Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Spelling and grammar

It's always the first of April over at Daily Gaming News. So they posted the fake announcement of Blizzard introducing spelling and grammar exams into World of Warcraft, which players will have to pass to be able to play. The reason why that makes us smile is that sometimes we just wish it was true. We live in an age where people write as much as never before in the history of mankind: text messages, e-mails, blogs, game chats. And it turns out that one of the reasons why many people didn't write so much in previous ages is that they don't know how. They still don't know how, but somehow the social inhibition to prove they're an idiot by writing like one has become lost.

They simply claim that "u" and "r" are just socially acceptable short forms of "you" and "are", mix in some newly invented slang like "roxxor" and "pwn", some acronyms like "lol", and soon the phrases they're writing looks so unlike correct English that nobody even notices that they just spelled a couple of words wrong, and have no idea of the correct use of punctuation.

Blizzard will never test their players for spelling and grammar, but don't you sometimes wish that players in chat were writing something which resembled English a bit more?

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