In the era of e-sports and the popularization of computer games, you can meet the word "teammate", as well as its original form in English, namely teammate, everywhere. For the average layman, such a term sounds unfamiliar, especially when it comes to value judgments regarding the quality of those same teammates. Where did this term come from and why has it gained popularity among e-sportsmen?
Origin of the word
The principle of the formation of the term in this case is extremely simple. The word comes from the union of two English tokens, namely team and mate. The first means a team, but the second is a kind of jargon and means a friend or close acquaintance. The combination of these terms gives the meaning "teammate", and to clarify, then "team member". In fact, teammates are players of the same team who participate together in a collective game, for example, CS, Dota, LoL and others. It is not known why such a term began to be used to refer to the team in e-sports, however, the popularization of the word quickly brought it to the position of the most frequently used among members of a certain stratum of society, namely adolescents who prefer games as leisure activities.
What does teammate mean in e-sports?
If from a lexical point of view, teammate is a kind of teammate of the player, then in practice the team can be combined only directly for the game. For example, in Dota, teammates are overwhelmingly randomly selected. Of course, the player has the opportunity to assemble a team on his own and try to replay the team played, but in practice most users cannot devote much time to hobby and the player has to be content with those teammates that the system imposed on him. That is why the value judgment of terminology is most often negative - “teammates are crayfish / noobs”, etc. The banal language barrier and the difference in tactics make the team unplayed, after which friction arises within the team.
Don't love teammates?
If you evaluate the term on the basis of the main source of promotion of games among users, namely streams on sites such as Twitch, you might get the impression that teammate is literally an insult. As mentioned above, when playing a team a significant contribution to achieving victory is precisely its teamwork. In the absence of communications, it is difficult for the team to advance, according to the previously created plan. Therefore, the player quite often uses insulting epithets in relation to his teammates, including: “my teammates are noobs”, “team not very”, “teamplay disgusting” and other similar variations. Noobs or "crayfish" in this case means the level of experience of the players, which, according to the author of the statement, is extremely low. Meanwhile, the cause of the defeat of the team may not be the lack of experience, but the teamwork of opponents.
Popularization of terminology
Team members are not just a team, but in fact a separate term that describes the terrible game of a teammate who deliberately “ruins the rink”. Despite the fact that the reasons for the loss of initiative in the match can be many, in addition to the game users, the term “teammates” still secured a negative meaning. It is almost always used with a negative connotation. Today, teammate is, first of all, a stupid, inexperienced player, fortunately accepted as a team of professionals.
It is noteworthy that the term remains extremely popular exclusively in the gaming and near-game areas. So, for example, “tima” often slips in the speech of the person who prefers to spend time at the games. In ordinary sports, the word “team” is still popular without any Englishisms. Ultimately, "tima" represents a form of cooperation that is necessary to achieve the goal in the party and the use of extremely negative epithets in relation to it can be justified only in cases where the fact of loss actually occurred as a result of the deliberate return of the initiative. In all other cases, it is worth remembering that games are just a way of entertainment.