Gosu (고수)

Gosu: online gaming vs Wikipedia

I spent several years of life in addiction to Counter-Strike and a year later in Warcraft III: Frozen Throne. Both games are great, they are entertaining and they deserve all the popularity they have and will have for some time. As for now I abandoned both of them. I believe I lost something while playing PC games. Multiplayer games provide some emotional experience and at the same time they steal your sunlight, sleep, real life fun and new people.

During my gaming career I have got some gaming skills and learned multiple specific terms like headshot, camper, tower rush and others. Korean word Gosu (고수) was one among them. I live in Belarus and speak Russian but still in the computer gaming club where we used to spend our spare time there were some gosus (or fathers as sometimes gosus are called in Russian), unbeatable players. It seemed they lived near PCs and when we played against them we had no chance no matter how we trained before.

While I am spending a lot of time with my PC now I am trying to avoid playing games. Instead of gaming I do more self-education by reading online newspapers and magazines, conribute to several community sites and sometimes even make corrections to Wikipedia. Once in the past I created a nice inscription of gosu with original Korean letters and posted it to my personal blog where it was noticed by Google Image Search and pulled almost to the top of the first page of results. Such a success inspired me to do a major rewording of existed Gosu article in Wikipedia. Of course it will be edited over and over again but now I make a complete quotation of it here and my heart is as easy as it could only be, because I am almost quoting myself.

Gosu

Gosu is a computer gaming term usually used to refer a person highly skilled in multiplayer game like Warcraft III, Lineage II, Counter-Strike and others. It has a Korean origin and since South Korea is one of the most influential nations in online gaming the term was adopted by gaming communities in many countries including USA, Germany, France and Russia.

Origin of gosu

In Korean, word gosu (Hangul: 고수, literally a high hand) is used for a person with great skill, usually in martial arts or in baduk (Go). In Gyeongnam province dialect gosu also has a meaning "leader". There is an urban legend saying that term gosu originated from Starcraft community as an acronym for "God Of Starcraft Universe". However, this is actually a backronym, as the term has long been applied to martial arts experts and players of other multiplayer games including first-person shooters like Counter-Strike. Most likely that Starcraft addicts were among first gamers adopted Korean word with a new meaning.

Related Terms

Though not so popular there are also several other commonly used Korean words for describing gamers with various skill levels. Jungsu stays for "a moderately good player", hasu for "a mediocre player" or "a person with no skill" and chobo for "a novice player". "Hasu" and "chobo" are the same skill level, but "hasu" is a polite/technical way of describing it, and thus implies the speaker has a general respect for the person as a human, or at least not a lack thereof. "Chobo" is a more insulting way of describing the player, implying the speaker looks down upon the person they are describing. An English equivalent would be newbie or newb.

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Wikipedia article about Gosu was used as a source.