How fast do you type, and has playing MMOs improved your typing in any way?

Terminally Online

This is Terminally Online: PC Gamer's very own MMO column. Every other week, I'll be sharing my thoughts on the genre, interviewing fellow MMO-heads like me, taking a deep-dive into mechanics we've all taken for granted, and, occasionally, bringing in guest writers to talk about their MMO of choice.

Final Fantasy 14 released a new typing minigame recently—you hop on over to the Gold Saucer, you rock up with a party of four, and you compete with each other to see how many waves you can defeat with the literal power of words. It's a fun little laugh, and as someone who types for a living, I spent a couple hours getting all of my rewards from it.

But not everyone has had as much fun as I—someone who has spent arguably too much of their life in front of a keyboard—am having. Typing speeds among MMO players vary greatly, despite it being the predominant form of communication. This became incredibly obvious to me when I sat down and tip-tapped my way through this mode.

Some players, I left in the dust—others I was level-pegging with, and some of them seemed blessed with divine powers of fingerwork (stop giggling) that left me agog. Also some people were just using bots, but hey, not everyone who's faster than me did. Which got me thinking—you, my fellow MMO players. How fast do you type?

If you're not familiar with your own speed, I invite you to go on your WPM tester of choice (there are plenty on Google) and pump some numbers.

For reference, most sites put the average keyboard typist at 40-60 WPM. I, a person, who does this for a living, average around 130-140 WPM on a site like Monkeytype, which doesn't require any capitalisation or many unfamiliar words. Putting the effort into proper punctuation and spelling on other tests slows me down to around 110-120 WPM (in both cases I'm pretty accurate, between 95-98%).

But then again, I grew up playing videogames on my PC (you might call me a PC Gamer) and MMOs were my jam, so I got a lot of practice; which is part of why I'm curious as to how you, dear reader, match up. Furthermore, do you reckon that your time in MMOs has made you better at typing and improved your grammar? Feel free to share your own experience with the wonderful English language in the comments down below.

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