Why Do So Many Video Games Have ‘Fall’ in Their Titles?
I saw an ad for a new-ish video game today: Atomfall. The title immediately got my head shaking.
Yet another game using ‘-fall’ as a suffix. What’s up with that?
This is a naming convention that my friends and I have been mocking for years, and I’m frankly a bit shocked that it’s still going on. Years and years, this nonsense.
An indie game developer friend of mine named Anthony would joke about it a lot, and this was in…2020? Maybe earlier?
At the time, a game named GreedFall had gotten deep under my skin with its title. It was the kind of name that wore that image of a random name generator or some kind of word matrix right on its sleeve.
Names like Planetfall or Titanfall make sense. They work in the same vein as commonly-used terms like ‘landfall’. But freakin’ GreedFall? I don’t even want to parse that out on a conceptual level.
| Some Games with ‘fall’ Titles (just to give you an idea) Glare Fall, Crown Fall, Overfall, Dark Fall, Light Fall, Dark Fall 2, Freedomfall, .fall, Ardein.Fall, Counterfall, Moonrise Fall, Aefen Fall, Glare Fall, Crown Fall, Sky Fall, Star Fall, Ground Fall, Goldenjar Fall, Infinity Fall, Godfall, Crowfall, Ironfall, Daggerfall, Redfall, Planetfall, Dreamfall, Greedfall, Cryofall, Irisfall, Freedomfall, .fall, Ardein.Fall, Counterfall, Moonrise Fall, Aefen Fall |
Now, that hackey naming convention is everywhere. Take a word and stick ‘fall’ on the end of it, and there’s your game. Already have a well-known title? No problem! Name one of your expansions this way to ride the trend! (See: Destiny 3: Lightfall)
Turns out, Anthony and I weren’t the only blokes poking fun at these names. I did a search today and found that there are not only around 50 known games using the -fall suffix, but several editorials and a five-year-old Reddit thread exploring this issue.
Anthony eventually named one of his games ‘Cowfall’ because it was about dropping cows on farmers from a flying saucer. It was an intentional jab at the trend, and if nothing else his game actually involved cows falling.
Most of the games using the suffix aren’t about things literally falling. It’s conceptual. And it’s getting very worn out.
So much so that when I saw Atomfall — a game that by all standards I should be interested in — I actually shrugged and gave it an instant pass. Somewhere deep in my subconscious, I reasoned that if the developers were that uncreative with the title, the game itself was probably garbage.
Remember, people were complaining about this trend five years ago!
I’m well aware that my aversion to this game is based on poor reasoning. But that’s the kind of thing you have to contend with when you’re a game developer — or any time you’re marketing something creative. People aren’t reasonable.
Marketing Is Only Creative Some of the Time
I’ve been at odds with my marketing career for decades. That’s because I’m not really an analytical person, but a growing percentage of marketing is expected to be analytical. At this point…I’d say 97% of it.
Sure, there’s still creative in play. Ad creative. Branding. Things that people like me enjoy — and the reasons why we got into marketing at all. But now even these human aspects of marketing are being more and more impinged on by data.
For better or worse, if a marketer comes up with a cool name for a video game, there’s likely to be someone higher on the analytical scale who will want to ‘run it by the data’. Even in a smaller company with no executives and fewer resources, I would bet money someone on the team is going to run the titles through ChatGPT for feedback. (I see this behavior all the time in my business life. Trust me.)
And that’s if they didn’t outright use Gen AI to create the title wholesale.
Hold on…quick experiment…
Atomfall: A ChatGPT-Approved Game Title?
Okay this is kind of funny.
After writing that last bit, I decided to run a quick prompt through ChatGPT. Note that I put almost zero effort into this prompt, and that I used one of my least favorite AI models (but the one most people are likely to use for something like this).
BEHOLD:
Proof that even though I advocate for the ethical use of AI, I can still be pretty damn amused by its foibles. (Note: I am not suggesting that Rebellion used ChatGPT to name their game. I would not even imply such a thing! This was an experiment for academic/entertainment purposes only.)
Hell, I even grew my own understanding of the interplay between AI and creative works today. By using a title that might as well have been AI generated (see above), the game in question immediately turned me off.
If nothing else, that tells us that AI makes mistakes (not that I have any doubt in my mind that it makes tons of mistakes). Gen AI can be helpful, it can do some brainstorming, but at the end of the day…you might get a title like Atomfall.
Full disclosure, I was going to end this article by examining how our fascination with personal trauma and angsty anti-heroes plays a role in this naming trend — but I’m now convinced it’s just lazy recycling of one idea without that much thought put into it.
You may know that in my cyberpunk novels (none of which is named Cyberfall…yet) I’ve modified/evolved a lot of gaming language to create the slang of the 2160s. I’m seriously thinking that I’m going to have to introduce a new usage of the ‘-fall’ prefix based around this whole thing. Time will tell!
