An interesting thing I’ve noticed in the last few years is that another RPG term has been experiencing linguistic drift. I talked about this a little in the context of the term ‘heartbreaker’ a while back, and now the term that we’re seeing shift is ‘railroading’. At first I was thinking about this in terms of linguistic precision (and as such risking becoming an old man yelling at a metaphorical cloud), but the more I thought about it the more interesting I realized the implications were of the drift. When a term becomes broader, it means more is falling under that term’s umbrella; that’s perhaps obvious. But when the term is derisive, like railroading is, the cultural onus to push more game behaviors (or more specifically GMing behaviors) under the umbrella says something about how the culture is evolving.