I think my favourite one is ‘meta’, we used to use ‘imba’ for the same concept 20 years ago, but meta is a better term.
For me the joy in competitive multiplayer is the “I know, and I know that you know I know” mindgame, where you can win not just by playing better, but also by playing worse.
Example: In Dark Souls 2 I stacked attenuation, which is a bad strategy. But this means I can hold a second forbidden sun. So I’d fire off the first, switch to a used-up spell to get the “oh no I ran out of spells” animation, then switch back to the second forbidden sun. By then the other player would rush me, thinking I was now defenseless. Right into the second forbidden sun I’m not supposed to have! META
Least favourite is ‘imsim’ - sorry, fake genre!
Either it refers to First-person RPG’s (which has a better term) or it refers to the practice of game mechanics being applied consistently to characters and objects within the game (which applies to both Nethack and Baldur’s Gate 3, so not a useful category)
Hah, I was gonna say capital G Gamer. I remember when I wrote my thesis there was a whole academic discussion on whether to use the word gamer or player or some other kond of term because even back then “gamer” was so culturally loaded.
Everyone here has already hit my latest one: “friendslop”. Honestly had never heard the term until sometime after PEAK came out this year. I recorded a few let’s play videos on it with my friends, and got a comment somewhere along the lines of “I’m tired of streamers and their friendslop games”.
If we’re saying “friendslop” games are games like PEAK, Lethal Company, R.E.P.O., RV There Yet, Content Warning, etc, the things I would say they all have in common are…
Multiplayer preferred (if not required)
Low-poly or “simpler” 3D graphics
Positional audio in player comms
Emergent game play (creating “moments”/”experiences”)
Relatively low purchase cost
…so is the “slop” part just like, a perception of low quality/low effort because they’re “cheaper” games with “simpler” graphics? If so, weird, man - just kind of sounds like we’re talking about modern multiplayer games, to me. Lose the “graphics” and “cost” bullets, and aren’t things like Tarkov, Helldivers, or Arc Raiders sort of banking on the same things?
I’m not sure my interpretation is necessarily any more correct, but as someone who grew up with the genre and saw it become overwhelmingly popular I can try to provide a bit more insight.
Roguelike used to refer specifically to games like Rogue. There was always a bit of flexibility around it, so allow me to introduce you to the Berlin Interpretation,
"Roguelike" refers to a genre, not merely "like-Rogue". The genre is
represented by its canon. The canon for Roguelikes is ADOM, Angband,
Crawl, Nethack, and Rogue.
This list can be used to determine how roguelike a game is. Missing
some points does not mean the game is not a roguelike. Likewise,
possessing some points does not mean the game is a roguelike.
The purpose of the definition is for the roguelike community to better
understand what the community is studying. It is not to place
constraints on developers or games.
The idea of procgen (procedural generation) has been around forever and if you dig around a bit you can find early examples even in some NES games and other consoles, so it wasn’t even limited to PCs. Still, it was rather niche until around the early 2010’s when I think it just became a lot more practical to implement it across a larger number of genres.
There was a tendency around this time to call any game implementing procgen level creation a roguelike or say it had “roguelike” elements which obviously drove the RL community nuts. Thus the term “roguelite” was introduced to refer to things that implemented only one or two elements from the Berlin Interpretation. To which I say you are correct, this is not particularly useful.
Time and culture wore on as nerds argued on forums across the internet, but language evolves regardless of what any of us think. Roguelike lost even its looser association with the Berlin Interpretation and came to more or less mean procgen/RPG adjacent-ish? With roguelite taking on the more specific elements you pointed out, generally an idea of meta progression.
Salty nerds like myself have retreated to “traditional roguelike” to stick closer to the Berlin Interpretation however that’s not really a tag on Steam I don’t think so it’s more a discussion point than anything. I was going to point to Caves of Qud as a modern example of a traditional roguelike (everyone should play this by the way!) but even their Steam page only lists “procedural generation”, “turn-based”, and “open world” which is totally fair and accurate.
That makes sense. I guess my line of thought is that Roguelike was always already a subgenre of RPG so defining say, Dead Cells as a “roguelite” due to being a sidescroller feels a bit silly to me, but I do understand that that’s how the terms evolved and were used. To me “Roguelike” boils down to two distinct traits, having randomly generated levels and needing to restart from the beginning each time (with newly generated levels). Needing to get more granular than that for the most part just means attaching other genre modifiers, like “RPG”, “Action”, “Platformer” etc. Though I realize by those two traits, that means Lethal Company is also a roguelike, and for some reason my brain wants to resist that.
Traditional Roguelike is used as a tag on Steam, if you click on the + sign to display all the tags for Caves of Qud, it’s the 7th tag listed.
I can relate to a lot of the least-favorites on here. My favorite gaming term is probably “proc” - it hasn’t really left the gaming sphere yet but it’s super useful and has always had such a clear meaning in my mind.
Just quoting this so I can second it - Qud is an unbelievable experience.
