Daria

I recall the marketing material for Metroid Dread calling it a "search-action game" because like, of course Nintendo isn't going to say the word "Metroidvania" in an official capacity.

it doesn't hurt that "procedural death labyrinth" is infinitely less fun and catchy sounding than "roguelike"

won't stop me from replacing dumb genre names in my head with things that make sense: e.g. replacing "jrpg" with "experience point game/xpg" because of how divorced games of that type are from the actual concept of roleplaying (read: making decisions that actually affect the course of the game in some meaningful way), instead fixating on the numbers game of boosting your character's stats via level grinding to get past meat wall enemies and thus progress the extremely linear story

Even as someone who agrees with the core argument - I don't like terms that are based in required knowledge to make sense and the series that inspired the term barely get made anymore - even when I try to use other terms like action exploration or search action I often fall back on Metroidvania cause it's what people understand.

This is 100% true, but also I am extremely fond of eyepatch wolf's ongoing attempt to replace metroidvania with corner-scratcher

tightly-descriptivist approaches to genre names always seem to be slightly mistaking why genre names exist and how they're formed -- there are few (arguably none) that accurately and comprehensively describe the games they belong to in isolation, because for the most part genre is necessarily used in context with other works. the word itself could be absolutely anything, because all the word really means is that there's a point of commonality between this game and another one.

trying to push for a more precise name in a genre feels to me like all those forum discussions where people work to distill the definition of something like 'role-playing game' into something self-sufficient and universally applicable. (similarly I think this article's attempts to find the floating points of commonality within the genre and extract them from their context are doomed, though I also shouldn't ascribe too much intensity to this article to begin with.)

I think people get too obsessed with perfect terminology. A genre name doesn't need to perfectly capture the essence of the thing, it just needs to group a bunch of things together. If you try to make it too specific, it just ends up making more people angry about things not being categorized perfectly, which pushes people to make more generic art.

Arguing about the nature of a genre is such a silly, nitpicky thing, but arguing about the name of a genre is the maximum possible extreme of nitpickyness.

very bizarre that this Game Developer blog post didn't mention "search-action" even once??

We're lucky that we don't still call FPSes "Doom Clones"