terms the gaming community is overusing/causing to lose meaning

x5 I have to agree with you there.

"Illusion of choice"

I fail to see how choices are "illusions" just because they don't completely change the plot.

I see mediocre as being average in the worst way possible, so it's a notch right below just standard average, a 4/10 if you will(with 5 being average, in fact electronic gaming monthly IIRC used to have that very equivalent). But sometimes people just say something is mediocre when it doesn't live up to their expectations, regardless of if the game is still decent or not.

SF 4 is a mediocre game, stuff like that.

I know what you mean, and it's the correct meaning of the word, I was just saying that the meaning drifted. And in the current gaming review system, 4/10 is So Bad Its Horrible. Most AAA titles hover around 8.5/10 - 10/10 and 6-7 seems to be Average.

Because "meaningful choice" is all about consequences, and "illusion of choice" is a way to railroad the player while making him believe that his choices are having tangible consequences and shaping the storyline. Illusion of choice is not inherently bad, the fact that it is adquiring a negative connotation occurs because Bioware marketing puts a lot of focus in the "meaningful" choices, and these choices usually fail to deliver in the way the customers expect them to, given said advertisements. The problem is that making "true choices" eats a lot of resources, and they don't give instant gratification, so they cost more than they are worth in the eyes of many devs.

edited 23rd May '12 2:13:55 PM by Anfauglith

I suppose my issue with it is the negative connotations, then.

Decent is good average, Mediocre is bad average.

Even David Gaider himself talked about this illusion of choice (when he was arguing with Chris Avellone in a panel about storytelling and choices). I think we had a nice discussion about it in the Dragon Age thread some time ago. My opinion is that the problem is both from the customers and from the marketing... the customers because they think it's inherently bad and don't weight all the resources it takes to make a choice like for example the one in The Witcher 2 (which changes the whole plot and location of more than 1/3 of the game) -resources that need to be taken from another part of the game- ; and from the marketing because they go on and on about how many variants and meaningful choices there are, how every playthrough is completely different from the others, and more of their usual hyperbolic hogwash, which fuels the dissapointment of the fans.

edited 23rd May '12 2:21:28 PM by Anfauglith

The solution to part of that is just to ignore marketing.

I have no idea why anyone pays attention to it.

Hmm...

Well, I've long had the issue with the overly blanket usage of the term "competitive," which tends to change to mean "whatever the hardcore community is doing." If it's different than what the hardcore community is doing, you can bet someone will claim it's "uncompetitive," even though with a little thought that makes no sense.

A good example is the use of "technical" and "competitive" as meaning the same thing. Which they really don't.

Also, specifically for the Smash Bros community: confusing the words "random" and "unfair" as synonymous.

Scrub isn't the one wins with two Seth combos. It is more scrubbish to ban Seth just because he's the best. The ones insists everyone should use Seth are the stop having fun guys.

Epic has no meaning, thankfully epoch remains untouched. RPG and RPG elements were already touched on, so I'll just say I agree.

Casual game to Casual gamer? I have a friend who lost over half her body weight through a combination of playing Just Dance and forgetting to eat. I casually played Eternal Darkness, not beating it for at least two years just for how seldom I touched it, Metroid Prime took even longer, for the same reason and I still haven't beat Resident Evil 4.

I see this used a lot on World Of Warcraft-related forums:

"Homogenization"

"Professional", specifically "pro gamer". Unless you regularly compete in tournaments or make money off of playing the game, you are not "pro".

Immersion.

I think it used to mean when a game was engaging enough to overlook the flaws but now people use it for all sorts of nonsense. I've heard people say that Fallout 3 more immersive than Fallout 1 and 2 cause it's first person which is a pretty stupid argument. A lot of people seem to mistake 'immersion' to mean "How close to real life is this" or something but that's not what it meant when it first started being used and it's a pointless 'feature' if that's what people are after.

Roleplaying.

Fuck this word. So hard. Roleplaying has lost all meaning and is far too often twisted to mean a bunch of nonsensical stuff. I've seen people use it to say that they 'roleplayed' Gordon Freeman as a crazy person by just playing the game in a weird way (avoiding water cause he's hydrophobic or stuff like that). My problem with this word is it's far too often conflated with the Roleplaying Game genre, and without turning this thread into yet another RPG discussion thread I just want to say that a word as meaningless as roleplaying isn't fit to define the genre. To say that an RPG is a game where you play a role is something that doesn't mean anything anymore and I really hate it when people start saying this without at least elaborating what they mean by that (but I'll still hate you for it even if you do explain what you mean. Seriously, never use roleplaying again, it's just so nebulous and nonspecific now).

Streamlined.

It used to mean making the interface more convenient, instead of going through 3 menus to access your pistol why not just open up one clear inventory instead or better yet just hotkey it? But nowadays people are conflating it as simply removing all complexity and it's not quite the same thing. Dragon Age 2 had roughly the same interface as before but with a lot of the depth stripped away and occasionally even made more inconvenient (no top down camera for PC and other pointless UI crap like Junk) but instead it started saying that it wasn't overly simplified but "streamlined". Um...no it wasn't, the interface was exactly the same and it wasn't made more convenient.

Similarly Skyrim started claiming that its interface was more streamlined and I think most, if not all, people should agree that its UI is fucking awful and the most inconvenient piece of crap ever. That wasn't streamlined, it was just stripped of most of its depth.

Isometric has also become a bit broader than what it strictly means (Fallout isn't technically isometric as an example, it's cavalier oblique) but this is a good thing since otherwise people would get all anal about the specific angle of the camera.

There's more but that's all I can think of off the top of my head right now.

That's easier said than done. Marketing is 50% of the reason all these terms have lost their meaning. The three examples I list above have been twisted by marketing to mean whatever they want and then the fans latch onto these new meanings and further twist the definition until it's very different to what it was supposed to mean.

edited 24th May '12 12:22:39 AM by ShadowScythe

I always think of Immersion as how much the game can well, immerse me in the setting and the plot. Sometimes I see it used well but I agree that some people use it as if it were something intrinsically related with the graphics, which is awful. Narm, bad attempts at humor, annoying glitches, plotholes, all this and more can be immersion breaking.

I agree. Plus while marketing tends to lie, I don't think "well let's ignore it because they always did this" is exactly the right way to deal with the issue.

Nothing to add about your other points, but all in all I agree with everything and you said it better than me.

edited 24th May '12 12:33:08 AM by Anfauglith

I agree that "epic" is overused. In my experience, it seems to be misused as well.

Epic is just a terrible word in general, and anyone who uses it non-ironically should be crucified.

I disagree with you vehemently

It had long become the exclaimative term for something remarkable. People these days would not go out of their way to say 'Remarkable' like a brit. They would rather choose the 4 lettered word called Epic

Emo and Scrub(with the latter being used incorrectly)

Overstatements in general, "awesome" and "epic" among them.

Exclaimative terms shouldn't even count in this thread. They're often spoken, but that doesn't mean they're overused

Trolling.

Basically, someone has a different opinion than you? Must be a troll.

I think this one might've been mentioned, but this TERM is used in gaming community as much as by netizens

"Fail"

Future of gaming

Hardcore

Old-school

REVOLUTION

Raping, rapage, raep, and all of it's cousin abberations. It's ridiculous that this particular word has become acceptable lingo in the gaming community. The other stuff just sounds chic or odd to an outsider, but that one sounds downright mysognistic, if not threatening to the females in our community. If any single word needs to go, it's that one.