why is it spelled Pwned instead of Owned?

[-CANE-]

This makes sense, I think it goes further back than recent online games and is most likely an intentional misspelling. Look at definition 7 from the urban dictionary:

"This term actually comes from a game created hundreds of years ago, even before computers were invented. This game was called, 'chess'. The object of the game was to put the other player in checkmate, meaning, he was unable to move his king anywhere that he would not be threatened by another piece. Also in this game, you have 8 pieces at the front of your army called 'pawns', these were the least useful of all pieces, but that is not to mean they were worthless. If you could defeat the other player by using your pawn to apply check, that was called, and is still called pawned.

Now, back in the early 80's, before warcraft, counterstrike or even the INTERNET, there were ways you could contact other PC's by using a modem. These were called BBS's and allowed you to connect to individual computers acting as severs where games would be so that people could play other people they did not know. Now, when I used to play these games as well as many other people 22+, they used to use and coined the phrase, 'pwned'. Which was slang for pawned. It eventually was taken from just chess and used in other text based games to taunt the loser of a match. It is now commonly wide spread across the world, although the children do not understand its true meaning."

I'm glad you posted that I don't feel such an idiot now. I never knew the term OWNED or PWNED until I came to this site. Owned seemed pretty self explanatory but Pwned I wasn't quite sure about. I thought it was just a shortened version of Pawned that had a slightly different meaning to Owned but wasn't exactly sure what it meant. I've always wanted to ask but didn't want to come across as an old ignorant twat. Every time I saw it I always read it as Pawned and wondered why they left the 'a' out. I wasn't even gonna bother posting as everyone seemed to think it was Owned just spelt wrong and I thought shows how much I know, but then I read your interpretation and that to me sounds the most likely and it makes me feel less of a twat.