“Flammable” becoming a thing because too many people thought “Inflammable” meant the opposite of what it means. Now we have two words for the same thing and it feels bad
I get it… I just don’t like it
…I didn’t catch on that most of the posts in this thread were video game-related before I wrote this
The word “meh” bothers me a lot
Don’t like people calling everything an “app”.
I’m ambivalent towards it.
shmup
I hope this doesn’t veer too far into negativity, but I don’t like “fidelity” to describe games. I get that it’s mostly used for how realistic the graphics are, but I just feel most games are not very faithful to reality no matter how nice the graphics are.
I think it stems from what I think of it as a music term, i.e., hi-fi and lo-fi. Hi-fi makes sense as a descriptor for a stereo system when it means that the sound coming out of the speaker is faithful to the sound recorded in the vinyl groove or CD data or whatever, but most of the music described as lo-fi is to me much more faithful to what music production sounds like - live music has mistakes, uneven mixing, microphone hum, and so on. Really clean sounding music to me is what’s lo-fi - perhaps it’s closer to the platonic ideal of what the song sounds like, but it has low fidelity to the experience of actually playing or hearing people play music. Obviously this reflects my prejudices - not all music is made by people with instruments after all, and a lot of the time when it is the people involved are better at it than me and get cleaner sounds.
I read it the most in reddit threads when someone doesn’t want to argue but argues anyway.
I can’t say I like most game-related words and expressions, but they don’t particularly bother me either. I like that a lot of it is so clearly improvised words that just caught on. That’s true for all of language I guess, but in games you can often see a random expression become a genre in real time, and I think that’s neat.
In support of keeping the thread positive, I think the two that irk me do so because we have such better alternatives right there, so I’m gonna highlight the alternatives. A totally inconsequential one is exclusive to gamers, which is “art style” or worse (for me), “artstyle.” It just has this sort of delegitimizing quality in a medium that’s often desperate for legitimacy – just say art direction! That’s what you mean. The other one is when people say “IP” (or “franchise” to a lesser extent) when evaluating something from a personal or creative perspective – like “this is my favorite IP.” That’s ick, dude. Let’s not talk like shareholders when expressing our human opinions – you can just call it a series!
My favourite Intellectual Property is when Dr. James Collip and Dr. Frederick Banting sold the patents for insulin and the method of its extraction to the University of Toronto for $1 each
My favourite IP is 192.168.0.1 because it’s where my router lives.
One word I go back and forth on is “self-insert.” It’s not that I hate it but I’m picky about its use. I think some people take it as a normative explanation for how a game protagonist, and especially a silent protagonist, should function. You put yourself in the game.
But I am not always finding myself “self-inserting” or playing a protagonist as an extension of myself. Indeed, even in a game like Dragon Quest XI, sometimes I find myself acting as someone else, rather like a tabletop roleplayer choosing a character who isn’t like them. I think that the relationship between player and PC is more varied than the term suggests, and there is a continuum between self-insert and playing a role, as well as between very deliberate self/role play and un-self-conscious vibing.
Anyway, I am picky about it mainly because I want to carve space out for something I value when I play games.
Shouldn’t give this info out online
It’s fine, a malicious do-badder would have to know that my admin password is ‘admin’ to do any harm.
I have just been introduced to a new term: threenager - which as you can probably work out is the lovely period of child development after the terrible twos, where they go into sulking randomly about anything and are frustrated by the world as they’re not big enough for some things and too small to be doing others.
The reason I don’t like it, having a three year old son right now, is how worryingly accurate the term is and describes him perfectly. I’m hoping this period will means his teenage years are going to be better.
Probably won’t but a guy can dream… Right?
Right?! Can we please all finally just make the jump to Xtreme Box and move on with our lives?
I agree with you @billy - my biggest one is content / content creator. Always makes me question how the person orients themselves around what they / anyone makes and whether they’ve internalized capitalism’s ability to reduce art’s value solely to a viable commercial product.
Truly. We have so many beautiful, descriptive word for different kinds of art people can make. Even commercial art deserves to be called what it is.
Content just makes everything a person makes and shares with the world sound like it’s part of a big slurry of indescribable nothingness.
Consumption is such an ugly word for what can be a beautiful activity to take part in - engaging with artwork.
It’s less that I don’t like it and more that I don’t get how it became a term people use, but ‘boomer shooter’ to refer to games like Doom or Quake just… seems inaccurate? I mean I guess my partner’s dad played Quake at some point, and he’s a boomer, but these games seem more like ‘gen-X shooters’ to me.
honestly for a long time i thought the “boomer” part referred to the characteristic shotgun lol
Boomer isn’t really treated as a literal term for the Baby Boomer generation anymore in most contexts. Boomer just means vaguely old (in terms of beliefs, the way you carry yourself, the things you do, the way you talk, etc.). A boomer shooter is just a shooter for old people; a shooter with old people sensibilities. So, “gen-x shooter” and “boomer shooter” are synonyms.