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Discussion Game-related jargon/terms that you dislike?

Yzz

Yzz

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Video game lexicon has changed a lot throughout the years, beat-em-ups were once accepted as fighting games, but in the present that seems ridiculous. New terms like shlooter and soulsborne are gaining popular use, however nobody knows if they'll be in use in the next decade. With that being said, let's get out of the way what is arguably the most controversial and discussed genre naming: metroidvania.

Metroidvania
A term used to encapsulate every non-linear sidescroller into a genre. This term is whack because a lot of these games are very different in their design, the camera format and non-linearity being the only thing that they have in common. Take for example the Ori games which are RPGs with experience points and a skill tree, these games get lumped with Guacamelee, a game which is heavily inspired by beat-em-ups. Guacamelee 2 even pokes fun at the RPG genre and experience points in a small gameplay segment.

However my personal vote goes to the use of the word 'Story' when evaluating games.

The Story
When discussing games the word 'story' 90% of the time is used to describe every literary element a game has, from the dialogue to the scripted events. The problem with the use of this word is that:
  1. It separates the literary elements from the interactive elements, which doesn't allow to judge the game as greater than the sum of its parts. I personally think this is why a lot of developers struggle to use the interactive aspect to convey a meaningful message.
  2. It overshadows other artistic elements of a game that are not literary. Many games with great artistic value get labeled as shallow because they don't have a Hollywood script attached to it. It doesn't help at all that many gamers have a very narrow view of how stories can be told, so a game story that doesn't have your usual hero's journey three-act structure gets criticized for having 'poor pacing' and other BS.

So, what are some game-related terms that you want to send out of orbit?
 
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Anti-consumer. There are very few instances where this term is actually applicable, rather than just being used for “thing I don’t like”.
 
I would love to see exploratory action replace "Metroidvania" as the term used. Or failing that, we start calling all fps games "Wolfendoom".

I hate Dark Souls being used the go-to measuring stick of difficult games. (I like the Soulsborne mechanics, I just would love to see them become more accessible).

I also hate the term "get gud". I wouldn't mind if I never heard that again.
 
Gridder. For whatever reason I dislike that genre name and prefer the use of Blobber or DRPG.
 
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“Immersive experience”

It’s been abused so much by publishers like Ubisoft and EA it’s lost all meaning
 
I'm not a big fan of the term "Metroidvania" either, but there hasn't really been an accepted alternative so I still use that term begrudgingly cause everyone will know what I'm talking about.
 
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I don’t know if this applies and it’s not exclusive to games but I hate “content”…. It makes art sound so sterile.

Youtubers/streamers too like “subscribe for more content” girl just say “videos” and stop acting all formal
 
Not canonical lexicon per se, but I HATE HATE HATE :

- This being "The Dark Souls" of that -

PS : did I say how much I HATE that 😤

EDIT : @Abzeronow, HATRED was so violent that it blinded my sight so I didn't see you already talked about that...

HATRED IS "THE DARK SOULS" OF FEELINGS
 
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Power fantasy is definitely applicable a lot but it also feels like an easy way to undermine a game’s qualities.

Also, “aged poorly” should be a bannable phrase.
 
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The term AAA is marginally useful to describe a publisher's business model or the market as a whole but when talking about individual games it's regularly better to stick to words like blockbuster, tentpole, big, major, etc.
 
"World Premiere"

We already know they are world premeires Geoff, that's why folks watch the show lol.

"(Timed) Console Exclusive"

To me this just says not exclusive, like what kind of legalese nonsense thinking is this?
 
Hate: Metroidvania

Shoving two franchise names together to describe a genre is lazy, especially with how different Metroid and Castlevania games tend to be... and it also doesn't apply to the classic Castlevania titles at all.

Love: Soulsbornekiring

Now that's what I call a home run
 
Reviewers over-using the word "repetitive". They are video games, they supposed to be repetitive. Do people calling this word knows secret video games that no one knows where you do different things all the time? The closest thing to that definition is Legend of Zelda and even in that you do same things over and over again.
 
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Phendrift said:
I don’t know if this applies and it’s not exclusive to games but I hate “content”…. It makes art sound so sterile.

Youtubers/streamers too like “subscribe for more content” girl just say “videos” and stop acting all formal
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But those people on YouTube are content creators! They create content, so you can’t call it anything else.
 
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"Replay-value".
This is just a personal gripe of me, but I really don't care at all if a game has replay value.
Who judged a book or movie on it's reread- or rewatch-value? This is just bizarre to me.
It's okay if you use it for games that want that you play them forever, but for most games it's dumb in my opionion.
 
Phendrift said:
I don’t know if this applies and it’s not exclusive to games but I hate “content”…. It makes art sound so sterile.
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Same, hate that word so much. I also am tired of hearing the term content creator and influencer.
Hyrulean said:
- This being "The Dark Souls" of that -
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Uggh, hate this soo much too.
Stupid Sexy Flanders said:
I would love to never hear “PC Master Race” again, ironically or not. Just stop.
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I had that on my Steam profile as I was super excited/hyped to finally now have a PC made for gaming. I removed it sometime ago.
 
