Why I don’t mind the term “boomer shooter”, my autistic and pedantic brain wants to yell, “Boomers are old enough to have voted for Reagan, they probably play Asteroids, not Doom!”
I kinda love/hate “search action” because it’s so terrible? All games have searching AND action.
I don’t know if the term for Vampire Survivors-like is set in stone yet? Survivor games is very close to the survival genre?
I simply adore “blobber”! Just blobbing around in a dungeon! <3
My favorite ones are the sillier sounding ones?
If there is one sillier than blobber I want to know it! XD
For me I’d say my favourite gaming term is “giblet” it’s such a fun word for such a grotesque thing!
Otherwise, I’d probably say that "rouge like* / “rouge lite” is my least favourite. It’s such a poorly defined genre. Like, the fact that there’s even a distinction between like and lite is evidence of that.
My favourite gaming term is “earth power”. It’s a piece of rhythm game jargon that refers to your fundamentals as a whole—your ability to read, make inputs, and keep rhythm. It came from the Japanese Beatmania IIDX community, and while it’s incredibly obtuse, once you know what it means it makes a lot of sense when discussing rhythm games with others.
My least favourite is “friendslop”. It’s so reductive to refer to the entire genre as slop when careful design decisions still have to be made in order to facilitate those fun multiplayer interactions.
i really like “mob” because even though it already has an english meaning and it literally just means “mobile” when i think of it it just means “enemy” which is a wild linguistic thing if you ask me
my most hated is “friendslop” and i will not be held responsible for my actions around people who use it unironically
Yeah boomer shooter always rubs me the wrong way. Can’t really describe why but as a millennial it just feels icky liking something described as “boomer”
Also I don’t dislike search action as a term but I will die on the hill of preferring Metroidvania as a descriptor
I once looked up the definition of roguelite and it turns out it’s not what I (and I suspect most people) think it is. The assumption was that it’s means a roguelike with meta-progression between deaths where you can earn permanent upgrades and whatnot, so it’s like a less hardcore roguelike, a light roguelike, a roguelite if you will.
Nope. Turns out it just means any “roguelike” game that isn’t a top-down turn based RPG. Which IMO strictly defining Roguelikes in that traditional way just isn’t that useful anymore.
The very nature of genre description defies perfect categorization but I think that is inherently incompatible with the narrow and “objective” view of capital G Gamers, I think
my hot take is that early 2000s trend of debating what games fell into what genres that lead to the wiki debate wars conditioned younger generations into thinking this was far more important than it actually is.
i’m old enough to remember when genres were just loose labels. 2000s forums raised an entire generation who weren’t exposed to gaming culture or even debates in any other way. it sucks because i think it’s a lot more interesting to talk about what mechanics and styles games share or influence.
Anything with “slop” attached to it as a genre descriptor is a no for me
My favorite one, if i’m allowed a little bit of international posting, is describing fighting game characters as “bonecos”. Means “toys” in english, is very common and will always remind me of super smash bros master hand playing with the characters
I kinda like talking about who some of the terms evolved?
Adventure started out as text adventures, when they had graphics we called them graphic adventures, when games like Tomb Raider came around they called themselves ACTION adventures and now graphic adventures are point n’ click?
See, that’s interesting. I watched that video about the origins of the term Metroidvania and the history of it over the decades because I think that’s cool. It’s the gatekeeping and beef that does my head in. It’s cool to make things clear and distinct but lots of games like to blur lines and I think that should be celebrated.
Metroidvania is such a touchy subject. I remember one game getting review bombed because someone tagged it as a metroidvania and it wasn’t “vania” enough for those who bought it. (Exile’s End I think?)
Are there many videos about old gaming terminology? “Pacman” was a genre when I was a kid, although we called them “comecocos” (ghost eaters), back when you could get away with just making a Pac-Man clones.
I kinda love how we still use “puzzle” for everything from “Tetris” to “Blue Prince”.
