i tend to call Petal Crash players "petalheads" as a play on "metalheads", but for the real high-level players i just call them "The Sickos"

God's Strongest Gururin lobbyist
i tend to call Petal Crash players "petalheads" as a play on "metalheads", but for the real high-level players i just call them "The Sickos"
Fallen London refers to their players as “delicious friends”; they begin their community posts this way a lot, but the website also has it in a few places, such as in the UI that declares your current location. (“Welcome to Wolfstack Docks, delicious friend!”) Sometimes community members greet each other this way in social actions too, which I find charming.
In Mossfield Origins (not released just yet) the term we use is Residents ✨
Start every community post with "yeah Buoys it's your dawg!" totally dropped the ball on that.
You'll never believe this, but the Mechwarrior devs sometimes call their players... Mechwarriors.
On Embr (Uber for firefighting capitalist nightmare) we always called our players Respondrs™ (tech startups sure did love removing vowels) as a result of most of our marketing language being angled as if the fictional Embr of the game was the corporate entity speaking.
I was also thinking about this a few weeks back and wondered how some of these might translate. I don't know how well other languages handle random collective nouns.
I really enjoy how gacha games do this, if only because of how intentionally and blatantly deranged they are, as they're often the same title the cute girls collected in the game address you by. "Producer" of course, in Idolmaster and its derivatives. "Doctor" in Arknights. "Admiral" or "Commander" is pretty common. Relatedly is all the weird pet names that vtubers have for their audiences. I think there's a nurse that calls her viewers 'patients'.
The Long Dark is one of those games that calls its players "Survivors," but they sometimes say "Survivors of the Quiet Apocalypse" which I think is cool and super evocative of the game (a survival sim in rural northern Canada)
I’d say that part of the problem with From Software games doing this, despite having strong identities for the protagonist, is that you actually do interact with other players, but they don’t serve the same mythological role that you do in-game. It’s weird to acknowledge that there are multiple Tarnished, or Bearers of the Curse (as I’d argue the Dark Souls 2 player should be called, there’s a lot of undead in that game lol), since that means noting the jerk who invaded you is on the same quest you’re on.
I’m curious to see if Bethesda picks up this habit, it wouldn’t have been surprising for them to call Fallout players Wasteland wanderers or something, even Skyrim players could be Dragonborns or Dovahkiin. There’s mythological names for each of the previous Elder Scrolls protagonists as well, such as the Nerevarine for Morrowind.
There’s also a cultural difference here, Japanese developers often have a more formal and respectful tone to their announcements, using a community nickname is almost too familiar for that? I don’t think the FFXIV team uses “Warriors of Light” anywhere outside the game for example, despite it being just as well set up as the rest of these. I do seem to recall hearing things like this in Nintendo Directs though, despite that similar tone?
I know the player characters in Don't Starve are officially called "the survivors"; I can't remember for sure if Klei's ever addressed the players as such in an update post (making them the sixth one to do so) or if it just sounds like something they'd do.
Interesting read! We (Postmark Games) call our Discord moderators 'captains' because our first game had a nautical theme.
this is fascinating, thank you for this Laura!
On Risk of Rain 2, we used "Survivors" as that is what the player characters were called, pretty standard. For Homeworld, it was a bit more up in the air, "commander" was okay but not entirely canonical as the player actually takes control of "fleet command", which is also an in-universe character(s).
Of course for Borderlands and Wonderlands "Vault Hunters" and "Fatemakers" which I still love.
is it possible to get the sickos comic as a player icon on PCO?