievo whores" concerning how the achievements are attained, but this still strikes me as very borderline stuff...

But I'm very glad you raised the point about "fair play" as it does, as you say, have a long and distinguished history. It shows there are concepts of honour in play, and that a player may be considered honourable. Still, it's striking that we have no adjective (or at least, none I've noticed) for a player who is good at adhering to this code of honour. We moan at players who don't "play fair" and call them cheats and spoilsports, but we have no title for a player who is fair.

Thanks again!

Hmm, masses of other pejoratives I can think of, but not having so much luck on the virtues still.

More from fighting games - the first time I ever heard the use of "spamming" in gaming was from fighting games back before FPS etc were really around, and it was used for "fireball spamming" - repeated use of projectile moves to keep an opponent at bay, that became shortened to just 'spamming' to refer to this. There's also "turtling" (excessive blocking & defensive play), accusations of being a 'tick-thrower' (using a particularly hard to defend mixture of attacks and throws to break a defence), and one of the most amusing ones I ever heard being a "janitor" for excessive use of low 'sweep' moves. Of course the weird thing is, when these games move out of the casual space and into more 'serious' competition, many of these insults can be turned on their head and seen as qualities of a player and/or their play style. The turtle may instead get complimented with comments of "great blocking" that are genuine. The 'spammer' or janitor becomes a great zoner ('zoning' is the term of using repeated perfectly timed ranged attacks to keep the opponent where you want them), the tick-thrower has great "mix-ups" or perhaps good "mind games". One virtuous term I've heard used is "styling" when a player plays with a style that's impressive to the observer, although it's fairly generic, and tends to refer to a player who's easily winning, seemingly no matter what moves or style he uses, so it's probably not especially grounded in any morality, much like most of these 'virtuous' terms unfortunately.

There's also some interesting use of language even about a player's character selection. A "tier whore" is someone who uses only the 'known' stronger characters within a fighting game. Doing the opposite is often seen as a virtue too, but I can't think of any specific language that's used for it. It's usually just exclamations of the kind "he won playing as Remy!!?". "Low tier warrior" is the only general phrase I think I've heard.

I think part of the problem is the massive difference in skill levels and attitudes that players bring to these competitive games. I've had some really difficult voice chat's on XBox Live when I happen to have two friends in the same chat & game with me that have wildly different viewpoints as to what is 'fair play' in the context of the game. To be honest, I sympathise with the 'anything goes' attitude here since otherwise it becomes a poor comedy of attempting to draw some arbitrary line in the sand of what's acceptable or not, it's simple not possible to ever get anyone to agree to some kind of house rules. In reality when you look at almost all the pejoratives and complaints it basically becomes a case of "whatever beats me, I don't like it". One vastly used term in all competitive games is the accusation of "using cheese" or "cheesey play", which again is actually so ill-defined it basically boils down to the same thing. Some people may define their targets of complaint as things that are relatively easy to execute, yet hard to counter. The trouble is, in a competitive environment, why wouldn't someone try to use those types of techniques?

Online fighting games also will have automatic accusations of "lagging" - often directed as an insult towards a player rather than the actual internet conditions, as if it is always the opponents fault (!) - although in some cases it is their 'fault' - when you host a game and an opponent from South America attempts to play you with an atrocious connection to you - even though the game shows them this beforehand, but you, as the host, cannot choose to avoid them. Also online you will frequently see complaints of "turbo" on the behalf of the opponent, due to the fact that many controllers these days have turbo button functions that make certain things far too easy to do in these games that weren't designed with it in mind.

One bonus term from miniatures wargaming - a WAAC player - Win At All Costs. Most definitely an insult!

I do also note that all of the moral language everyone has come up with is from multiplayer games (and generally competition in those games - ie: *real* games, in my definition!). In a single players 'story game' or puzzle-challenge kind of environment, there doesn't seem to me to be much room for morality when it's quite clearly 'man against machine'. A fair amount has been written about games such as Black & White, Fable, Bioshock etc that attempt to create some kind of moral choice for players in this context, yet players generally easily see through their thinly veiled options.

I'm also wondering about applying the same idea to the language of sport, since that's essentially the same essence of a competitive videogame. Thinking about that quickly, you see the same kind of language there; moral insults tend to be quite specific styles of play that some find unacceptable, whereas most virtues are generally reserved for just being good and winning.

Ugh. I wish I'd seen this back in 2017-2018? (when I wrote a paper with Thi Nguyen sort of about this).

In my ethics and videogames class we often talk aboutthe emergence of value-laden language used to describe in-game behaviors. And yes, most of it seems pejorative (ganking, spawn-camping, etc.). My go-to examples for positive ones are: (and these might not be in common use anymore?)

twinking - a simple act of generosity from a high-level player/character to a lower one, e.g. in an MMO when you dump a bunch of loot that's super valuable for new characters but not really for your current character. Also visiting new player areas and casting strong buffs on them.

sherpa ("to sherpa") - when a player leads a group of new/inexperienced players on some in-game activity so that they can learn it/experience it from someone with more experience knowledge. As seen in Destiny 2 raids and dungeons and other high level content.

carry ("to carry", "thanks for the carry") - when a player bears the brunt of the effort required to succeed in a game activity (usually through their own skill) and other players recognize that their contribution was less/minimal. It's a sign of respect. A player who is/was carried might refer to themselves as "backpack". E.g. We were doing Trials of Osiris in Destiny (a tough Pvp event) and I was backpack or I went as a backpack - the rest of the team carried me along.