Gaming

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.

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

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"

Ok Boomer.

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.

Guys, IT ISN'T A REFERENCE TO THE BOOMER GENERATION. It's boomer as in shotgun-go-BOOM.

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

Boomer Shooter = Shooter that goes 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.

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.

Ok.

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

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.

Who says boomer shooter?

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 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.

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 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.

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.

Back to Doom-clone it is then.

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.

I just think of it like boom as in explosions. Boom-boom shooty-shoot; or boomer shooter if you prefer brevity.

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 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".

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.

It's such a fun phrase to say, though.