Ganking

In the cutthroat world of online gaming, you need to keep up to date with all the lingo to know what’s going on. That’s why we’ve put this helpful guide about ganking together for you. What is ganking, you ask. It’s a popular gaming term that also has slightly other meanings in slang. It’s important that you know the difference. 

What Does Ganking Mean in Slang?

You may not have heard ganking used outside of the realm of gaming, but it does exist as a slang word - mostly in the US and Canada. Gank is a verb that means to rob or defraud someone, so ganking would describe the process of that happening in the continuous tense. 

Ganking can also refer to the action of stealing or taking something. To use it in context, you could say something like this: The thief is currently ganking my house. He’s ganking everything in there! 

What Does Ganking Mean in Gaming? 

When it comes to gaming, ganking takes on a totally different meaning from the definition described above. Ganking generally means to easily kill an enemy, but there are different ways that this can occur. 

One of the most common examples of ganking is when a group of players gangs up on a single member of the opposing team. This person will be vulnerable and easy to defeat. Another situation could be when a low-level character comes up against a highly leveled warrior and gets vanquished with ease. 

What Does Ganking Mean in MOBA?

In MOBAs, ganking refers to a surprise attack that happens hard and fast. An incident of ganking will involve someone pulling off an easy kill by causing a high amount of damage in a short space of time. A noob might get frustrated with all the ganking they experience in the early days of learning a game. However, once you get to pro level, ganking can be highly enjoyable. 

Where Does Ganking Come From? 

Ganking has come about for a variety of reasons. Sometimes, in highly competitive online situations, taking someone out in a 1v1 scenario can be too difficult. In those circumstances, you need to bring some friends to the party and go on a ganking spree. Ganking does give the ganking team an unfair advantage, but there’s no reason why the opposing players can’t get together and do some ganking themselves. 

The word ganking itself probably didn’t come from the American slang term. It’s more likely to have morphed from saying to gang up on someone. Ganging up couldn’t have been used for this term anyway, as ganking can sometimes be done without other friends helping out.