A Glossary of Browser & Arcade Gaming Terms

Some of these words get thrown around like everyone already knows them, which is how a lot of people end up nodding along in a comment thread without actually following it. Here's what they mean, in plain terms, no prior knowledge assumed.

Speedrun

Playing a game with the sole goal of finishing it as fast as possible, usually under self-imposed rules (any%, 100%, glitchless) that define exactly what counts. See our piece on how speedrunning turned browser games into a spectator sport.

Route

The specific sequence of moves, skips, and shortcuts a speedrunner follows through a game. Routes get refined over time as the community finds faster paths, and knowing one well is usually worth more than raw reflexes.

Frame-perfect

An input that has to land within a single frame of animation, often a 1-in-60-of-a-second window, to work. A frame-perfect trick is unforgiving by design, which is exactly why landing one on stream gets a reaction.

Roguelite

A genre built around repeated runs through procedurally generated levels, where death sends you back to the start but you usually keep some form of permanent progress between attempts. The "lite" distinguishes it from a stricter roguelike, which typically offers no persistent progress at all.

Permadeath

Death that actually ends the run, no reloading a save to undo it. It sounds punishing, but it's what makes every decision in a roguelite matter instead of being a formality you can always take back.

Procedural generation

Building levels, maps, or item drops algorithmically instead of hand-placing every one, using a seed value to determine the layout. It's how a roguelite can offer a fresh map every run without an artist designing a thousand of them by hand.

Seed

The starting value fed into a procedural generation algorithm. The same seed produces the same layout every time, which is why speedrunners sometimes compare runs on a shared, fixed seed instead of a random one.

Save-scumming

Repeatedly saving and reloading to undo an unwanted outcome, like a bad drop or a death, until it goes the way you want. Roguelites with permadeath exist partly as a direct answer to this habit; see why roguelites made losing fun again for the full argument.

Frame data

The frame-by-frame breakdown of a move's startup, active, and recovery windows, most associated with fighting games. It turns "this attack feels fast" into an actual number you can compare against another move, the same analytical instinct that shows up in combat sports film study.

Endless runner

A genre where the level scrolls forward automatically and the only real decisions are when to jump, dodge, or duck. The run ends the first time you make a wrong call, which keeps sessions short and restarts nearly instant.

Bullet hell / bullet heaven

Bullet hell means dodging an overwhelming, deliberately patterned wall of enemy projectiles. Bullet heaven flips the role: your character auto-attacks constantly while you manage positioning and upgrades against swarms of enemies instead.

Leaderboard

A ranked list of top scores, usually visible to everyone playing. Simple as the concept sounds, it does a lot of the work in keeping players coming back, a case we make in more detail in our piece on leaderboards and motivation.

Pixel art

A deliberately low-resolution visual style built from individually placed pixels rather than rendered detail. It's a design choice about legibility and durability, not a budget shortcut, as covered in why pixel art isn't nostalgia.

Unblocked game

A browser game hosted in a way that slips past school or workplace content filters, usually because it runs entirely in the browser with no install, no launcher, and no flagged domain category.

No-install / instant-play

Any game that runs the moment you open a link, with no download, account, or app-store step in between. The friction that removes turns out to matter more than most players notice consciously; see why zero install beats flashier alternatives.

None of these terms are hard once you've seen them defined once. The confusion mostly comes from communities that forget not everyone was there when the word first caught on.