I hate the term "Boomer Shooter"

onlooker@lemmy.ml to Gaming@beehaw.org – 130 points –

Not to say I hate the genre, I actually love me some Dusk or Turbo Overkill, but why, oh why are they called Boomer Shooters?

These games clearly took inspiration from 90s FPS games, which 👌, but they were played mostly by Gen Xers and Millenials, not Boomers. When games like Duke Nukem 3D or Quake were out, Boomers were what? 30 to 50 years old? I'm sure some of them played FPS games, but there is no way they were the majority.

Whenever I see the term Boomer Shooter, my mind goes to games like Shootout! for Magnavox Odyssey. Can't we call them something else, like Retro FPSes or something?

Anyway, rant over. Thank you for your time.

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It's not meant to be taken literally. Language evolves and boomer no longer exclusively refers to baby boomers, it's just a general Gen-Z term for older people.

Which is hilarious, because Zoomers are turning 30 now and when I was actually young people over 30 were just one large group of walking corpses. I am curious to see how long Gen Z will keep this "we are the young ones" shtick up. Gen Alpha is where the actual young people are.

Depends on your definition of gen z, and the oldest of gen alpha has barely started getting into highschool. As a zoomer though we are on our way out.

Boomer is a state of mind, love, and this post is a shining example of boomerism.

I'd say closer to the xennial "forgotten generation" type. The playtesters of all of your favorite franchises didn't fall behind as far as you think.

You seem like an intelligent and discerning person, so I'm sure you'll appreciate that the only possible response to this is "ok boomer"

Dammit! Upvoted with great begrudgement.

Lol try being a Roguelike fan.

You correctly tell people that Pokemon Mystery Dungeon is a Roguelike and they look at you like you've grown a second head.

Sometimes this stuff happens, and there's basically nothing you can do about it.

Major part of it is that some people differentiate hard between rogue-likes and lites, and others simply do not, and the two will never get along with each other. The thing being that if there are any type of permanent upgrade/unlock systems that makes the game easier the more you play, it is not like rogue, where instead of grinding for more max hp or dodge percentage, you "grind" knowledge and experience as a player.

Which means that there are very, very few actual roguelikes because upgrade systems are just so cool (tm) and every game obviously needs one. Or three.

Does that make pixel dungeon an actual roguelike? Never played the original rogue.

I hate how difficult it is to find games I like when it used to be so trivial.

2010: "I want to play another game like rogue"

"Ok try these 10 games which are all excellent, and then there's these 50 which stretch the definition but rhyme with it if you like"

2020: "I want to play a game like rogue"

"Here's a 3d looter shooter with multiplayer and 9 currencies for upgrades between short runs"

I feel like a lot of people haven’t ever played Rogue and so struggle understand what Roguelike actually means. Fair call, it’s a very old game with essentially no graphics, but to understand the genre properly everyone needs to give it a go at least once in my opinion.

Side note; love me the whole Mystery Dungeon franchise. I still need to pick up the Shiren the Wanderer series.

I love the term. For me it's not just a shooter in an older style but also a shooter that goes BOOM. Much better than boring cover shooters.

Oh, they're definitely better, no question. But by that definition, wouldn't that make them Boom Shooters?

Na, because the newer shooters still go boom. But boomer shooters are just boomer. And everybody's waiting for the coming of the boomest shooter.

We've already seen the boomest shooter. Our savior hath already come and gone and left us behind to witness his passing. His name was Ultrakill.

I would love to see that take place, so sign me up for the Church of the Boomest Shooter. My only real concern is where do we go from boomest?

Helldivers 2 wins. You get to drop orbital strikes, launch ICBM nukes, call in cluster munitions, etc.

Meh, I've been able to do all of those in modded Minecraft for years.

That's the neat part, we don't. Can't have the messiah coming for real. Otherwise you get splinter religions.

Now I feel like playing Messiah.

Oh come on. It's funny. Boomer is more of a state of mind descriptor at this point. Don't be such a boomer bro.

Get off my lawn and leave me to my prune juice.

