High Fantasy/Low Fantasy/Power Fantasy

[Desdichado]

In my experience, both here and elsewhere, gamers define high fantasy as high-powered magic, flight, artillery wizards, resurrection and all the other DnD tropes. What I'd call high magic. Whereas low fantasy in gamer terms involves a lot of mud and "historical" elements such as slow healing. Harnmaster would be an example of this style.

These terms are quite different from the literature terms as I understand them.

Yes, but again...

Gamers do, however, seem to be relatively unfamiliar with genre, and use genre labels much more sloppily than I'd like. That leads to confusion, but it's not a problem with the terminology, it's a problem with the ignorance of those using it.

Because gamer usage is so closely related to magic I think High Magic and Low Magic would be better terms.

That terminology is already quite common amongst gamerspeak online. I agree that some education is in order when genre labels are applied incorrectly, but that's going to be a never-ending battle, I'm afraid.