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"God-tier" and "godlike". It only started really bothering me once I realized that no one actually talks like that outside the gaming (and anime) sphere, but once I did they've just made me cringe more than anything else.

Clov said:
Hate: Metroidvania

Shoving two franchise names together to describe a genre is lazy, especially with how different Metroid and Castlevania games tend to be... and it also doesn't apply to the classic Castlevania titles at all.
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I don't like what the term is now, but the way it came about at least makes a lot of sense.
 
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Lichtsang said:
"Replay-value".
This is just a personal gripe of me, but I really don't care at all if a game has replay value.
Who judged a book or movie on it's reread- or rewatch-value? This is just bizarre to me.
It's okay if you use it for games that want that you play them forever, but for most games it's dumb in my opionion.
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It's just... so true to me.
 
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I don't like "bang for your buck". In theory there is nothing wrong with it. In practice, it is actually just a way to ask how long a game is, not how good it is. Nevermind that a lot of the groundbreaking and best games of all time in the past have been super short. Even going into the 3D era, a lot of singleplayer titles were only about 8-10 hours long, and still served as some of the best games of their time.

There is absolutely times where everyone can probably agree a certain title is overpriced relative to its length, but I think its very rare that complaints like this are justified. At least, when it comes to game creation, which is how I see "bang for your buck" used, in an almost spiteful way against certain video games that don't meet a given arbitrary criteria. If you can't afford more than x amount of games in a set amount of time, and you pick the games that you think will give you the longest lasting joy, nothing wrong with that. That's not what I'm talking about.

I remember when Astral Chain came out, some people were seeing its 15+ hour length stated by reviews and saying it wasn't long enough for a $60 price point. Meanwhile I was wondering how an action game can justify such a long length, when aside from very RPG-oriented action games (I know Astral Chain has some RPG elements, but they're pretty loose) almost all action games are rarely above 10 hours. Turns out the games standard length is actually on average 20 hours. If someone thinks that isn't good "bang for your buck" for a singleplayer game, especially relative to the genre it belongs to, I'd just think you were insane. I guess open worlds have really spoiled people.
 
Sheldon said:
The term AAA is marginally useful to describe a publisher's business model or the market as a whole but when talking about individual games it's regularly better to stick to words like blockbuster, tentpole, big, major, etc.
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Was gonna say AAA. Actually, I used to have no problem with it because we all understood what it meant, but then you got some chucklefucks thinking they were clever by trying to coin 'AAAA'.
 
Pascal said:
I like shlooter just because of how mad it makes people lol
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Shlooter, boomer shooter and "the Dark Souls of [Blank]" are fun to use just to see people groaning about it lol

Soulsbornekiro was also on the list but I think people are catching on that it's ironic
 
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The Dane.

Nintendo Fork is clearly superior.

Aaron said:
Was gonna say AAA. Actually, I used to have no problem with it because we all understood what it meant, but then you got some chucklefucks thinking they were clever by trying to coin 'AAAA'.
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Or AA instead of keeping it simple and saying "an upper midcard game not quite ready for the main event push".
 
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'Micro transactions'

There's nothing micro about buying 10% of a retail copy of a game's worth in funny money.

I also dislike how 'beta' and 'demo' are used interchangeably, same with 'localization' and 'censorship'.
 
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I Nate the word “Toon” when referring to user-created characters. It just sounds tacky to me.
 
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"Second party". Just feels like a unnecessary distinction that serves no purpose. Who cares if Pokémon isn't developed by an internal studio? They own the IP, they fund the games, they publish the games, and collect profit off of those games. No real difference.
 
"...like Dark Souls"

Seriously, does ever hard game have to be compared to Dark Souls? Why not Contra?
 
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quadruple A or the triple I that was used a few years ago. Just high budget games trying to separate from being called as AAA

another one is experience. But that is not limited to gaming. It is pretty common to find companies to call their products as some sort of unmissable experience to lure people to buy into their products.
 
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Another vote for ”content”, although I suppose not exclusively applying to video games. I remember in the early days of YouTube, very few, if any, channels called the videos they made ”content”. I honestly don’t ever remember hearing it until years later and it has made me cringe every time I hear it ever since.

“Hours of content” as a selling point almost immediately makes me recoil at a game, because it says very little about what you‘ll be doing. Desert Bus has hours of content but I wouldn’t exactly call it the most engaging stuff. Which is essentially what content is. Just stuff. “Here’s some stuff!! Buy it!!!”

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Yzz said:
Metroidvania
A term used to encapsulate every non-linear sidescroller into a genre. This term is whack because a lot of these games are very different in their design, the camera format and non-linearity being the only thing that they have in common. Take for example the Ori games which are RPGs with experience points and a skill tree, these games get lumped with Guacamelee, a game which is heavily inspired by beat-em-ups. Guacamelee 2 even pokes fun at the RPG genre and experience points in a small gameplay segment.
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The term isn't perfect, but that's true of most gaming genre names. "First person shooter" could also describe Doom 64 and Perfect Dark and CoD4, all of them are vastly different in style and structure in the same way your examples are

Metroidvania works as a genre name, because if I tell you about a new Metroidvania game you will immediately have a base level understanding of the kind of game I'm talking about based on the genre name

That said, it's fair enough if the descriptor is something you dislike. I didn't like the term "Schlooter" or whatever it was when people tried to make that a thing
 
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WestEgg said:
Anti-consumer. There are very few instances where this term is actually applicable, rather than just being used for “thing I don’t like”.
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you meant "why do I have to pay for this, I deserve it for free cause reasons" ??



