Lamer

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This article is about the slang term. For the Canadian lawyer, see Antonio Lamer. For the bus line, see Lamers Bus Lines.

Lamer is a jargon or slang name originally applied in cracker and phreaker culture to someone who didn't really understand what he was doing. Today it is also loosely applied by IRC, BBS, and online gaming users to anyone perceived to be contemptible. In general, the term has come to describe someone who is intentionally ignorant of how things work.

The term is derived from lame. A lamer is widely understood to be the antithesis of a hacker. While a hacker strives to understand the mechanisms behind what he uses, even when such extended knowledge would have no practical value, a lamer only cares to learn the bare minimum necessary to operate the device in the way originally intended. Thus, a lamer is usually indistinguishable from someone who is too lame to understand why something works even if they wanted to. A lamer's attitude is summed up by the phrase, "I don't care how it works, just that it does".

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[edit] Origination

In phreak culture, a lamer is one who scams codes off others rather than doing cracks or really understanding the fundamental concepts. In warez culture, where the ability to wave around cracked commercial software within days of (or before) release to the commercial market is much esteemed, the lamer might try to upload garbage or shareware or something incredibly old.

This term seems to have originated in the Commodore 64 scene in the mid 1980s. It was popularized among Amiga crackers of the mid-1980s by ‘Lamer Exterminator’, the most famous and feared Amiga virus ever, which gradually corrupted non-write-protected floppy disks with bad sectors. The bad sectors, when looked at, were overwritten with repetitions of the string “LAMER!”.[1]

[edit] Common New Uses

Lamer is now commonly applied to individuals perceived to be contemptible.The proliferation of computer-mediated communication media such as IRC or BBSes may be partly responsible for bringing the term into common parlance.

Lamer has become a word misused in meaning, in the way that stupid, gay, and retarded are misused to describe something contemptible.

Generally, the more specialized and developed the culture, the more lamer is used as it was defined originally. In less exclusive cultures such as online gaming and IRC, the term has lost its original meaning.

[edit] Use in Online Gaming

In online gaming, a lamer is a person who disrupts the natural process of gameplay, usually intentionally. It is also often used as a verb, to "lame" meaning to do something that is adverse to mutual enjoyment of the game, with "laming" being a noun describing the act itself. A frequent example of laming in many games with a deathmatch mode of play, is the fragging of AFK or chatting players, particularly if the server has a house rule condemning such actions. There are many variations of this often unwritten code of conduct, depending on the game. For example, in Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy, killing a player with his lightsaber turned off is usually considered laming, especially given the less frenetic and relatively social nature of "free for all" (deathmatch) maps in that game.

In online real-time strategy gaming, the verb is commonly used to describe the strategy (or lack thereof) of using a single unit in massive numbers. An example is abus laming in Age of Empires III. Usually the units lamers choose to use are hard to destroy, and very powerful in great numbers. This again is disrupting the natural process of gameplay, as it requires the opponent to find a suitable counter-strategy, often leading to laming by both teams. While not adverse to the mutual enjoyment per se, laming in RTS often makes the gameplay more repetitive.

Similarly in First Person Shooter gaming, the verb is commonly used to describe a player who exclusively uses a particularly devastating weapon, typically one that doesn't take great skill and causes high damage over a wide area. Examples would be rocket launchers and BFGs. These types of lamers are often called weapon whores (i.e. BFG whore!) by other players. Also in FPSes are certain tactics that are commonly considered lame including spawn camping, where a player waits at the point in the game where enemy players appear and kills them immediately before they get their bearing in the game world.

Another frequent example of laming occurs in games which feature competing objectives from something as simple as capture the flag to more complex objectives such as defusing a bomb. A lamer may hide an item necessary for the opposing team to complete a certain objective, or he or she might abuse a glitch in the game to make completion of an objective unusually difficult or even impossible. Generally speaking, in these cases, a lamer does something that runs counter to the way the game was intended to be played. This often causes frustration, not only among the opposing team, but often among the lamer's own teammates, as the lamer's actions often completely change the way the game must be played, or, in some cases, halts all productive action altogether.

