Quick definition:An error or flaw in a game's code or design that causes unintended behaviour, such as crashes, broken objects, wrong calculations or characters stuck in the scenery.
Meaning
A bug is a mistake in a game that makes it behave differently from what the designers intended. Causes include coding errors, missing checks, unusual combinations of actions and problems that appear only on certain hardware, and the word is used by players and developers alike.
Effects range from harmless to severe. Visual bugs make objects flicker or stretch, gameplay bugs let characters walk through walls or gain unlimited items, and game-breaking bugs crash the program or corrupt saved progress. Testers try to find them before release, but large games almost always ship with some.
Developers fix bugs through patches, which are updates released after launch. Players help by reporting faults, often including the steps needed to repeat them. A bug that players use to gain an advantage is called an exploit, and in online games, serious ones may lead to rollbacks or penalties.
Origin:Bug has been used for technical faults since long before computers, and engineers in the nineteenth century used it for small defects in machinery. A famous story about a moth found inside an early computer is often retold, but the word was already in use. Games inherited it from general software development.
Example:While walking through a village, Nell notices that a villager has sunk halfway into the road and is sliding around in a crouched pose. She takes a screenshot and sends a bug report to the developers. The next patch fixes the problem, and a short note thanks players for reporting it.
Did you know?Some bugs become loved. Players have sometimes grown fond of an unintended glitch, and developers have kept a few as features. Others are exploited by speedrunners, who use bugs to skip large parts of a game. 