• Rookie Level 1 Gamer: "They're called boomer shooters because they're old like baby boomers"
• Veteran Level 20 Gamer: "Baby boomers thought Doom was satanic, that's a stupid term"
• Enlightened Level 60 Gamer: "They're called boomer shooters because of the huge debt they owe to the original Doom modding scene and therefore "Boom", one of the first limit-removing source ports"

IDK why the OG FPS are now a considered subgenre

Modern shooters should be called "dumber shooters" or something like that instead, I mean, you are constantly told where to go, and what to do, level desings are extremely linear so you don't get lost, puzzles are gone so you don't have to use your braincells, there are no traps nor secrets, the actions is incredibly "childlish" (when your screen is filled with ketchup it means is time to stop playing the FPS and start playing hide and seek until the ketchup is gone) everything screams "our playerbase is too dumb to play videogames, so we have to handhold them like babies" it's really hard to consider them even shooters

What irks me is that it associates the genre with the wrong generation for the sake of being catchy. Should be "Gen-X shooter" if anything but I guess that doesn't roll off the tongue.

Why are they being called "boomer shooters"? My boomer parents didn't want anything to do with them. The older millenials were the ones playing them. Most boomers don't even like video games.

I think maybe the irksome thing is this is a retroactive label for older games. It's not how we got to know those games, and it sounds pretty dismissive of something we enjoyed and loved. smart_boy below has the right idea, reclaim the term, realign the meaning.

Hmm, I guess I'm wrong but I always felt they were called boomer shooters because they're always full of over the top explosions and everything is always going "boom"

You boom and you shoot it's right in the name

Aren't "Boomer Shooters" actually Millenial Shooters? That's who played them when they came out.

@MrEUser I just hate the term “boomer shooter.” Can we do away with that please?

wait what's stopping "arena shooter" from being used

I won't lie, I had to look at the comments and do a real quick search engine check to find out that the kids these days call the old FPS games "boomer shooter". One hell of a way to remind me about my age by calling me a boomer for liking my childhood FPS games :(

Honestly I never even knew people didn't like this term, wtf. It properly conveys the idea of an old-fashioned FPS game, with basic 3D graphics, many times based on 2D sprites. Me and all my friends play them, and we love them, and we all call it "Boomer Shooter".

This was my childhood. Doom, so much Doom.

@MrEUser

Look, I understand words meaning can change over time, but it’s one thing to observe this after the fact, and another to look at it while it’s happening and just say “I am fine with us changing the meaning of this word without offering a replacement term”. If “boomer” just means “old” now, what word do you use for actual boomers?

And of course, others have pointed out all the other reasons it doesn’t make sense to use this term. I feel like the only reason the term is catching non is because it kinda rhymes but not really. We might as well call them “greatest generation racing”. What’s that? It doesn’t make sense to refer to a shooting game as a racing game? I shouldn’t just arbitrarily use a term that means something else when we already have existing accurate terms we could be using? Interesting thought.