云玩家

What does 云玩家 mean?

A cloud player treats gameplay footage as first-hand experience. The label lands on the friend who quotes every boss pattern but has never held a controller, and it stings because nobody can check how much of that knowledge is borrowed. Watching others play is a normal way to enjoy a game these days, so the term mostly shows up in arguments, when an opinion sounds like it came from a walkthrough instead of from the player's own hands.

Where does 云玩家 come from?

The phrase rides on the habit of calling anything remote 云, cloud, in Chinese tech talk. In gaming it came to describe people who watched a full playthrough online and then talked as if they had finished the game themselves. The tech magazine ifanr ran a piece on June 12, 2018 about the cloud player phenomenon around Detroit: Become Human, a title many followed through videos rather than by playing it.

How to use 云玩家

• 他连手柄都没摸过，却在论坛里把每个Boss的打法讲得头头是道，被人一句“云玩家”堵了回去。
  Tā lián shǒubǐng dōu méi mō guo, què zài lùntán lǐ bǎ měi gè Boss de dǎfǎ jiǎng de tóutóu shì dào, bèi rén yī jù “yún wánjiā” dǔle huíqù.
  He has never touched a controller, yet he explains every boss strategy on the forum in fine detail, and one comment calling him a cloud player shut him down.
• 出差一周没带电脑，新游戏全靠看视频补进度，朋友笑我是标准云玩家。
  Chūchāi yī zhōu méi dài diànnǎo, xīn yóuxì quán kào kàn shìpín bǔ jìndù, péngyou xiào wǒ shì biāozhǔn yún wánjiā.
  A week of business travel without a laptop meant following the new release entirely through videos, and my friends crowned me a certified cloud player.