Words Worth Knowing: Mobs
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 Sep 05, 2016.
What It Is: Mob = A mobile enemy
What It Means: The term "mob" is an old-fashioned (for video-games) word for indicating a generic enemy which can move and has no particularly special features. Players are often assigned quests requiring them to kill a number of an enemy animal or person and collect items from their corpses for crafting purposes. The population of enemies will recover their numbers in order ("respawn") to allow the player to repeat the quest over and over ("grinding") to harvest rewards from these "mobs."
Why You Care: The term "mob" had fallen out of fashion to a certain extent, but was revised by the explosive popularity of the online building and exploration game Minecraft. Though it was not originally an acronym, some players use Mob as a "backronym" for "Mere Ordinary Beast" indicating the creature has no special properties and so should be either harvested for resources or ignored by players.