Boomer Shooter = Shooter that goes boom

Boomer shooter

Okay, then riddle me this: which shooter DOESN'T go boom?

I call them id-style shooters myself, but there is a bit of word play I like in the term 'boomer shooter'. On top of referencing the age of the audience when they first arrived (albeit incorrectly), it is also a reference to the fact that the optimal strategy for these games is simply to blow things the fuck up. There is very little tactical play beyond what weapons to use for a given situation, and these games really love their explosive barrels and rocket launchers.

I never even considered that the name referred to baby boomers I thought it just meant they went "boom"

Worth noting that the boomer wojak meme started as "That 30 year old boomer". It was never about actual Baby Boomers.

I always assumed that the Boom in Boomer Shooter was more “Gun go Boom”, which seemed to fit the genre quite well.

Old=boomer sorry. That's just the way it turned out, nothing we can do about it. Raging against new slang is just gonna make us more out of touch, and intensify the feeling of being old, so I just accept it and try to keep up. Boomer is old now, not just the Baby Boomers.

I'm 26 and I've already been called a boomer by younger people. I don't really see the problem as to me it's just funny and reminds me to try my best not to eventually become a boomer that hates everything that isn't how it used to be.

Raging against new slang is just gonna make us more out of touch, and intensify the feeling of being old, so I just accept it and try to keep up.

NEVER! I choose to embrace my inner geriatric and complain about kids these days and their hippy-hop music.

NEVER! I choose to embrace my inner geriatric and complain about kids these days and their hippy-hop music.

Can recommend, but only when you're subverting expectations. Young student is unloading a bunch of empty beverage crates from the elevator on the ground floor, making you wait, already looking quite self-conscious about it? Bellow, loud but not shouty, "Unbelievable, the students of today". See them flinch and cower, "oh fuck this again". Continue, with flawless timing, "why isn't that beer?".

Oldskool FPS. There. That's the correct term. Now, who's up for some DM-Morpheus with instagib mutator?🤘

We were calling them Doom-likes before FPS became a thing, maybe it's time to bring it back as a sub category.

Appending "-like" to any genre is so unoriginal and uninteresting.

It isn't intended to be interesting

That's abundantly clear.

The burn you think you are deploying, to a casual categorical label and those who use it, is not very effective.

It's an observation, not a "burn".

If you observed it to be abundantly clear you wouldn't have made your original comment.

Speak for yourself. I comment on obvious things all the time.

Not a bad idea, but like which DOOM?

I ask that sarcastically, but 90’s DOOM, 00’s DOOM, and 10-20s DOOM all play very differently lol

Who says boomer shooter?

It feels like everybody, here are just a few examples. And if that doesn't cut it for you, Steam has a whole-ass tag for boomer shooters.

Man, this is the first time I've heard that term. But then, I don't play anything in this genre anymore, so maybe it's just by virtue of the fact that I'm out of that space almost entirely.

There's been a big revival of that genre over the last 10 years or so and I think Boomer Shooter was adopted as a way to differentiate it from your standard FPS. Turbo Overkill is very different from Borderlands which is very different from COD. You'll need a way to communicate that difference if you want fans to buy your game.

That's cool. Always neat to see things come back but with the modern understanding of game theory.

I mean it became a tag on steam it’s so common. “Retro-style FPS” doesn’t roll off the tongue quite as easily. Boomer = Baby Boomer generation (or close to it) where the engineers making the things; so while it’s not entirely accurate of the dev demographic of the day, “the things people who are now old used to make” is the meaning. Boomer is also like “boom” because there big loud guns, big loud sfx, ridiculous explosions, etc.

Why does this have to be a point of contention? No fun allowed? What is this, Nintendo?

As for why it might be a point of contention with many millennials.

My best guess is we've spent years being accused of doing things by boomers who didn't know that Gen Z was a thing and now it feels like we are being lumped in with Boomers because Gen Z can't be bothered to learn that more than one generation camr before them.

For Gen X it may just be that they constantly feel forgotten and want to be known.

My dad helped me install the original Wolfenstein 3D on DOS when I was a kid. And he's 100% a boomer (b.1947). So for that reason it always feels accurate to me.

