Anyone besides me beginning to cringe at certain terms because of Video Games?

[Wargamer]

Spunkgargleweewee.

The Escapist is now rife with it. Can't we just go back to calling them FPS games, or military shooters?

Christ knows I like the guy, but not everything Yahtzee says is Holy Gospel destined to be repeated until the end of time.

That's Jim's job.

No. A First Person Shooter and a Spunkgargleweewee are two completely different things. For starters, an FPS is a game. Spunkgargleweewee is a military jerkoff with quick time events.

As to terms I have come to hate thanks to gaming...

Terran. Once upon a time, "Terran" was for me a grown ups way of saying "Earthing." It used to mean any lifeform, especially sentient ones, who either originate from Earth or choose to make it their home. Now? Terran is a word with bile; a go-to phrase to describe imbalance, annoyance, fun-destroying cheapness and, of course, the most insultingly self-entitled pricks the RTS community can produce.
Blizzard says Terran is the most well-rounded race, and they ***** about how that's CLEARLY not true. Balance their units and they scream "OMG NERF Y U NO NERF MUTA INSTEAD!?" Add new content to their faction, and it invariably ruins the gaming experience for the guy who isn't using it.

Fuck Terrans. They ruined Starcraft.

 

[Sexy Devil]

Words like "groan" and "cringe" have pissed me off somewhat ever since the video game community started using them to describe stuff that was mildly cheesy/cliche. Whenever something truly awful comes along it's fair enough, but whatever the poster is talking about is rarely that bad. Not a dig at you, OP; just something I've noticed in general.

 

[Exius Xavarus]

I...don't really hate any words. I just wish people would use them more properly.

 

[Pulse]

Boycott.

If you're not buying a game it's not because you don't want it, it's suddenly because you CARE about the GAMING INDUSTRY so much and YOU know what's best. Even if you're just delaying buying a console, suddenly you've been boycotting it.....

 

[Longstreet]

well, not exactly hating but,

Whenever i see an announcement that sais something like "X will come out soon" I remind myself what soon stood for with a game called 9Dragon. In the Acclaim days especially, but the companies that picked it up after that had to suffer from it aswell.

Now for some trivia!

Who here actually knows what i am talking about?

 

[Terminal Blue]

I'm going to join the chorus against "dumbing down".

"Dumbing down" refers to process of replacing or removing content which is intellectually challenging or educational with low brow entertainment. The process of replacing factual news with entertainment news or celebrity gossip, or replacing in-depth documentary and educational programming with "celebrity pets in rehab gone wild" is dumbing down. Changing the interface or mechanics for a video game to make it simpler or easier to play is not dumbing down, it's making the game easier.

That may indeed be a bad thing, and as someone who is generally better at games than publishers seem to think I am, I do find it annoying when I breeze through a game without it ever feeling like a challenge, but it's not dumbing down because, and let's be honest here, games were almost always dumb lowbrow entertainment to begin with. In fact, it's only in very recent years the content and subject matter of certain games has caught up with that of lowbrow summer blockbusters.

The only way games could "dumb down" at this point is if they started using pure and blatant exploitation to.. oh, hang on..

Seriously, games are dumb already. They are not dumbing down, if anything they're getting less dumb. The fact that some games are easier than games in the past has nothing to do with dumbing down.

 

[michael87cn]

Yeah, I dislike a lot of popular phrases/words.

Casual, Welfare, Easy-Mode, Dumbed-down, Spunkgarglewheewhee (who thought that one up, a 6 year old? and why do so many adults think its even usable in mature conversation?).

Lots of these things come from ignorance; that is, a lack of knowledge. A lack of understanding. A lack of caring, too. Lotsa people like to share their opinions on things they don't actually care about.

 

[Legion]

"Realism" Why the in the name of fuck do we want our games to be realistic? Games are supposed to be an escape and how can you escape from real life if the game is realistic?

I think that depends on how it is used.