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My only grip with something is the current trend of "The Dark Souls of ......" To try to signify difficulty as if DS invented that
 
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WestEgg said:
Anti-consumer. There are very few instances where this term is actually applicable, rather than just being used for “thing I don’t like”.
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This one is bad but more because it enrages people to the point where any legitimate issue is hand waived away

Like, "this DLC isn't long enough to justify the price" and "We're building our game around gambling mechanics" might both be "things someone doesn't like" but they're not the same and they don't deserve the same level of criticism/scrutiny

Whenever someone lumbers into a thread to say something is "anti-consumer", the focus is always shifts onto a discussion of the term "anti-consumer"
 
"Succ" as shorthand for successor when talking about the next iteration of the Switch (only place I've seen it used)
 
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oni-link said:
The term isn't perfect, but that's true of most gaming genre names. "First person shooter" could also describe Doom 64 and Perfect Dark and CoD4, all of them are vastly different in style and structure in the same way your examples are

Metroidvania works as a genre name, because if I tell you about a new Metroidvania game you will immediately have a base level understanding of the kind of game I'm talking about based on the genre name

That said, it's fair enough if the descriptor is something you dislike. I didn't like the term "Schlooter" or whatever it was when people tried to make that a thing
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Yes, but those games are often assigned into subgenres, like CoD is a Multiplayer Military Shooter and Doom is called a Retro/Traditional FPS. FPS culture loves to talk about the differences about those games, and there are ton of analysis about the limited loadout system or how Halo changed the genre. 'Metroidvania' fans, on the other hand, always are pitting every game of the genre against each other, and it really shows that there is a severe lack of literature covering said genre.

I think the problem with the 'metroidvania' scene is that it started blooming a few years ago, unlike FPS which have been popular and diverse for 2 whole decades. As the 'metroidvania' scene matures, new subgenres will emerge, and the discourse around those games will improve.
 
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"JRPG" or "japanese-style role-playing": I think the term never had any meaning to begin with and it's time we retire it. "Japanese-style" also really doesn't work since it's just as vaguely defined and either just bundles a plethora of genres under one term that suggests they have more in common than they actually do.

"Walking simulator": A term mostly defined by those that don't like that type of game. Sure, there are some titles that probably deserve it (Dear Esther), but it's been used almost always in a derogatory fashion i.e. "Walking Simulators aren't REAL GAMES". They're a subset of adventure games, similar to text adventures, point'n'click's, VNs/J-ADVs and whatever we want to specifically call games like Until Dawn and Life Is Strange.

"REAL GAME(S)": Usually used by knobheads who want to decry anything popular with children, women, LBGTQIA+ people and PoC. Drop it, it makes you sound like a douchecanoe.

"Non-Game": Nintendo's weird term for what we call "edutainment software". Made them the butt of the joke. Retired mostly, so call this a dishonorable mention.

Abzeronow said:
I would love to see exploratory action replace "Metroidvania" as the term used. Or failing that, we start calling all fps games "Wolfendoom".
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I think "Metroidvania" is going to stick around for a few more years. Exploratory action - or "search action", as Nintendo apparently calls it - works fine for me though.

Abzeronow said:
I hate Dark Souls being used the go-to measuring stick of difficult games. (I like the Soulsborne mechanics, I just would love to see them become more accessible).
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Yep. I honestly don't even find Dark Souls that hard (granted... I don't have some of the accessibility issues a lot of people who want the games to be tweakable
have)

On that note, I never got why "Nintendo hard" became a term. Like... back in the day, games were often just hard, period and Nintendo was hardly special there.

Tendo said:
Visceral and cognitive dissonance. It seems like around 2010 every games writer learned those terms for the first time.
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Do you mean "ludonarrative dissonance"? If so, yeah, not a term I'm too eager to hear either.

Stupid Sexy Flanders said:
I would love to never hear “PC Master Race” again, ironically or not. Just stop.
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God, that. There's a peripheral manufacturer now that calls itself "Glorious" (heard their stuff is even pretty good), but I wish PC gamers would just drop it, especially since it was a dig at how cumbersome and overdesigned some games could be.
 
"Gamer"
It sounds so condescending no matter the context.
It also has no actual meaning. What qualifies a gamer. At what level do you stop simply enjoying games and become a gamer?
 
"Gamer" i hate that term, for me it's a loaded term that not only includes someone who is a videogame enthusiast but all the Toxicity the gamer culture brings. But that's me.
 
"Remaster" has always bothered me. It makes sense for the sorts of media where it originally arose, but games have a much more complicated relationship to master copies, to the point where every patch could arguably be called a "remaster". Multiplatform development just muddies the water further.

Also "console exclusive" means the opposite of what it should.
 
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