Back at Kotaku, our style guide contained a list of over-used or meaningless phrases that were banned from headlines and articles. My strongest memory is of “looks” making an appearance every press conference season, very good advice that also forced me to think more deeply about what had actually happened during a marathon of trailers. In my decade-plus of working as a professional editor in games journalism, I’ve developed my own personal list of words I axe from drafts. Since it’s Inside Baseball week, here’s some games writing words I hate and why I hate them.
Some of these words are jargon, either from game development or games marketing, while others are vague. I am pretty pedantic as an editor (“But what does this mean?” is one of my most commonly-written notes), but it’s usually in service of pushing a writer to be specific. I'm also aware that I too have used these words, probably on this very website, because many of them are pretty entrenched in how we talk about games. I’ll try to offer some alternatives to the words I criticize in this list, just so I don’t come off like a complete crank.
Immersive: This is an easy one, since discourse around this word returns every few years. In a 2012 video essay on the topic, Ben Abraham pointed out that calling something “immersive” can lead to “appealing but meaningless statements,” and I think that really sums up why this word is so useless in games writing. It looks good on paper, but what does it actually mean to be “immersed?” You’re just saying that you…had a lot of emotions, that the game felt realistic, that you were paying attention? As praise, it’s contributed to the high-fidelity graphics race that is ballooning production costs and pricing all of us out of hardware. You don’t need to help that happen.
As an alternative, you guessed it: Be specific. If the boulder scene in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle felt “immersive,” think about what that word is really pointing to for you. Did the game’s accurate recreation remind you of seeing the movie for the first time as a kid? Did the scene have really good sound design? Was it paced in such a way that it felt tense or unpredictable? Tell the reader what you actually experienced and why you valued it, instead of throwing down a tired buzzword.
Franchise: Regular people do not use this word in their regular lives; no one who isn’t a shareholder is saying “oh boy, another entry in my favorite franchise!” (While we’re at it: “entry” also sucks, but I’m less of a stickler about this one.) “Franchise” is a marketing word, and you don’t work for a game’s marketing department. Just say “series,” jesus christ.
I know that not everything you might be tempted to call a “franchise” is strictly a “series,” but in this instance I’ll take a potentially fuzzy noun over one that makes you sound like a tool. We all know you’re talking about a video game.
IP: Same. There is no reason for you to ever say “IP” unless you are making fun of people who say “IP” or are a contracts lawyer. Like with “franchise,” I know it can sometimes be hard to find a non-clunky alternative to this word, but it’s a PR word and you are not on a game’s PR team.
A lot of video games writing words veer close to marketing words; while I don’t consider journalists the enemies of PR per se, we’re doing very different jobs, and the words we choose can make that clear. When marketing words creep into our vocabulary, we blur a boundary fundamental to journalists’ independence, and we also miss out on the opportunity to say the things that we as journalists are uniquely situated to say. Leave the press release talk in your inbox.
Revealed/Dropped: Look, I get that this one is pedantic, but unless you work in a video game’s marketing department, a company “showed” or “announced” something. They didn’t reveal it–it’s not a magic trick–and they didn’t drop it–it’s not a new album. Actually, I frequently get into arguments with writers about that last one, because while I get that people use this colloquially, I think it sounds like a hype word. You’re a journalist; you’re not in the business of hype.
Fun: Hear me out. One of the big challenges of writing about games is trying to communicate your own reactions and emotions when you’re talking to hundreds or thousands of people you don’t know, who not only have their own tastes but also their own perceptions of their own emotions. What you find “fun” or “moving” or “interesting” or “boring” could be completely different not only to what kinds of experiences give them those emotions, but to how they even understand their experience of those emotions. It’s easy to write “this game is fun” or “this mechanic is fun,” but, like “immersive,” you actually aren’t communicating very much.
Here, again, is where being specific will be your friend. If you found a game “fun,” give a concrete example of a fun moment and dig into precisely what your experience was. What was “fun” for me about climbing up and down the tea-making machine in Wanderstop was that it was clunky and manual; this strange, slow machine gave the game its particular pace and highlighted that quality in the game itself, as part of its overall message. That has a lot more detail than “Making tea in this game is fun,” and asks you to really dig into your experience with a game.
