Useless Gaming Terms, and What the True Problem Is

Frequent any forum on gaming long enough and you’ll start to see threads named things like:

• Gaming Terms You Can’t Stand
• Words We Need to Retire
• Your Pet Peeve Gaming Phrases

Nevermind that the internet simply loves to complain; you’ll get some of this type of moaning regardless of what hobby you involve yourself with.

However, the preponderance of such discussions speaks to a deeper issue, and it’s one that directly involves our communication habits.

Writing For an Unknown Audience

I write reviews for RPGs and board games, and other think pieces like these. And my site does decent traffic, so at least hundreds of people are reading everything I write. And do you know who my audience is? No?

It’s ok. I don’t either.

Granted, I have a general sense of who’s reading them. No one reads board game opinion pieces who isn’t already invested in the hobby. But a few might. For example, a parent looking for game ideas for their children for Christmas might stumble upon my blog. Or a teenager who wants to learn about that neat-looking game they saw on the shelf in Target.

So if that’s my audience, along with established hobbyists, I can’t use a bunch of industry jargon and shorthand, or I’ll lose them.

I forget what celebrity Tweeted (sorry, X’d) about this on Twitter (sorry, X), but their complaint was that they were trying to get into board games, but literally anything they found was impenetrable, and required preexisting knowledge of hobby-specific phrases and terms in order to engage with the writing.

This sucks. Not for me and maybe not you, but for those interested people reading. We should be striving for inclusivity in public-facing media, which means not gatekeeping hobby involvement behind a wall of jargon that’s been learned over years or – in many cases – decades.

It also means I try to imagine this audience when I write. I want my reviews to be accessible to a broad audience. But I undoubtedly have blindspots that cause me to take shortcuts in my writing, losing some people.

This is all to make the point that how we talk about our favorite toys matters, because it relates to our ability to impart information and opinions to others, and engage fully with them.

Shortcuts Don’t Work Among Hobbyists Either

What does “elegant” mean in a gaming sense? If you’ve played enough games, you are probably imagining a few right now that you’d describe as elegant.

Follow-up question: does elegant mean the same thing to you as it does to the next gamer over? Am I using it differently than you might?

It’s a deliberately nebulous term, so it’s tautological to say that it will mean different things to different people.

So when a discussion thread opens on Reddit or Board Game Geek asking for “games with elegant gameplay,” you’re going to be treated to a confusing, often contradictory set of recommendations from those who will eventually chime in with game suggestions.

This is what leads to those angry threads mentioned in the intro to this blog. And who can blame them?

Framing Your Perspective

In reviews, it’s common to frame one’s perspective. What does that mean? In a gaming sense, it could mean anything from revealing your biases about what you’re writing about, talking about your experience within a genre, and defining a term you’re about to use a lot while also including detailed examples of what you mean when you use the word or phrase.

The problem is that a lot of people skip this step in less formal communication.

So if I’m going to use the term “elegant” in a review – and I have – I’m taking the time to explain exactly what I mean with its use.

You might still disagree with how I’m using it in the context of the review. But at least you don’t misunderstand what I’m attempting to convey. We can have a discussion at that point, at the very least, without talking past one another.

So is the term ‘elegant’ problematic? I’d argue it’s only so if it’s not properly framed in a discussion.

The Insanity of Definition Discussions

The downstream problem of this practice, though, is that you end up getting a lot of attempts to codify language precisely.

Language is fluid, though, and you’ll quickly find that your ideas of usage don’t always match others. This is expected, and fine. But again, human discussion – on the internet or otherwise – isn’t always known for allowing such nuance.

Which then leads many of those discussions down spiraling, often recursive debates as to the precise meaning of a word or phrase.

For example: What does “low interaction” mean in a game? Again, you are probably forming a rough idea based on your experience with games. So am I.

But what if my experience with games is a lot different than yours? So then, when we discover that a “low interaction” game for me is a “high interaction” game for you, which of us is wrong?

It’s here that we need to have the discipline to meet people where they’re at. Ok, such-and-such is what constitutes low interaction for you. I may disagree, but if we both explain our frames, we can then discuss within one, the other, or between the two with an understanding of how the term is being used. Exact agreement isn’t necessary.

This isn’t a hypothetical example. I’ve seen this exact debate play out over hundreds of replies from dozens of people. And on multiple occasions on different websites. And I have a hard time entering the discussion at all, because even if my concept of interaction matches with someone else in such a debate, I can’t fully agree with their participation in such a debate. I see it as a failure of communication, and can’t agree with the very premise of the debate.

