This is admittedly not that big of a deal I guess but it drives me nuts how often modern games describe themselves like: a zelda-esque soulsborne roguelike metroidvania- or something equally indecipherable to anyone outside of the entrenched Gamer demographic. I am thoroughly “search action”-pilled…we really gotta use words better!
How else would you name the genres? The last two (arguably last three) terms you give are pretty specific to the extent that you can’t give it a self-evident name like FPS, RTS, Racing, etc.
I don’t particularly have an answer, but games don’t seem to be more or less special to me than any other medium of expression, and books aren’t going around calling themselves potterlikes or whatever (maybe the critics/pundits do, but that’s not where my complaint goes)
As mentioned I do really like “search action” to replace metroidvania.
I think this is just kind of how language works. Most words are just referencing other words that were ultimately made up by someone and used often enough to become part of language. The problem is that gaming, as we know it, is such a novel medium that we don’t have all the language to describe things yet, and we keep coming up with new things. Most of the “X-like” terms are used to describe genres that are relatively new, even by gaming standards. The soulslike genre, for example, has only existed since 2009. You have to give language time to develop, and there has to be a reason to replace perfectly good language. Terms like “metroidvania” or “soulslike” are used not because people are lazy, but because they’re effective at conveying a specific concept better than other words. That’s what we want from language, the ability to communicate clearly.
An example of this is the evolution of the term “Doom clone” into “first person shooter”. Doom was the quintessential FPS, so it made sense to refer to other FPS games by referencing Doom. Once the genre saw enough success, novelty, and variety, it no longer made sense to reference a single game to describe them. Further, we now have a bunch of games made in the same style as the original Doom and Doom clones, but we call them “boomer shooters”.
Language evolves organically and as-needed, and if “roguelike” or “soulslike” are useful and clear ways to communicate the concepts that they communicate then they’ll probably stick around. When it’s time to retire them, we’ll have already moved on to different terms.
This is a good post. My biggest gripe I think is that in a hypothetical where you describe something as a doom clone or what have you and someone goes “what’s Doom?”, you find yourself having to break it down into a more general description of qualities anyway. The purpose of “doom clone” has failed, then. It works for a percentage of people who already know what doom is, but to me that just reinforces an “in”-culture approach to classification which gives me the creeps (though I don’t really know why, per se, this is not a vibe I have interrogated too much to be clear)
But it’s the same problem if I tell someone about a cool sci fi movie and they’re like ‘what’s a sci fi?’. Everyone has to have new terms explained to them the first time they hear them.
I don’t think using terms like roguelike or metroidvania are trying to be exclusionary, it’s just difficult to convey a genre succinctly. There’s probably lots of people unfamiliar with the game Rogue but they know exactly what a roguelike is.
I knew what “roguelike” meant long before I realized Rogue was a game and roguelike meant “games that are like Rogue”
It was a completely abstract term to me, like any other word.
What was fun for me was that I played a game called Castle of the Winds on Windows 3.1 when I was a kid, and really enjoyed it, but didn’t put together until well over a decade later that it was a roguelike, or that that’s even what those games were called. It was obvious in retrospect, but I don’t know if people were even using the term roguelike at the time.
Same! I played that game a lot, though I was young and had no qualms about save scumming
I also learned much later that the Sega Genesis game Toejam and Earl from the same era is also essentially a rogue like.
I really don’t mind save scumming. It basically turns a roguelike into a roguelite, and sometimes that’s what you want. This is an interesting article about Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries that points out that Mercenaries is essentially a roguelike, and that the ability to restart the mission if it’s going poorly is critical to enjoying it because the game has a few big flaws that would be intolerable if you had to deal with irreversible consequences of those flaws:
https://www.polygon.com/reviews/2020/1/16/21066189/mechwarrior-5-mercenaries-review-restart-button-glitches-bugs-ai
I love MW5: Mercenaries and I completely agree that the game requires the ability to essentially save scum to make it worthwhile. You still have to beat a given mission from start with whatever you’ve got, but you don’t have to accept the loss from the game glitching or the AI doing something stupid if you’re willing to start over.
I say everyone should save scum if it improves the experience for them. It’s a feature!
Mother of God, I think you’re right. I may have to go give that another run, I played the hell out of it as a kid. One of the best Genesis titles, period.
How is that a problem? If you’re interested in a subject, you learn its terms lol. It’s like saying “checkmate” is exclusionary because you have to explain to someone who’s never heard of the term or played chess what it means.
If you’ve never taken or cared about literature, how are you supposed to infer what “first person shooter” or “third person sandbox” means without reading about it or having someone explain
If you don’t explain to someone what anime is then you shouldn’t surprised when they ask if you’ve seen the new cartoon about robots fighting each other
A valid genre complaint would be something like Tyler the Creator being labeled as “urban.” It doesn’t mean anything except “the artist is black and makes music people dance to.” It’s not comparable to “country” because that has distinct features outside of “white people singing about farms”. Describing a game clearly uses mechanics inspired by or pulled from From Software without mentioning dark souls would be disingenuous - unless, like the OP said, there’s enough variety that referencing the original game doesn’t make sense. Most rock bands don’t mention the Beatles anymore despite their innovation.
If we have words to describe things then we should use them. I am willing to concede that because “metroidvania” has colloquial use enough now to let most other people know it means a 2D platformer game where you search for skill improvements and gradually get stronger to see more of the play field then we can use it, but I don’t have to think it doesn’t sound dumb as hell, and by definition if you don’t know a Metroid or a Castlevania then “metroidvania” isn’t helpful, and you can’t tell me that “then learn what those two things are” isn’t being just a little exclusionary when we have words! Words to describe the style of game! Words that I used! This is nothing like not knowing what checkmate refers to, that is absurd.
You might say something is Dickensian or Shakespearean though
Do critics/readers say that or would the authors themselves, like on a paragraph on the back cover with the teaser, or in a foreword? I’ve never seen something like that, but I guess it’s a big world. What spurred this post was seeing the Steam store page of a game use pretty much all of these terms in its own marketing blurb, which seems ridiculous to me.
Well because JK Rowling didn’t innovate anything or have a feature tied to her brand unlike From Software. Eventually “souls like” or “rogue like” will just be no different than “cyberpunk” or “fantasy.”