What does GG and the rest of gamer slang you don’t understand mean

A coworker writes “gg” in the work group after closing an impossible project and nobody asks what it means. Someone says they are “on cooldown” after a three-hour meeting and everyone nods without further explanation. That slang was born inside a game, between headphones and controllers, but a long time ago it escaped the living room and settled in the office, in friend chats and even in conversations with parents, who use it without really knowing where it comes from.

This glossary collects the terms that are most repeated outside of a game screen: GG, AFK, NPC, respawn, cooldown, farmear, noob, speedrun and save point, among other close relatives. Each one has a concrete explanation for why it’s said that way, and each one has found a place outside the game that explains why it’s still alive.

What GG means and how to sign the end of anything

Starting here makes sense because GG is probably the most repeated gamer slang word on the planet, inside and outside a game.

GG (good game)

GG stands for “good game” in English. It’s written at the end of a match, whether you win or lose, as a gesture of sportsmanship between the two sides. The first strategy and shooter games that pitted thousands of players against each other on the internet, in the late nineties, turned those two letters into an almost mandatory ritual when closing the game. Anyone who didn’t write it was marked as a sore loser.

Over time the expression became elastic. It serves to congratulate genuinely, but it also serves to make it clear with sarcasm that something has gone irredeemably wrong. “GG, the four o’clock meeting is falling apart” doesn’t congratulate anyone: it declares the meeting dead before it even starts. That double face, sincere at times and ironic at others, is what has traveled best outside the game.

AFK (away from keyboard)

Four letters that mean “away from keyboard”. They were born in the late eighties in the first text chats and in multiplayer worlds without graphics, when someone needed to warn that they were leaving for a few minutes without the rest thinking they had disconnected by mistake. Writing AFK was basically a form of digital courtesy.

Today that courtesy has moved to remote work. Putting “afk 10 min” in a company channel does exactly the same function that it did thirty years ago in a game chat channel: to warn without giving further explanations. That jump from the game to the video call explains why many people use the word without ever having played online.

These two terms are just the gateway to the vocabulary that has grown around video games since online matches exist. The rest of the glossary now enters the territory of the game in progress.

What each word means during the game: respawn, cooldown, farmear and noob

This second batch of terms describes what happens while playing: dying and coming back, waiting to repeat an action, accumulating resources through repetition, and the eternal newcomer who still doesn’t know anything.

Respawn

Reappear after dying within the game, normally at a fixed point on the map. The word combines the prefix “re” with “spawn”, generate, a term that computer science borrowed from biology to talk about creating a new process. The first first-person shooters from the early nineties popularized its use within the game, and from there it spread to any genre with quick matches.

Off screen, “doing a respawn” describes coming back with energy after a slump: a weekend of total disconnection, a long nap, starting the week from zero. The image works because it describes exactly the same thing as in the game, appearing again with life at maximum, even though the map is real life.

Cooldown

Mandatory waiting time before being able to repeat an action or use an ability again. The mechanic comes from tabletop role-playing games, where certain actions required waiting turns before repeating them, and it jumped to strategy and role-playing video games when that calculation started to be done in real time instead of by turns.

“I’m on cooldown” is today one of the most recognizable office phrases among those who play or have played games. It says, without needing to explain anything else, that that person doesn’t have the energy left for one more task and needs that waiting time before performing again. It’s a useful shortcut: it names a state that office Spanish took an entire sentence to describe.

Farming (and grinding)

Repeating the same action over and over to accumulate resources, experience or money within the game. It comes directly from the English “farm”, cultivate, and coexists with “grinding”, from the English “grind”, mill: two different words to describe the same repetitive gesture, borrowed untranslated for convenience. Role-playing and strategy games have been using this mechanic since their first personal computer versions.

At work, “I’m going to farm extra hours” or “we need to grind this quarter” describes the same graceless repetition, the one that has no shortcuts and only gets resolved through sheer persistence. To me it seems the word that has aged best of the entire glossary, because it names without beating around the bush something that before was only described with euphemisms like “giving it your all”.

