Words Worth Knowing: Spawn
Words Worth Knowing was a vertical I wrote weekly explaining key pieces of gaming jargon to parents, guardians and teachers, as part of the larger overall GameHub outreach effort. The column ran for nearly two years and resulted in around 60 WWK articles. GameHubHQ.com closed in late 2017. This piece originally appeared on Nov 30, 2015.
What It Is: Spawning = when an object or person appears in the game world.
What It Means: Spawning is the name given for the moment when a character, object or human player appears live in the game world. When an object is generated for the first time, it is spawning. If a player character has died or been deleted but then re-enters the game, that is respawning. The portal through which the item enters/re-enters the game is called the spawn-point.
Why You Care: Badly placed spawn points are evidence of a poorly polished game. In online multiplayer games, badly placed spawn points can destroy the balance of a game, giving one team an unfair advantage over the other. If a spawn point is too far away from the centre of the map, or in an area which is easy to turn into a choke-zone or kill-box, any player spawning from that point will be at a disadvantage compared to the opposing team. In multiplayer online games, its crucial for players to know exactly where the spawn-points of people and objects are, in order to complete objectives. This is particularly the case if the spawn-point is bringing large, heavy objects into the world. Most seasoned players will have a funny story from when they accidentally stood underneath a vehicle or building spawn-point and were inadvertently flattened by a tank suddenly manifesting on their characters' head!
