Why do game pundits love the word "trope" so much?

[Fireaxe]

Because the internet is really bad at not putting things into arbitrary boxes.

 

[Mau95]

Its because of TVTropes.

 

[Vern5]

Tropes are everywhere. Best to get used to that word because it is not going away.

The reason you may be hearing it so much in relation to games might be because more games are falling under the usual tropes i.e. games are starting to become more and more cliche for various reasons.

I agree with everything you say except for the last part. The stories and characters of games are generally just not very good, and relying on cliches too much is one contributor, but it's not getting worse imho, it's getting better... slowly.

I would say that gaming, as a whole, is getting worse in a very subtle way. For every one revolutionary game that subverts all of its predecessor's tropes and becomes an artistic success we get at least twenty shit games that desperately cling to tired old formulas.

The big problem is that these formulaic games are selling very well among the mindless idiot populations of the world and each new iteration of these games only refines the formula to be more bland. I'm talking about the nameless masses of shooters that pop up in droves every year and the horrendously casual games that shamelessly steal ideas from each other.

Basically, gaming's quality, on a whole, is worsening solely due to the increasing amount of needless "fat".

 

[Qvar]

apparently people became too edgy and cool to just say cliche or stereotype

Because they are not "cliché" or stereotypes.

Cliché has a dead horse beating connotation.
Stereotypes implies that it's the predefined way to see something.

If you have a film with a villain, and he can either be a card-carrying villain, or a anti-villain, or a knight templar, or a what have you, you are not dealing with a "stereotypical villain" which would be a much narrower set of attributes.

And yes, it's because tvtropes.