Game Industry Terms for the Aspiring Game Industry Employee

While it's not necessary, you can always set yourself apart from the competition who are interested in getting into the game industry by knowing some of the jargon - or even better, you'll not have to have it explained to you when someone drops you an e-mail or an assignment with a number of terms that don't necessarily mean the same thing in the work place.

Here are some useful words to know, many of them would already be known to most gamers, so this could also act as something of a refresher:

Content - Anything inside the video game that has been designed for players to see or interact with. Usually it doesn't involve art unless it is an actual part of the game play process.

Base Pop - Shorthand for "base population", meaning the unscripted, basic population that inhabit a level, map, or zone. This does not include things such as boss battles or special events that occur in games, but simply the general population of Non-Player Characters who have to be placed throughout to either add life or "content" for a player to interact with. It can either be enemies or allies.

Designer - Though commonly referred to as a developer, the game designer is the one who actually creates and designs content. Developer is a term better applied to programmers and coders, whose job it is to break down into the nitty gritty and create the less than interesting, technical aspects of a game. The designers are simply those who take the tools available to them and make the game itself.

Drop - A drop is a term used to describe a new package of content. It's more of a slang term for a patch or updated file - referring to the developers/designers "dropping" the new content into the game. It will often be annotated much like any other patch or version of software, as version 1, 2, 1.1, 2.1, 2.2, etc. Usually this is a term used between QA and the design team, as a number of bugs will be found and later fixed - and when they are, a new "drop" will be sent to QA.

Pathing - The routes a non-player character takes. These are usually agonizing to create, as it requires the designer to hand code the parameters of the character's movement in a seemingly infinite number of situations.

NPC - A non-player character, essentially any character that appears in the game that isn't being controlled by the/a player.

Mob - A term from the days of MUDs, a mob is essentially any NPC that is intended to be fought by the players. The term is an acronym for "movable object". Unlike NPC, mobs are only NPCs that are meant to be fought.

Maps - The lay out of an area or zone. Not exclusively a diagram of the layout, but literally the entire zone itself. For example, any level in God of War is referred to as its own map. Blood Gulch, in the popular Halo series, is a multiplayer "map".

Build - The current "version" of a game that is ready to be tested. Usually when a "drop" happens, it is "dropping in" a new "build". As with the versions, it will be considered Build 1.0, 1.1, and so on with typical numerical ascension. Frequently, game studios will keep a number of builds on hand, in case there is some unseen problem with the latest build and they are required to return to a more stable, previously working build.