Science fiction will not wholly lie to you. While there is not yet credible, immersive virtual reality, some people devote much too much of their lives in alternate reality games on the internet. A few people have actually died in real life rather than risking the temporary death of their game avatars, forgoing food and sleep for more than 100 hours before nature took its inevitable course. As far as you know, insanity should take hold after 72 and maybe that starts to explain it.
These games are called Role Playing Games and are distant relatives of that crappy Colleco-Vision Dungeons & Dragons game you will have in a few years. Imagine the graphics are a thousand times better and millions of people continents apart are all playing their own interrelated games. Many players can get together to defeat the hard monsters. Or, depending on the server, each other. Have you got that image in your head? These games are even better.
They have spawned a rich and varied vocabulary that drives you absolutely crazy, from the noun "n00b" to signify someone blatantly and obnoxiously inexperienced, to the verb "killsteal" for when another player interferes with a fight and steals the experience points, to "tweek" for a low level character who has high level equipment owing to the intercession of a high level character. Like with any developing subculture, the lingo evolves much more quickly than can be reasonably recorded by anthropologists. You think most of the players would have no idea why anyone would query this and would hurl homophobic epithets at anyone suggesting they might be queried.
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