I was looking for quote on an AVG genre abbreviation and a thread in this forum board is the first google result. The problem is it's closed and, what's worse, it doesn't answer the question. Now, while I failed to find a reliable source, I myself know the answer because I'm old and I was there when the term was in use and meaningful, so:

AVG stands for Adventure Video Game and is a term that was coined by first gaming zines somewhere around late 80's and early 90's as opposite to (at that time) "traditional" Adventure Games that were purely textual with no visual content. In late 90's due to branching of Point & Click kind of adventure games the term was mostly used to describe what was left of the genre and what we nowadays know as Visual Novels, and later on got entirely replaced by the latter term. It's not AdVenture Game which isn't a proper abbreviation and follows a naming scheme that wasn't popular back in the 80's and 90's. It has nothing to do with AV girls which is a (rather modern) term for female adult video industry performers popular in Japan.

I apologize if this post doesn't fit the subject of this forum, I hope it does, or if it's misplaced in a wrong category (in that case I plead to mods to move it accordingly). I just hope it will prevail somewhere because IMO we're loosing way too much of the computers and games related lingo due to "enthusiastic" manner of popular media inventing new terms for things that are already established but not widely known. We used to have CG for Computer Generated which was meaningful on its own and worked as a base for many other terms like CGG for Computer Generated Graphics (think 3D), CGI for Computer Generated Imagery (think VFX), CGA for Computer Generated Audio, etc. We used to have PC that meant Personal Computer, not Personal Computer With Windows or Personal Computer With Keyboard because smartphones, smartwatches, laptops and desktops are all Personal Computers. Finally FPS used to mean Frames Per Second and FPP was the genre where FPP and TPP meant First or Third Person Perspective while shooter was a sub-genre of action games and had nothing to do with camera perspective.

Thank you for this venting opportunity.

And acronyms can mean something completely different in different contexts. SSE is of(f) course south-to-south-east. It has always been ?

But maybe we're irritating the beginners in here ... back to hacking.

The thread I linked in the first post shown interest so hopefully somebody does. And I don't mind language evolution, forking, absorption - all that exists to satisfy as many people as possible giving them the possibility to choose their lingo... but all of these language processes assume we don't loose the original definition so it can be looked back at when in doubt. And for some reason we lost this one.

The idea behind sharing this at all is that we're all gaming geeks here and I, for one, like to understand the roots of the subject I'm geeking about. I apologize if it's irrelevant to GameDev website, I hope it is for some, never meant to post irrelevant thoughts. Cheers!

I am on your side. And i find it important to point at the possibility that too much jargon can exclude the rest of the world from certain discussions. More so since often times it becomes more clearly what is actually meant when using some more grammar instead of a possibly personally pre-biased shortcut that has long since changed meaning.

More grammar ?