Noob

Inexperienced player, sometimes with an affectionate nuance and other times with an intent to mock. It descends from “newbie”, newcomer, a term documented as American military slang as early as 1969. Around the year 2000, in the forums of the first competitive online games, “newbie” was shortened and hardened into “noob” or, written with numbers, “n00b”.

The difference between the two words is maintained outside the game: an office “newbie” is simply new and still learning, while calling someone a “noob” already carries a hint of mockery for not having figured it out yet. It’s used the same way with a new application as with a person newly added to a team.

Speedrun, save point and NPC: what do the terms for advancing and not losing progress mean

The last block groups words about time and progress within a game: going as fast as possible, saving before something goes wrong, and that background character that nobody controls.

Speedrun

Completing an entire game, or part of it, in the shortest time possible, using shortcuts, non-obvious routes and sometimes the game’s own glitches. The hobby grew among players who recorded their complete matches and shared them to compare times, and over the years it organized into its own categories: finishing with any available object, finishing at one hundred percent, finishing without using a specific object.

“I’m going to do a speedrun of shopping” or “speedrun of the nine o’clock meeting” translates that same idea to normal tasks: reaching the end by skipping everything dispensable. The fewer unnecessary steps, the better the score.

NPC (non-player character)

An NPC is any character that the game controls and not a person: the shopkeeper, the guard, the neighbor who always repeats the same phrase. The term appeared in 1974, in the manual of one of the first tabletop role-playing games, where it already distinguished between the characters that each player controlled and those that the game master controlled.

Outside the game, “NPC” became a viral insult: calling someone an NPC means accusing them of acting on autopilot, without thinking for themselves, repeating the same opinion as everyone else. In 2023 the phenomenon exploded completely when several content creators started streaming live imitating phrases and gestures of background characters, and millions of people started using “NPC mode” to describe any robotic reaction, inside or outside the internet.

Save point

The place or moment in which the game saves progress, so you don’t have to start all over from zero if something goes wrong afterwards. The idea was born out of necessity: the first video game consoles didn’t have memory to save anything, so when you reached a certain point the game gave you a password that you had to write down by hand and retype to continue in another session. With more memory available, that password became a fixed point on the map where you just had to stop.

“I need a save point” is used today to ask for, literally, a stable moment to return to after a rough patch: closing a complicated month, finishing a move, passing the last pending exam. It doesn’t erase what came before, but it gives a safe place from which to continue without loading the entire match again.

From the screen to the office: why this slang no longer stays inside the game

None of these terms need explanation among people who have played online, and less and less explanation is needed among people who have never played. The reason is generational: whoever grew up with a controller in their hand now runs meetings, writes emails and organizes work shifts, and brings with them the vocabulary they learned to name exhaustion, progress and failure.

There’s something deeper, and here I allow myself a second personal opinion: this slang survives outside the game because it names states for which office Spanish didn’t have a short word. Saying “I’m on cooldown” avoids half a sentence of justification. Saying “NPC mode” describes in two words a reaction that otherwise would take an entire paragraph to explain. It’s not linguistic laziness, it’s efficiency: each term solves in a second what used to take a complete sentence.

That crossover between work and video games also has its humorous version with more development in the guide on gifts for programmers, a profession where this jargon has coexisted with work for longer than in almost any other sector. And gamer humor itself, the one that plays with these words turned into visual jokes, has quite a lot of ground within the funny t-shirts section.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does GG mean outside of a video game?

It means the same thing as inside: “good game”. It’s used to close any situation, good or bad, sometimes seriously and sometimes sarcastically when something has gone irredeemably wrong.

Is a noob the same as an NPC?

No. A noob is someone new to something, with room for improvement. Calling someone an NPC is different: it accuses that person of acting on autopilot, without their own judgment, regardless of whether they’ve been doing that task for a long or short time.

Why do so many people say “I’m on cooldown” at work?

Because it describes in two words a very specific state: needing wait time before performing again, just like a game ability that can’t be reused until its cooldown expires. It’s shorter than explaining the reason for exhaustion every time.