All those obnoxious acronyms getting you down? Well, dry your weepy eyes—below is our guide to gamer-speak. Soon you’ll be as geeky as the rest of us.

4X A type of empire strategy emphasizing “eXpand, eXploit, eXplore, eXterminate”

AA Anti-aliasing

AD&D Advanced Dungeons & Dragons; a classic pencil-and-paper RPG system

AF Anisotropic filtering

BFG Big friggin’ gun; a common über-weapon in FPS games

CPU Central processing unit

DDR Double data rate

DNF Duke Nukem Forever, vaporware

EQ EverQuest

FSB Front side bus

FPS First-person shooter; frames per second

GBA GameBoy Advance

GHz Gigahertz

MHz Megahertz

MMORPG Massively multiplayer online role-playing game

NPC Non-player character

PBEM Play by e-mail

PK Player killer

PvP Player versus player

RPG Role-playing game

RFTM Read the f***ing manual.

RTS Real-time strategy

TF2 Team Fortress 2, vaporware

TK Team killer

USB Universal serial bus

WASD Refers to the “WASD” letter keys to control movement in an FPS

WTF What the f***?

XP Experience points

Copyright © 2003 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in Computer Gaming World.