I had just assumed it was for the generation whence a chunk of the programmers came

I dunno, my rich uncle is a boomer and back in the 90s he was one of the only people I knew who could afford a gucci PC and every big box FPS game. So it kinda makes sense from that perspective.

It is utterly bizarre to me out of all the misnomers and ridiculous (sometimes offensive) terms out there in the media/hobby world, I see “boomer shooter” complained about so much more than any other. This is like the third rant I’ve seen about it in a week.

I thought Twitter and such were making a mountain out of a mole hill with how people responded to the term “Boomer“ in past years but clearly it ruffles peoples feathers way more than it should. Half the time I go through the comment histories and these are the same people that use ableist slurs regularly. I am not suggesting that OP does, I have not looked at their comments. Just a general observation.

If you were around back in the 90s, you might appreciate why this annoys so many older gamers. Boomers lost their fucking minds over video games. Millennials and Gen-Z weren't the first generation that had to deal with their bullshit.

Yeah, it drives me nuts as well! Boomers hated video games. They still hate video games. They had congressional hearings about the evils of video games. Stupid name.

It's marketing doublespeak dreamed up by the totally deranged and it works

You have to remember its millennials and Gen Z experiencing this genre, not boomers.

Boomer doesn't have to be literal boomers but old, like it is a joke in the WoW community to call it a boomer game because most of the people playing it (especially classic) are 30+ years old.

In the same way, people will talk about boomers in politics but Obama was the last baby boomer in the presidency.

I get that the term doesn't line up age wise with actually Boomers in terms of calendar years, but also video game generations are shorter than social generations. We're currently on the "ninth-generation" of video games, and Doom came out at the beginning of the third generation of video games. So you could consider Doom-likes to be 6 generations old, and baby-boomers to be 4 generations old. So in terms of "generations", Boomer shooters should maybe be named after an older generation such as the "Greatest Generation" (6 generations ago). Therefore I propose we call Doom-likes "Greatest Shooters" instead of "Boomer shooters".

Oh, I'm liking this take. Get ready for "Z Shooters" and "Alpha Shooters".

An actual boomer shooter would be like Space Invaders.

But at least it's got a name I suppose so if you like them you can find them and differentiate them from all your online XP bar tutorial modern bullshit.

Boomer today is used for anything that's old, and I wouldn't be surprised if you get Gen Xers that get called boomers. Since boomer shooters are a homage to old shooters, we call them boomer shooter. The ultimate problem is that it's just catchy, so unless you find a more catchy term, you're shit outta luck.

I've been saying this forever too! Boomers were the ones complaining about thier kids playing them back in the day because of the violence and demonic imagery.

In the 90s people called them "Doom-like"s. I usually just say "90s FPS games". Which I guess could be confusing and make people think I'm talking about framerate, but eh.

Millennials are going to be in absolute shambles if they ever find out "Okay boomer" wasn't directly targeted at boomers.

It wasn't? This is what Wikipedia says:

"OK boomer" or "okay boomer" is a catchphrase and internet meme that has been used by members of the Millennial generation and Generation Z (born between the early 1980s and the early 2010s) to dismiss or mock attitudes typically associated with baby boomers – people born in the two decades following World War II.

Who was it targeted at then?

Young people saying things old people told them.

People who were usually younger than millennials.

It was targeted at everyone older than the younger people saying it.

It's used as a catch all, with the intention of getting everyone riled up. Because regardless of if you're an actual boomer or not, now you're getting bundled together with them.

If it helps, this is the first time I hear it 🤷‍♂️

played mostly by Gen Xers and Snake People

For a moment there I was really confused, I forgot about this wonderful extension

I think they're called that because they postdate the "looter shooter" that combined Diablo-esque "action RPGs" with FPS games, like Borderlands and Destiny. "Looter" without the "shooter" is a much better name for Diablo's genre anyway, since we have far too many RPGs that are also action games and have nothing in common with Diablo.

