I hate the term "Boomer Shooter"

Submitted ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨onlooker@lemmy.ml⁩ to ⁨gaming@beehaw.org⁩

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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survivalmachine@beehaw.org ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Boomer is a state of mind, love, and this post is a shining example of boomerism.

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- Tiltinyall@beehaw.org ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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.
  
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- onlooker@lemmy.ml ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Hey, at least it’s shining.
  
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Hubi@feddit.de ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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- onlooker@lemmy.ml ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I know, but just let me have my old man yells at cloud moment.
  
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  - Hubi@feddit.de ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Ok boomer
    
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- MummifiedClient5000@feddit.dk ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  That’s OK, because older people use the term Gen-Z for idiots of all ages.
  
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- Midnitte@beehaw.org ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  But we’re not o… ah nevermind.
  
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  - RavenFellBlade@startrek.website ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    “Whatevers” in GenX.
    
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  - shapesandstuff@feddit.de ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I’m a younger millennial.
    I’m past my 20s. My back hurts. You’re wrong :D
    
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- state_electrician@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - Euphoma@lemmy.ml ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    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.
    
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kbal@fedia.io ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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"

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- onlooker@lemmy.ml ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Dammit! Upvoted with great begrudgement.
  
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DrJenkem@lemmy.blugatch.tube ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Ok Boomer.

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BirdEnjoyer@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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- JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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 ™ and every game obviously needs one. Or three.
  
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  - TheOakTree@beehaw.org ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Does that make pixel dungeon an actual roguelike? Never played the original rogue.
    
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- naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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”
  
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- Instigate@aussie.zone ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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.
  
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pelotron@midwest.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Guys, IT ISN’T A REFERENCE TO THE BOOMER GENERATION. It’s boomer as in shotgun-go-BOOM.

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- FarceOfWill@infosec.pub ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  This is worse tho. You can’t just erase the bfg like this
  
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- DragonTypeWyvern@literature.cafe ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Boomer cope
  
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FeelzGoodMan420@eviltoast.org ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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- onlooker@lemmy.ml ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Get off my lawn and leave me to my prune juice.
  
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bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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- onlooker@lemmy.ml ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Oh, they’re definitely better, no question. But by that definition, wouldn’t that make them Boom Shooters?
  
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  - bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    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.
    
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Xatolos@reddthat.com ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Boomer Shooter = Shooter that goes boom

Boomer shooter

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- onlooker@lemmy.ml ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Okay, then riddle me this: which shooter DOESN’T go boom?
  
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  - Xatolos@reddthat.com ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Fortnite
    
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  - Blackmist@feddit.uk ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Splatoon?
    
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520@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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Amphobet@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I never even considered that the name referred to baby boomers I thought it just meant they went “boom”

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Phroon@beehaw.org ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I always assumed that the Boom in Boomer Shooter was more “Gun go Boom”, which seemed to fit the genre quite well.

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shea@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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- Aasikki@sopuli.xyz ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - lolcatnip@reddthat.com ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Don’t be such a tardigrade.
    
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- onlooker@lemmy.ml ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  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.
  
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  - barsoap@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    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 of 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?”.
    
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Mastengwe@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Ok.

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PatheticGroundThing@beehaw.org ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Worth noting that the boomer wojak meme started as “That 30 year old boomer”. It was never about actual Baby Boomers.

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- honey_im_meat_grinding@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  This is it, notice how Google Trends[1] shows a rise in “30 year old boomer” not long before “boomer shooter” becomes more commonplace. It’s just the whole applying “boomer” to things like being stuck in their ways or boomer-like behavior, rather than age, that took off a few years back.
  
  [1] trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&…
  
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ULS@lemmy.ml ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Who says boomer shooter?

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- onlooker@lemmy.ml ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - Telorand@reddthat.com ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    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.
    
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- 4am@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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?
  
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  - ursakhiin@beehaw.org ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    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.
    
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Shurimal@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Oldskool FPS. There. That's the correct term. Now, who's up for some DM-Morpheus with instagib mutator?🤘

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- Tubulous@beehaw.org ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  …and volatile ammo. I’m in.
  
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mctoasterson@reddthat.com ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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darkphotonstudio@beehaw.org ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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Deconceptualist@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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- tiredofsametab@kbin.run ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I had just assumed it was for the generation whence a chunk of the programmers came
  
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Fubarberry@sopuli.xyz ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I get that the term doesn’t line up age wise with actually Boomers, but also games progress really fast. 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”.

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- onlooker@lemmy.ml ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Oh, I’m liking this take. Get ready for “Z Shooters” and “Alpha Shooters”.
  
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jmcs@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
We were calling them Doom-clones before FPS became a thing, maybe it’s time to bring it back as a sub category.

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- LunarLoony@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Doom clones!
  
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- ech@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Appending “-like” to any genre is so unoriginal and uninteresting.
  
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  - GBU_28@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    It isn’t intended to be interesting
    
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- BmeBenji@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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
  
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  - jmcs@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Any of them would be more accurate than Boomer shooter.
    
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Blackmist@feddit.uk ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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Kolanaki@yiffit.net ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I just think of it like boom as in explosions. Boom boom shooty shoots; or boomer shooter if you prefer brevity.

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DragonTypeWyvern@literature.cafe ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Millennials are going to be in absolute shambles if they ever find out “Okay boomer” wasn’t directly targeted at boomers.

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- onlooker@lemmy.ml ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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?
  
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  - DragonTypeWyvern@literature.cafe ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Young people saying things old people told them.
    
    People who were usually younger than millennials.
    
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  - altima_neo@lemmy.zip ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    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.
    
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Grzmot@beehaw.org ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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bonegakrejg@lemmy.ml ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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BolexForSoup@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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- darkphotonstudio@beehaw.org ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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.
  
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KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
It’s marketing doublespeak dreamed up by the totally deranged and it works

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- Tak@lemmy.ml ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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.
  
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derbis@beehaw.org ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
If it helps, this is the first time I hear it 🤷‍♂️

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