Gaming Emoji

🎮 Video game is the gaming emoji: a two-handed gamepad that stands for playing, a gaming session, a gamer identity or the whole hobby. Every platform draws a controller, so it reads the same on iPhone, Android and Windows. 🕹️ Joystick is the arcade stick, added in Unicode 7.0 in 2014, and it leans retro: cabinets, old consoles, pinball halls and anything pixel-era. 👾 Alien monster is a pixel alien in the style of Space Invaders; it has meant arcade and retro gaming since it arrived in Unicode 6.0 in 2010, and it is also the emoji people reach for when they want something that says “gamer” without a controller.

The PC side has 🖥️ desktop, ⌨️ keyboard and 🖱️ mouse, the hardware every PC gamer argues about, with 💻 laptop for playing on the go and 📺 television for couch co-op. 🎧 headphone is the headset, 🎤 microphone says voice chat or commentary, 🛜 (Wi-Fi, from Unicode 15.0 in 2022) stands for the connection, so 🛜😡 is lag. 🔋 and 🪫 are a full and a dying controller battery, and 💾 floppy disk survives in game menus as the save icon long after the disks themselves.

🤖 robot covers bots, AI opponents and Discord bots; 👽 and 🛸 belong with space shooters. None of these are brand logos: there is no PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo or Steam emoji, which is why the text symbols further down this page exist.

GG, rage quit and clutch: how gamers use emoji

A win is 🏆, a title or a top rank is 👑, and the podium 🥇🥈🥉 works for tournament placings and leaderboard screenshots. 🏁 and 🏎️ are the racing games, 🎯 is a headshot, a perfect aim or a goal hit, 💯 is a perfect run and 🔝 or 🆙 means a level up or a rank up; 📈 and 📉 track your rank going up or down. 🆚 sets up a match (Team A 🆚 Team B), and 🔓 is “achievement unlocked”. The Guernsey flag 🇬🇬 doubles as “GG”, because its two letters spell exactly that, so it turns up at the end of matches as a good-game sticker.

Good sportsmanship has its own set: 🤝 for GG and well played, 🫡 for respect or “understood”, 🙏 for “carry me” or “please”, 💪 for a clutch and 😎 for a smooth win. Hype is 🔥, ⚡ and ✨, and 👀 means someone is watching the stream or eyeing a drop.

Losing has more emoji than winning. 😤 is the sweaty tryhard, 😡 and 🤬 are rage and rage quit, 😭 is the loss you cannot believe, 💀 is “I'm dead” after a death or a joke, 🤡 is a clown play, 🗿 is the deadpan “bruh”, 🫠 is melting under pressure, 🤯 is mind blown and 😵‍💫 is dizzy after a spin camera or a loss streak. 🤨 is “sus”, straight from Among Us. 💤 is AFK or “going to bed after one more game”, and the hearts ❤️🖤 read as lives left and lost, the way health shows in Zelda and Minecraft; 💜 is Twitch purple.

Weapons, loot and bosses: emoji for RPGs, shooters and Minecraft

Fantasy and RPG talk runs on ⚔️ crossed swords (PvP, duel, versus), 🗡️ dagger (rogue, stealth, backstab), 🛡️ shield (tank, defence), 🏹 bow and arrow (ranger, archer) and 🪓 axe (barbarian, and Fortnite's pickaxe stand-in). The player classes are 🧙 mage, 🧝 elf and 🥷 ninja (Unicode 13.0, 2020), the enemies 🧟 zombie, 🧛 vampire, 🧌 troll, 👹 ogre, 👻 ghost (the Pac-Man ghosts too), 💀 and ☠️ for death and poison, and 🐉 dragon for the boss. 🪄 is a spell or a buff, 🔮 a magic class or a prediction, 🧪 a potion.