“But Mark, Words Matter”

The downstream problem with THAT solution, though (tired yet? I’m getting there myself), is that a lot of words do have specific meanings, and if we simply allow people to define them however they want, they’ll end up confusing a lot of others and simply creating more useless debate.

Imagine someone claiming that a game is highly interactive where you can never affect other players via your play, nor need to talk with them, to play a full game (again, not hypothetical). Now imagine someone from outside hobby gaming, one with a real-world, practical sense of what words mean, coming into that discussion and trying to make sense of things. It’s a recipe for disaster.

This is where we need to assess for bad-faith arguments. Because often these debates are framed as being Good/Bad, or a particular descriptor is seen as Positive or Negative. So there’s a vested interest for many to associate their favorite toy with that descriptor, even if it means stretching the limits of its definition to shoehorn your tastes into it.

It’s the internet’s version of 1984’s Doublethink. If you find yourself reading something that seems to be using a term in the opposite way it’s used in everyday speech, you’re probably looking at this phenomenon. It’s not too hard to see this phenomenon at work in politically charged language as well. It’s coded into our society, and can be insidiously employed, not just for low-stakes ephemera like games.

I’ve talked about this before, but terms like “bash the leader” or “multiplayer solitaire” are loaded phrases in a hobby sense. They’re usually used pejoratively, and in juxtaposition to other games that are “better” or “good.” So for example, in such a debate, convincing people that your favorite game isn’t multiplayer solitaire or bash the leader is a goal for many.

Except many games absolutely are multiplayer solitaire, or nearly so. Or they absolutely have bash the leader mechanics. The issue, then, is that we treat these terms as a default-negative too often. Which they aren’t, since Good/Bad here depends entirely on execution and personal preference.

Far better to admit to what type of experience they are, then examine how the gameplay is being executed, and the experience it provides.

Use Your Words

Ah, but what about when someone legitimately sees things differently than you? They aren’t arguing in bad faith to try to “win” an argument, but are being honest.

It’s here we need to come back to framing. To stick with the example I’ve been using a bunch here, I’ve had people tell me {GAME} is highly interactive when I have stated otherwise. I generally end up explaining to them that, based on the games I’ve played and the spectrum of interactivity in games, and those I personally find to be consistently interactive, it’s definitely on the lower end of this spectrum. I’m glad they find meaningful interaction in it, but from my frame of reference, it’s absolutely low interaction.

We can have a different frame at that point, but aren’t lost in an arbitrary debate to define the precise location games go from high to low interaction.

Related, spectrum-based analyses tend to help me as well. In that example above, framing the discussion as a binary, yes/no, high/low, good/bad, elegant/not debate is pointless. We’re not ditching the practical meaning of the phrases at that point, but simply viewing them in context and refusing to create an all-or-nothing argument that has no true answer.

So when someone makes that “Gaming Terms That Need to Go Away” thread on a discussion forum somewhere, it’s not that they’re wrong. They’re correctly identifying ambiguous or confusing terminology that’s commonly used, and it rightly annoys them.

However, where they’re wrong is in the proposed solution. Shuffling off some words for others won’t benefit our collective understanding. It will simply create new, similarly ambiguous words for us to wring our hands over.

The only solution is the harder one: use your words.

It shouldn’t be enough to say that a game is elegant. Or highly interactive. Or whatever else. Explain yourself.

What are you doing that makes it interactive? Attacking, negotiating, bribing, outbidding, deceiving, deducing, etc. Use examples of gameplay to show us what you mean. Why does the game feel elegant? Walk us through the experience so that we can corroborate or refute it based on our own experiences.

The terms themselves are impotent without this context, and always will be, however hard we try to define them.

Games are experiential, so the best way to convey meaning is via experiential language. “What it is” is not as good as “What it does” which in turn is not as good as “How it feels.” That last phrase could be substituted for “the experience it is most likely to create at the table.” Covering games as mechanical objects isn’t wrong, but it’s incomplete. The effect it has on the writer/reviewer is necessary for me to feel as though I’ve understood their perspective.

The problem is that we want to use shorthand, without realizing that shorthand only works among those with a similar frame of reference. It can work, mind you, but rarely when your audience is large and unknowable. I used shorthand gaming language all the time…but it’s in more bounded circles of friends who have been gaming together for years. Our frames are adequately aligned, so that the lack of extrapolation doesn’t create confusion.

We all know what we mean. But not everyone else will.

It’s also why you won’t find me anymore in the hobby’s many definitional debates, nor threads about terms that annoy us. Plenty of terms annoy me, but not in and of themselves. They annoy me only insofar as they aren’t given proper context within both a personal framework and broader hobby setting.