Death to "Videogames"
Recently, doing a technical review of a book Chris Crawford is writing, I took issue with his definition of videogame. He defined the term to mean "a console game."
That certainly isn't how it was originally used; it was coined to refer to this new breed of games appearing in bars and arcades everywhere, that relied on electronics to project an image on a screen--quite unlike the conventional pinball games and arcade amusements of yore. They were different, or so it seemed, because they involved video; they were video games, which, in the manner of all two-nouned English terms, ultimately became conjoined, until they were videogames.
When the first home game devices appeared--actually not the first, since Magnovox Odyssey predated Pong, but the memory of the press is fleeting--the games they ran, too, came to be called videogames.
Even before Pong, of course, people at academic computing centers had programmed little games for their amusement and the amusement of their friends; but these, by and large, ran on devices either attached to paper teletypes or monitors that displayed only text. Because the salient characteristic of these games was that, unlike an earlier generation of board and card games, they ran on computers, they were termed "computer games."
The first rash of games for "microcomputers" (that is, home computers), too, were mainly text-based, though some began to play with graphics--but they remained "computer games," at least for a time.
For many years, the two remained pretty distinct; even the development communities saw little movement between each other. In the US, after the Atari crash, computer gaming (and a greatly lessened arcade) was all that remained of digital gaming, and the first generation of computer game developers came to their fame. Then Nintendo proved that Atari was not the end, and the rebirth of console gaming began.
As the graphics capabilities of home PCs improved, the distinction between console and PC games began to fade--though even now, some distinctions can be drawn between them. E.g., you find few platformers on PCs, and strategy games basically don't work with the limitations of a console controller. But for all intents and purposes, today there are four main home game platforms: PS II, XBox, GameCube, and PC.
"Videogame" has, for the prevailing culture, gradually become a term that encompasses all digital games; Grand Theft Auto III is a videogame, and so is Quake Arena.
Oddly enough, the reverse transition has occurred in the academic community; academics look at digital games, and realize that it's the processor, not the use of visuals, that distinguishes digital from non-digital games. Consequently, they tend to eschew the term "videogame," and use "computer game" to describe both console and PC games.
And in the industry itself, you almost never hear anyone talk about "videogames." They aren't videogames, after all; except for the occasional cut scene, we almost never use video. We use images rendered on the fly--and the images are the surface of the game, the interface, the cotton candy. The meat of the game, the heart of it, is in the underlying code. These are games that run on processors, not on magnetic tape; algorithm and interactivity is what they are.
Instead, the industry tends to talk about the platform; there are console games, and there are PC games. And the PC is really just another platform--with its own peculiar characteristics, to be sure.
"Videogame" is a term that deserves to die; it actually says nothing about what the games it describes actually are. It won't die, of course; it's too widespread in the prevailing culture. But both the academics and the industry are right: video isn't what digital games are about. Indeed, given the visual crudity of the original videogames, it's hard to believe that even non-gamers could have thought that "video" was the single factor about those games that needed mentioning. But of course, the prevailing culture has never understood the game qua game.
Still and all, if you care about games, expunge the word from your vocabulary. We play games--and digital games are not so different from paper games. You can slice games any number of ways; by the platform on which they run: by genre; by visual style; by audience appeal; by artistic intent; by culture of origin; by medium. In all these cases, you can make fine, informed distinctions between different kinds of games, and the terminology you use to draw those distinctions can be enlightening. The term "videogame" has no such dignity; it draws a crude and indefensible line between games with graphics (like say, Pong) and games without (like, say, Zork)--or with graphics that don't show up on a screen (like, say, Risk). A peculiar line, indeed, when you realize that Pong has more in common with table tennis than with, say, Final Fantasy X.
If we are to understand games, we must learn to make meaningful distinctions. The term "videogame" makes none.
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