There are plenty of things we see in games over and over again — but we don’t have words for most of them. Thanks to Vlambeer’s Rami Ismail, we may be on our way to building a new lexicon.
That’s probably an understatement, but the well-known indie today started a Twitter thread where he coined the term “Bloody Baron Effect” — named for the quest in Witcher III — with the definition “a sharp pacing drop after dense content with strong potential to disengage players” and invited his followers to come up with more terms.
The results are amusing, of course, but they’re also insightful — some encapsulate play mechanics and situations that developers frequently use while others shed light on trends of game design that (in many cases) should maybe be rethought. We’ve selected a number of tweets and present them below.
These tweets are also more than a little reminiscent of Cliff Bleszinksi’s game developer flashcards — a series of design tropes that the Gears of War man identified over his years at Epic Games. We even did a community-sourced sequel, so if you enjoy this post, make sure to read both of those.