Originally Posted by
Abuse Them and Lose Them: I'm Taking these Words Away
I’d say I’m sorry for doing this, gamers, but come on. You’ve brought this on yourselves. You’ve abused certain words way too much, and now I have no choice but to take them away. You’ve thrown them around like meaningless buzzwords. If I don’t take them now, they’ll be ruined forever. You’ll thank me when you’re older.
Unplayable - Do you know what “unplayable” means? Well, no, I guess not. If you did, we wouldn’t be here having this little chat, now would we? “Unplayable” is the opposite of “playable,” which literally means “able to be played.” If a game is “unplayable” it means there is something preventing you from being able to play it. A game with a small technical failure is not unplayable. I’ve seen you whine about The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, saying its framerate makes it unplayable. No. Stop. The frame rate is low by today’s standards, but if you really wanted to, you could sit down and play it from start to finish and the frame rate would never get in the way.
Floaty - Guess what! “Floaty” does not mean “bad platformer!” Whether the game you’re playing is good or bad, if the character stops when you let go of the control stick, or turns around when you push the stick in the opposite direction, the game you’re playing is not floaty. I don’t care if you’ve heard people use this word when complaining about LittleBigPlanet. It MEANS something, and that “something” is not “platformer I don’t like so I’m going to complain about it and throw words at it to trick people into thinking I’m smarter than I actually am.” Go sit in the corner, young man.
Narrative - Oh, you’re so close with this one. I almost feel bad for taking it from you. You do seem to understand the basic definition of the word. You know it basically means “story.” Still, you need to learn that, just because a word is next to another word in the thesaurus, that doesn’t mean they’re interchangeable. “Narrative” implies that the a story is more complex than “The princess was kidnapped but then Mario jumped on some goombas and saved her the end.” Using the word “narrative” to describe most video game stories is a faux pas. What I’m trying to say is, you can have this word back when you stop using it to complain about Sonic the Hedgehog.
Pedestrian - If I ever hear you use this word again I will wash your mouth out with soap. Or bleach.
Broken - You can’t have this word back. Ever. You’ve done terrible, terrible things to this word. If a gameplay element is broken, it means it simply doesn’t work, or it works very inconsistently. If you press the jump button and you don’t jump very high, but you do jump high enough to make your way through every level of the game you’re playing, that jump mechanic isn’t broken. You might not like it, and you may wish you could jump higher, but what you want doesn’t matter. The jumping mechanic works. It’s not broken. However, if you come to a gap you’re clearly supposed to jump over, but you can’t because you simply can’t get enough distance, and this means you can’t progress in the game, then you can use the word “broken.” If you run and jump at that gap the same way five times, and the end result is different each of those five times, feel free to call it “broken” because it’s not working the way it was intended to. Or, at least, that’s what I would be telling you if you hadn’t thrown this poor word at every game you haven’t enjoyed in the past five or ten years. Your mother and I are very disappointed in you.
You are a human being. You are not a parrot. You don’t just repeat everything you hear without understanding the meanings behind the noises you’re making. You weren’t raised that way. Maybe someday, when you’re older, I’ll give these words back to you. You’ll have to earn them, though. Prove to me that you can be responsible with the English language. The next time you hear someone use a new word, before you try to use it yourself, look it up in the dictionary. That’s the way adults do things. It will save you a lot of embarrassment and a lot of pain. Trust me on this one. It’s for your own good. I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t care.
Words Gamers Need to Stop Abusing
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