I'm still waiting for the resurgence of the style of shooter that came just after those that inspired this wave of boomer shooter; the likes of Half-Life, Halo, 007, TimeSplitters, and so on. I don't know what subgenre will be assigned to those games when they start to come back around, but that style is also old at this point, so hopefully it doesn't also get assigned the label of "boomer shooter", because then it'll be harder for both audiences to find what they're looking for.

Back in my day, we used to call them shooters..

But we had to fight uphill, both ways...

Boomer basically means 20+ years old nowadays as far as I can tell. Or older than zoomers.

When games like Duke Nukem 3D or Quake were out, Boomers were what? 30 to 50 years old? I’m sure some of them played FPS games, but there is no way they were the majority.

Think about it this way, it's not that the majority of people playing those games are boomers, but the majority of games that boomers play are those games.

Also, this has caused me to look up the formal definition of Gen X vs Boomer, and I did not realize that everyone born after 1964 is considered Gen X. In my head Gen X went from ~1975-1990, everyone before that being a boomer, so assuming other people have the same conception of boomer in their head, then the majority of people able to afford gaming PCs in the mid 90s would be boomers....

They also do just go boom and have stuff like the BFG ...

So do I. But it is a term from Gen Z to piss off Gen X.

Face value no one wants to be associated with the generation that destroyed the economy.

Sorry it bugs you, but it's far better than the entirely uninteresting/unoriginal "Doom-like". I get it's standard practice at this point, but I'm happy whenever we get an actually interesting, poignant name.

There's a video on this, but that's just the name that stuck. Its not derogatory at this point, just a way to differentiate a good shooter from a game like CoD

Maybe it works if read as "games made by boomers?" ... Yeah I have no idea how old anyone was/is. Time and I don't really get along 🤷

Also, going along with a thing I've been seeing in these comments, I'm idly curious as to whether anyone who isn't a Boomer cares about use/misuse/abuse of the term "Boomer" 🤔

From what I've seen, Boomer Shooters were actually often developed by Gen Xers (and played by Millennials), and both of them despise being lumped with the boomers - hence why they dislike the term :p

I guess that makes sense. I'd be upset if critters kept associating me with boomers 😼 I don't play those so I guess I just haven't been around the term enough to get a feel for it.

Gen-X: Whatever.

*continues to slay in Warhammer 40K: Boltgun*

When games like Duke Nukem 3D or Quake were out, Boomers were what? 30 to 50 years old?

You mean, like most of us Millennial gamers are now (30+)? The youngest Millennials, born in 1996, will be 30 in 2 years.

These games clearly took inspiration from 90s FPS games, which 👌, but they were played mostly by Gen Xers and Millenials, not Boomers.

I'm a middle-Millennial (1988), and Doom was well before my time as a gamer. I was 5 years old in 1993. Halo (2001) was more my generation, just barely. The oldest Millennials in 1993 were 12 years old, which was not the target age group for Doom.

GenX? Sure, they played Doom, but Boomers were by far the larger age group playing "Mature" games at that time. Video games have never been just for children.

It's so curious, I swear I heard "boomer shooter" used to refer to another type of FPS... But then again I guess the definition has changed. What term do people use nowadays for slow FPSes that are more tactical, rather than twitch-reflex reliant, like ARMA?

Those are tactical shooters. If it's a simulator like ARMA then the term "milsim" (military simulator) is also used. Good example of a non-ARMA tactical shooter would be Ready or Not, Squad, Insurgency, or S.W.A.T

Makes sense. And I have heard those terms before. I guess i just need to update my internal definition. All this time I thought boomer shooter meant "slow FPS for old folks who can't keep up in Valorant anymore". Which is a group I probably belong to myself, to be honest.

Oh no boomer shooter means very fast FPS, it just has old-school mechanics like health packs, a large loadout, arena-style gameplay, stuff like that. Things that were considered outdated when games like Battlefield and COD rolled around in the mid 2000s. Like you're not supposed to take cover in DOOM, but you are in Battlefield.

If it helps try thinking of it as a "boomer shooter" because of the proliferation of rockets and rocket physics in classic games like Unreal and Quake