I like realism so far as it allows me to suspend my disbelief. That is to say, if I were playing Skyrim and a Bosmer flies down from the sky flapping their arms, telling me that wood elves are capable of flight, I'd want more realism in the game.

When people use it in things like "Regenerating health is so unrealistic. Why can't they use magic, bullet healing medi-kits instead? They make much more sense."[footnote]Although if you don't like regenerating health for other reasons, then I don't necessarily disagree[/footnote] is when I despise the term being used.

As for my own: Tryhard, feminism/sexism

Out of curiosity, with sexism do you mean people who think things are sexist when they are not, people who think things are not sexist when they are, or both/neither?

 

[Pink Gregory]

GOTY

That's simply being caught in the middle of catching someone else.

"GOTY-!"

 

[Pink Gregory]

Boycott.

If you're not buying a game it's not because you don't want it, it's suddenly because you CARE about the GAMING INDUSTRY so much and YOU know what's best. Even if you're just delaying buying a console, suddenly you've been boycotting it.....

and surely the point of a boycott is that it's something that you would have actually bought, were it not for whatever reason it is that yer boycotting it?

I've seen a few people confuse 'boycott' with avoiding a certain publisher's output, for example.

 

[Anathrax]

Try Hard. MLG. Top [Insert character here] NA/Global/EU. Owned.

"Premium". "Realistic".

Someone kill me.

 

[Zen Toombs]

I've been a touch less active on these forums lately, but the only time I've heard that term was when Yahtzee first said it, and the bajillion times people have complained about others using "Spunkgargleweewee" to describe a game.

People were saying it really frequently for a couple of weeks there. Now it's just died down and all you hear are the people who hate the term.

See also: MLP on the Escapist.

Sorry, couldn't resist. I'm not even a huge fan of that show.

I...don't really hate any words. I just wish people would use them more properly.

Way to be awesome Exius.

 

[spartan231490]

you know what word is really starting to piss me off in this community: Hate. Seriously, gamers are getting to be the most judgmental community on the planet. For god's sake, there is someone hating character development on page one of this thread. Can you imagine that in any other narrative media discussion. "I don't like 'The Night Angel' Trilogy by Brent Weeks, because he has too much character development." Now I know that isn't exactly what the individual in question was saying, but it was close enough to be ludicrous.

 

[Adept Mechanicus]

This might seem a bit silly, but "cinematic." This is very problematic, as I am a film studies major. It's just that the word provokes a sort of beserker fury because it reminds me of the parts of gameplay the devs thought were too cool for me to participate in.

 

[thebobmaster_v1legacy]

Evil. Don't get me wrong, I'm not necessarily talking about in video games. I'm more talking about how people refer to companies such as Activision and EA as evil. Just because they don't do what you think they should, and are possibly taking games in a direction you'd rather they not does not make them evil.

Hitler? Evil. Stalin? Evil. Pol Pot? Evil. Microtransactions? Not evil.

 

[The Almighty Aardvark]

I don't understand all of this hate for immersion. It is probably one of my favorite aspects of games. The ability to create a world that feels real and gripping doesn't seem to me like something that should be disregarded. There is bound to be some degree of subjectivity to it as different things are going to work for different people, but that doesn't mean that a game shouldn't be criticized for doing it poorly, or applauded for doing it well.

"Branching out to a wider audience". Not that there's anything inherently bad with this, but I shudder every time I see it because so often it involves changing a niche feature that attracted me to the game in the first place

 

[JEBWrench]

Immersion on the other hand comes from way off in left field and has no actual relevance since that one element that could be completely off-putting for one person is the thing that another finds most appealing. In such - it's a completely useless term for reviewing a game that gets used for that purpose far too often.

I'd say that because of that, it is one of the most useful terms you can find to understand the reviewer's viewpoint, though. If certain conventions bothered the reviewer enough to lower their opinion, and those same ones don't bother you, there's a good chance you'll like it more than the reviewer.

I digress! I'm starting to get tired of "consumer rights". I'm pretty sure that everyone's shared their viewpoints ad nauseum at this point.