"Game-Changer"

In contrast with a lot of the words and phrases I discuss here (like the appalling "lifestyle") the term is not inherently annoying to me. I accept that a thing may well be a "game-changer."

My annoyance with the term has to do with how ridiculously low people set the bar for something being "game-changing."

I recall, for instance, a certain science fiction "fan site" that offered its list of twenty "game-changing" science fiction novels of the decade of the '00s.

The books in question did indeed each make a splash when they came out (mostly in the very small pond that is contemporary print science fiction, but some of them in larger pop cultural bodies of water as well).

But were they game-changers? Did they leave us unable to read or write in the ways we had before, the way that, for example, E.E. Smith's space operas or Isaac Asimov's Robot stories were arguably game-changers?

Even before the passage of the years made this even more starkly clear it was clear that they were not. After all, how dynamic would a fairly limited corner of the publishing world have to be for it to see twenty "game-changers" in a mere decade? Especially when the genre in question is, as I have said so many times, fairly old and stagnant by any such standard?

The term's use was just poptimist hype--as is generally the case when we hear words like "game-changer" trotted out.