Greetings and welcome to the revised glossary. I hope that this may prove useful to anyone attempting to create a game, or perhaps coming upon a term they don't know, or even attempting to find an elusive concept (for those "it's onna tip of my brain" moments). I have taken some liberties with the organization, as some concepts could potentially have more than one categorization; I have also removed overly generic concepts that are not directly used in games, such as 3D modeling, digital art, CRT or pure mathematics. Please /msg me for corrections and additions.
A more complete node trawl is coming soon; there are a few that I found (and added) over the course of rewriting the previous version of this metanode, and there are bound to be more.
Video Rendering
Terms used in describing techniques of creating images, scenery and objects, putting them all together to create a world, and then displaying them in a way fast enough to be enjoyable and clever enough to be understandable (3D world on a 2D surface and all that).
alpha channel
anisotropic
anti-aliasing /
FSAA /
Why full screen anti-aliasing is pointless on current hardware
bilinear filtering
bump mapping
composite sprites
FMV
gouraud shading
HAM (
hold and modify)
mip mapping
mode 7
phong shading
real time
raster
raster effect
raster interrupt
ray tracing
sprite
sprite flicker
texture mapping
tile based rendering
trilinear mipmap interpolation
Audio Creation
Methods of creating audio to accompany the game are stored here.
FM synthesis
MIDI
PSG
red book
Game Mechanics
Concepts used in gaming to simulate real life, and side effects of these attempts at facsimile.
collision detection
clipping /
no clipping
cone of fire
parallax scrolling
pop-up
slowdown
Programming
Concepts and languages used most exclusively for the process of game creation.
Apple Game Sprockets
counter
DirectX
Glide
GLUT
OpenGL
SCUMM
SDL (
Simple Directmedia Layer)
voxel
Game Genres
Action RPG
beat 'em up
CRPG
fighting game)
FPS
isometric games
MMORPG
platform game
rhythm action
RPG
RTS
racer
shmup
shoot 'em up
shooter
simulator
survival horror
strategy RPG
tactical RPG
turn based
General - Era
16-bit era
32-bit era
classic era
next generation
transition era
Arcade Legacy Terms
1-up
arcade perfect
cocktail mode
continue
credit
Input Devices
data glove
joypad
joystick
light gun
Game Terms
Vocabulary of gamers. Words commonly used to describe common concepts in games.
attribute clash (aka
colour clash)
AWP whore
battle
board
boss
camp
caravan stage
combo
darkside
droid
encounter (See also:
random encounter)
god mode
homing missile
HUD
miniboss
option
parry
quad damage
quad whore
rapid fire
shoulder button
sound test
smart bomb
special move
Hardware
Hardware used in making a game system work.
50/60 switch
adapter
adapter damage
backup device
bridge adapter
GPU
JAMMA
microswitch
mod board
mod chip
multitap
red book
RGB mod
SCART
stepdown transformer
VRAM
Electronics
Bits and pieces of not necessarily game-related hardware, but necessary to create audio and video, the two components of a game.
AV
bit
blit /
blitter
Z buffer
Updates
Jan. 27, 2004
Added cocktail mode.
Jan. 5, 2004
Added god mode.
Oct. 9, 2003
added: isometric games, tactical RPG, sound test