Gameplay loop: I feel like this one is going to be contentious. To me, this is a game design word, and much like marketing words, I think it behooves us as writers to remember that we aren’t game designers. (You might in fact also be a game designer, but hopefully you get what I mean!) Whether or not games journalists are “in the games industry” has come up a lot in the past few years, particularly in a few high-profile instances where our different roles and priorities became clear. I am firmly of the mind that games journalists are in the journalism industry, and as such, we have a wonderful wealth of our own words to use, rather than another field’s. Take advantage of it!
“Gameplay loop” also veers into jargon territory, another thing I try to excise from writers’ drafts. It can be really tough to avoid jargon without running the risk of talking down to your audience, because it’s hard to know what is or isn’t jargon to such a large, diverse group. Not everyone who plays video games is as dialed in as someone who likes games enough to write about them on the internet. Jargon can be useful–one word instead of several always feels better–but I find it almost never harms my writing to take a moment to consider if there isn’t a simpler or more accessible way to say what I mean. This gives me the opportunity to invite more readers in and maybe teach them something in the process.
Addictive: Many games sites have finally gotten on the same page about this, thankfully. “Addictive” as praise sucks, not just because your readers might struggle with compulsive behaviors related to video games, but also because when you think about it, it’s not really meaningfully descriptive. The fact that I struggled with alcohol use isn’t a compliment to alcohol, nor is it–to me at least–a criticism of it; booze was a tool I used to solve a problem, and it took over all my other tools, but you might not have that struggle at all. Addictiveness might say more about you and your experience with something than the thing itself (this isn’t a blanket truth, obviously), and as such is not very useful when describing something.
“Addictive” also ties into some negative tendencies in game design and how some games want to keep you playing for longer than you might otherwise, but whether or not that constitutes “addiction” is a whole field of thought far bigger than a nit-picky blog about words. If you’re writing an article about predatory practices, just say that. If what you mean is that you really enjoyed playing a game and wanted to keep playing it, just say that, and, as always, give a specific example of a moment and why you felt the way you did.
(While we’re on substance talk, I’m always a bit chagrined when I have to explain this one, but I tend to edit out “drank the Kool-Aid” in pieces. This is a reference to the brutal end of the Peoples Temple in 1978; beyond the fact that research has shown that many people did not willingly drink the poisoned Kool-Aid, it was also a hideous tragedy that should not be turned into a glib phrase.)
Genius: Maybe this is a hot take, but no one is a “genius.” “Genius” itself is often a marketing word that obfuscates the labor that goes into games and other creative work. People might be very good at what they do, and they might be in the right place at the right time or have access to the right resources so that they get lots of opportunities to be good at that thing, and they might have a whole system or marketing apparatus behind them so that everyone knows how good they are at the thing. But no good comes of praising an individual as a genius, not just for helping readers know more about a person, but for anyone who makes things. I’m looking at you, everyone who writes about Kojima.
If you’re writing about someone who’s very good at something, try to dig into what precisely that looks like, and also why. It’s also a great opportunity to think about and highlight the people who are most likely helping them be so good at their thing. There’s probably a way more interesting story there than another fawning profile of someone who already gets talked about to death.
Game of the Year: Apart from lists written for SEO purposes, ranking things against each other and deciding which one is the best is a fool’s errand. And look, I’ve written these lists, and I even like them, because it’s nice to see a roundup of things someone liked that I might like too. But it’s a weird practice that the whole internet ecosystem falls into that, sure, has some benefits, but in the long run probably does more harm than good.
“Game of the year” or “my GOTY” should especially be avoided when you’re writing about one specific game, particularly when the year isn’t over. “This is a contender for my game of the year” means nothing to a reader for the same reasons that “fun,” “boring,” and their ilk mean nothing. Furthermore, you don’t know what the year holds! Life is a terrifying roller coaster and anything could happen! Just say what stood out for you, or what you’ll remember, and, as always, be specific.
Review scores: I’ll end on an easy one, and I know this isn’t always in a writer’s hands. These are ridiculous and do nothing but serve as a siren for the worst kind of readers. They can exert financial consequences on game developers that you, as a games writer, should have nothing to do with. Down with this, for the love of god.
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