For example in Return to Castle Wolfenstein the Allied team must infiltrate a German base to steal an objective and take it a certain location. An Allied player could take the objective and instead of taking it to the proper location he would run and hide in an obscure location of the map leaving the players unable to complete the game.

Laming shares much in common with griefing, though the latter tends to have stronger connotations. It is possible in many game contexts to unintentionally lame (for example, by violating generally agreed upon conventions without foreknowledge). Alternatively, a player may do something considered lame with the sole intent of winning or gaining the upper hand without any particular inclination to cause distress to other players (even if that is a natural consequence of the action). Griefing, however, implies a specific desire to cause negative impact on another player.

In general, lamers (like griefers) not only draw the ire of their fellow players, but are also often kicked or banned from the servers they play on. However, given that server administrators and game hosts cannot monitor the games they play at all times, laming is a constant presence on many games.

[edit] Use in Computer Culture

The word "lamer" has been used in the demoscene for many years to refer to a demoscener whose productions are lame (poor quality) in some way. It would typically be considered lame to "rip" (steal) material from another source, such as samples from another musician's song, or to use widely available tools to create a simple, unoriginal demo rather than coding something new from scratch.

"Linux lamer" is a derogatory term used by Linux "hackers" to refer to computer users who install the Linux OS (often as a secondary boot option or by only booting removable media) solely to brag to others or to accomplish a minimal hacking feat (eg. WEP cracking) which may have been more difficult with their primary OS. Some Linux purists also extend this term to refer to anyone who installs Linux and expects it to "just work," without demanding intimate knowledge of OS structure, or kernel compiling. Newbies to Linux may bring this expectation from other, less technically demanding operating systems such as Windows.

[edit] Use in Academic Culture

Lamers adopt a 'cookbook' approach to school and learning in general. Lamers, if required to learn something, are typically not interested in the development of the subject. Lamers see little use in most subjects, and so they become preoccupied only with exactly what will be graded, and exactly how they will be graded on it. Lamers then accumulate specific, step-by-step approaches to every conceivable task, either through their own trial and error, published materials, or most commonly, through social networking. Instead of actually reading required novels and text books, lamers substitute with only the solutions manuals, and short summaries such as those available from SparkNotes or CliffNotes.

[edit] Use in Programming Culture

Lamers involved with video games often come up with ideas for new games, yet the majority of them settle with merely playing games, because implementing new ones requires programming. Of those that do have enough interest to take up programming (mainly because they perceive future usefulness of the skill), many are quickly snagged when they find out that their 'Learn [language] in 24 Hours' book doesn't cover anything practical.

Programming overwhelms many lamers because it often requires that programming concepts, along with a language, use of its tools, and APIs all must be learned before making any tangible progress. This flies in the face of the "learn only what is necessary" mantra.

Lamers who continue in programming are then thwarted by their own thought process. Lamers, by definition, impatiently just want things to work, and the more often they can get any little something to work, the better. The lamer's program is thus doomed to a one function heap of specific, and often repeated, code, engineered through thousands of compile-fix/add-run cycles. Though the lamer makes life hard on himself this way, it keeps him busy with a sense of achievement. Very few lamers exist with such experience in programming, as eventually such lamers become hackers, and find that delving into the mechanisms of what they are doing, even if not necessary at the moment, helps them avoid future pitfalls.

A lamer may also be a programmer who doesn't use comments in his source codes.

[edit] Usage on IRC

A lamer is someone who irritates other users by typing in all caps or partially in caps with no pattern, by insulting and flaming other users, by typing abbreviations for almost every word, or by performing other annoying acts in channels. Some IRC channels use bots to monitor any "lame" behavior and kick such users out.

Such is not strict usage of the term lamer, as defined in the original sense.

[edit] Use in hacking

A lamer, as used in the hacking culture, refers to an individual who uses previously written code or well documented exploits to perform a hack with no desire to understand the technical functionality behind it. The actual word lamer is a formally undefined variation on the word "lame", which is used to describe one who cannot walk, and further to describe someone who is "uncool."

[edit] External links

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