Blowhard. Dilettante. Poser.
We have many names for people who speak with the confidence of experience and knowledge they don’t actually possess. Lately, video game discourse has developed a new term for performative authority: the ball and gun gamer.
The phrase sounds generally dismissive, describing players whose tastes rarely wander beyond sports and competitive online shooting games. For almost 20 years, the category has been dominated by Call of Duty, a multi-billion-dollar franchise as industrially annualized as FIFA, NBA and NFL video games. That’s hundreds of millions of players. According to Circana, the top 20 best-selling games on PlayStation platforms in the United States are dominated by games with balls and guns. You can count the exceptions, such as “God of War” and “The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim,” on one hand.
Despite the diversity of video games today, the popularity of sports and shooting are no surprise, as the genres are rooted in the medium’s founding and history. Since the dawn of the medium in the 1950s, games have often revolved around guns and competition. “Spacewar!” was developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the first game to be played across various computer platforms and a foundational “gun game.” “Pong” released in 1972 as a digital re-creation of tennis and is part of the Smithsonian Institution’s permanent collection of American history.Not bad for a ball game.
The label becomes derogatory when someone who only plays games with balls and guns starts complaining about the wider medium of video games.
“There’s nothing wrong with only playing ball and gun games,” said Corey Smallwood, also known as the Black Hokage, a creator since 2007 whose podcast “Gaming illuminaughty,” or “Gi,” helped popularize the phrase. (The phrase might’ve originated from a 2023 X post, according to Know Your Meme, but Smallwood and his co-hosts remember it was uttered by players as early as 2016.)
“The issue becomes when, every year around the Game Awards, they start to moan what is the game of the year, what games should be nominated,” Smallwood said. “They want to be involved in the conversation of what’s going on in the greater industry, and there’s nothing wrong with that,” he added, “but they didn’t study for the test.”
The phrase reentered the popular lexicon toward the end of last year, where influencers like Shroud complained that “Arc Raiders,” a gun game, was snubbed for nominations at the Game Awards. Twitch streamer Timthetatman yelled in Novemberabout how there were “zero good games out” during the first half of 2025, a ridiculous notion considering that fantasy game “Clair Obscur: Expedition 33” released in April and swept awards season, and that Capcom’s “Monster Hunter Wilds” became one of the biggest hits of the year. YouTube comedian Mightykeef made a skit poking fun at ball and gun gamers.
“It’s about being loud and wrong,” added “Gi” co-host Jezzeeka Kinoshita, who goes by Ms5000Watts. “It’s playing those games but also saying things like: ‘There’s no games to play.’ ‘There’s nothing good out anymore.’ ‘When’s the next good game going to come out?’ But they only play a really small section of games.”
Enjoying ball and gun games doesn’t mean you have bad taste, either, however narrow, said Marlowe Crawford, known as Ethos on “Gi.” “Battlefield 6,” the final game led by the late Call of Duty creator Vince Zampella, won critical praise and became last year’s best-selling game. Even “Expedition 33” can be loosely defined as a gun game, as its heroes can conjure magical pistols.
“They’re good games with great appeal,” Crawford said. “Their high-production presentation do get the eyes of a lot of people who only play one or two games a year.”
The ball and gun gamers are expected to have the ultimate release this November in the form of “Grand Theft Auto VI” by Rockstar Games, developer of the other gun games that top charts besides Call of Duty. The studio’s last game, “Red Dead Redemption 2,” didn’t win game of the year in 2018, which angers its fans to this day.
“If it doesn’t win, it will be the biggest drama on the timeline for at least 48 hours,” Crawford said.
A 2025 Circana survey found that about 63 percent of American gamers only buy up to two games a year, which now often cost $70 to $80 each. Crawford surmises that the 2020 pandemic might’ve added casual players who are still finding their way around the medium but are armed with social media to speak on an industry they’ve barely entered.
“Everyone was locked inside, and we saw it,” said Justin Gates, known as UTxJGTheDon of “Gi.” “Everybody was trying to become a streamer. People were buying gaming PCs, and PlayStation 5 consoles were flying off the shelves. It ushered in a lot of first-time gamers. And look, you guys are welcome into the culture, but it’s just that you’re very loud and not fully participating in the culture.”
Gates said it reminds him of what’s happening in hip-hop. October marked the first time the Billboard Top 40 contained no hip-hop since 1990. This kicked off discourse that rap is dying, with TikTok videos complaining about how hip-hop is only about money, drugs and women, ignoring the wider variety of music throughout the genre.
“So many older rappers literally had a renaissance in 2025, and they didn’t listen to any of it because they’re still stuck on Drake and waiting for ‘Iceman,’” Gates said. Similar to what the pandemic did for gaming, Kendrick Lamar’s high-profile decimation of Drake during the 2023 rap battle helped expand the hip-hop audience if only for those few months.
Being a ball and gun gamer isn’t really about genre preference. And while some critics of the term have suggested it stereotypes Black players, it’s not really about race, either, the hosts of “Gi” say.
“‘Ball and gun gamers’ is just a new term for bro gamer,” said Smallwood, referring to the early 2000s term for people who only played shooting games. “I’m going to be honest, the top bro gamers are usually White men. It’s not a racist term. If you’ve ever seen community day for NBA 2K — they do it every year where they fly out creators — it’s mostly White boys.”
“If you see a ball and gun and immediately think Black man, I think you’ve done the woke circle too much. You need to go back around,” Kinoshita added.
The phenomenon is really about how modern discourse rewards blustering confidence over curiosity, amplified by a social media culture that can flatten expertise. It’s not unique to video games: It’s across politics, art and even science. The ball and gun gamer becomes a symptom of a wider culture that treats participation as knowledge.
Ball and gun games will always matter in the medium, as they’re foundational, popular and often excellent. Games that feature college sports stars and blistering gunplay have helped the industry mature and grow. It’s the conversation about them that feels stunted and juvenile.
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