Shooters and battle royales use 🔫, 💣, 💥 for a kill or an explosion and 🪂 for the drop at the start of a Fortnite, PUBG or Warzone match. The 🔫 looks like a toy because it is one: Apple redrew its handgun as a green water pistol in 2016 and Google, Microsoft, Samsung and the others followed in 2018, although Unicode's formal name for the character is still PISTOL.

Minecraft has the clearest emoji vocabulary of any game: ⛏️ pick for mining, 💎 for diamonds, 🧱 for blocks and building, 🟩 for a creeper, and 🔨 is the ban hammer every server admin threatens with. Loot in any game is 💎 🪙 💰 and the new 🪎 treasure chest (Emoji 17.0, September 2025, still rolling out to phones through 2026). 🗝️, 📜 and 🗺️ are keys, quest scrolls and the map. Mario fans have 🍄 (super mushroom), ⭐ (star) and 🪙; Sonic is 🦔; 🦄 stands in for anything legendary or a rare drop.

Gaming emoji for Discord, Twitch and streams

Discord shows presence as a coloured dot, and the same dots work as text: 🟢 online, 🟡 idle or AFK, 🔴 do not disturb or “in game, don't ping”, ⚫ offline or invisible. 🟣 and 💜 are Twitch, 🔴 on its own means LIVE, 🔔 is the notification bell (“turn on notifications”), 🔊 and 🔇 are voice chat on and muted, and 💬 is text chat. ⏺️ is recording a clip, ▶️ starts a VOD or a stream, ⏸️ is a break, 🔄 is a reload or a respawn, ⏳ is the loading screen or a queue, and ⏱️ is speedrun time.

Discord's own emoji are custom images per server, not Unicode, so they only show inside Discord; everything on this page is plain text that pastes into channel names, role names, server descriptions, Twitch titles, YouTube descriptions and tweets alike. Servers typically put a 🎮 or 🕹️ in front of game channels, 🔴 in front of a live-announcements channel and 🔔 on the role that gets pinged.

Puzzle and word games made their own emoji: a Wordle result is nothing but 🟩🟨⬛ squares, which is why those three sit here. For game night, 🎲 dice, 🧩 puzzle, 🃏 joker, ♟️ and ♛ chess and the four suits ♠️♥️♦️♣️ cover board, card and tabletop games, with 🎱 for pool; the full sets of playing cards, chess pieces and dice faces are on the Card, Chess & Dice Symbols page.

Gaming symbols for names: PlayStation, Xbox and crosshair text

There is no PlayStation emoji, but the four face buttons exist as plain text symbols: △ ○ ✕ □, triangle, circle, cross and square, in their on-pad positions top, right, bottom, left. Xbox's A, B, X and Y buttons can be written as circled letters Ⓐ Ⓑ Ⓧ Ⓨ or filled 🅐 🅑 🅧 🅨; the symbol grid above arranges them by position, so Ⓨ is at the top like △. Nintendo swaps the pairs: its A sits where Xbox's B is. The d-pad is ▲ ▼ ◄ ►, and ✚ or ⊕ stands for the whole pad.

Crosshair symbols are the most asked-for gaming symbols for Free Fire, PUBG, Call of Duty Mobile and Fortnite names: ⌖ (the position indicator, a real crosshair), ◎ ◉ 🞋 as targets, ★ ☆ ✦ ✪ as rank stars, ϟ as a lightning bolt, ✠ for clan tags, 🕱 as a text skull, ✓ and ✘ for win-loss records, ⏻ for power and ∞ for an endless streak. ツ is the Japanese katakana tsu, famous as the smiling face in Fortnite and Free Fire usernames.

Mind that game name fields differ: most accept these characters, but some strip the emoji while keeping the text symbols, and a few limit the length in bytes rather than characters, so a name full of 🎮 may count as longer than it looks. For more decorative frames, brackets and fancy letters see Nickname Symbols and Fancy Symbols; for the keyboard key symbols ⌘ ⌥ ⇧ see Computer Emoji & Keyboard Symbols.