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This Half-Life mod reimagines the game as a boomer shooter—yes, even boomier than the original (www.pcgamer.com)
submitted 11 months ago by to c/pcgaming@lemmy.ca
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[+] 11 points 11 months ago (24 children)
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  • [–] 30 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (10 children)

    "Boomer shooter" is a genre of video game. As far as I know, the term is unrelated to "Baby boomer," the name of the generation.

    Edit: Okay apparently it is related. Some debate exists over the etymology. I imagined it was from "boomstick" (a gun), but some people are are claiming it's from the dusk development team and a reference to a meme I'd never heard of about calling people boomers who aren't, or maybe it's from earlier and nobody can trace the etymology at all.

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  • [–] 8 points 11 months ago (6 children)

    Boomer is just old slang for person who is older than the speaker or someone who is out of touch

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  • [–] 8 points 11 months ago (5 children)

    I've never heard boomer used this way

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  • [–] 17 points 11 months ago (4 children)

    "ok boomer"

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  • [–] 9 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    Right -- but this is in reference to baby boomers. It's used to indicate the person is going to die in a couple decades and so their opinion doesn't matter. If it's used on someone other than a boomer it's probably an exaggeration or intentional misidentification meant to make the phrase even more provocative.

    Hate to have to overexplain, but yeah, ok boomer is absolutely derived from baby boomer.

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  • [–] 6 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    I hear you, but as you just said it can be adapted to be used as an exaggeration, generally to indicate the person is out of touch in opinion.

    A similar pattern with our speech is how terms for mental disability (eg idiot or some of the modern terms recently deemed a bit more hateful) were adapted in our language to become insults.

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  • [–] 7 points 11 months ago (3 children)
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  • [–] 6 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

    Duke Nukem makes sense. Half-Life does not. Half-Life stars a nerdy scientist who just wants to live, and the game is carried by its story.

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  • [–] 4 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    No video game newer than Pong makes any sense with the word Boomer in front.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago

    Because the younger boomers who were in their 30s to 40s between the 90s and early 00s weren't allowed to play video games? It's not the game that's born in the boomer generation, it's the audience it's popular with.

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  • [–] 10 points 11 months ago* (1 child)

    No, that's just what kids have taken to calling a very specific genre of shooter. Nevermind that everything that makes a Boomer Shooter such actually came from Millenials pop culture. 🤦‍♂️

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago*

    The games in the genre like Doom came out in the '90s, but it wasn't just young people playing it, more like uncles generation, I suppose that's why they were still boomers. I feel the audience got younger (taking the millenial generation) when Quake really focused on the multiplayer scene beyond some Mac and Linux modding and LAN parties. That was Quake 3 I think ? The one on Dreamcast. e: and obviously also the Counter-Strike era that came just after. Boomer shooters are the ones before that.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 11 months ago* (2 children)

    I am not going to get into the discussion around the "boomer shooter" name, but surely HL1 would be considered part of the Gen X experience.

    The youngest millennials were in their early teens in 1998. The last members of Gen X were finishing up secondary school in 1998.

    I say this as a relatively early to mid generation millennial born in the late 80s.

    The whole generational cohort approach can be very limiting. IMO late cohort Gen X and early-mid cohort Millenials have a lot in common.

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