A rant about game jargon

I just need to get this out of my system.

Technical language, or jargon, helps communication—particularly within a specialism.

But I don’t like using jargon to exclude outsiders.

So I am frustrated by some game jargon where the terminology has an everyday meaning different from its use as jargon.

It’s frustrating because it’s opaque, and it doesn’t help make our hobby more inclusive.

So my most hated game jargon:

Bluesheet

This originated in theatre-style larps for general background sheets. A group of characters, say US spies, would have a common background sheet explaining what US spies do and their goals. This saved copying it onto each character sheet, and ensures that everyone gets the game information. And because they were usually printed on blue sheets of paper, they became known as bluesheets.

And although I can’t remember the last time I saw one printed on blue paper, the term bluesheet lingers on. 

What’s wrong with background sheet or info sheet?

Bid (as in to bid a game)

This comes from Intercon, I think, and is now part of the UK’s lexicon for Consequences. To ensure a reasonable quality, all larps must be approved by the convention committee. That’s fine—I approve of that. Except that the process of submitting a game for proposal is called bidding.

Bidding?

That’s not what bidding normally means, but it seems too late to call it what it really is: submitting.

Module

I blame D&D for this. In D&D, when someone says module, they mean adventure or scenario. Module has perfectly good dictionary definitions (these are from the Cambridge Dictionary):

• one of a set of separate parts that, when combined, form a complete whole
• one of the units that together make a complete course, taught especially at a college or university
• a part of a spacecraft that can operate independently of the other parts, especially when separate from them.

None of these explain how an adventure came to be described as a module.

Freeform

So I know exactly what I mean when I say a freeform: a self-contained live-action roleplaying game with pre-generated characters, simulated combat and limited running time. (Typified, I guess, by the murder mystery games we publish at Freeform Games.)

Now I know that’s a rubbish term—at the time (in the 1990s), we (in the UK at least) were differentiating our games from ‘live-action’ larps, which typically meant running around outside with rubber swords.

Anyway, larp terminology changes across the world—we don’t have a common language and now freeform means different things.

What I mean when I say freeform is also known as theatre-style, or chamber larps, or secrets and powers larps. 

But freeform also now has other meanings—American Freeform is something else (although I’m not sure what), and in the Nordic scene, freeform means something else again.

I can take my fair share of the blame for promoting the term in the UK. I set up the uk-freeforms mailing list and UK-Freeforms Facebook Group, and I called my company ‘Freeform Games’. (Although Morgana Cowling’s 1989 The Freeform Book was extremely influential.)

I now call my games freeform larps, which is still a little imprecise, but I don’t have a better name for them.