Ah, videogames. So fun to play but so hard to talk about. So hard in fact that we still have no consensus on how to address them. There has been much debate over the correct terminology for the medium: video game, videogame, digital game, electronic games, games, and so on. It isn’t life altering, to be sure, but if we are going to be serious about our discipline we should at the very least try to agree on what we call it. I personally like the single word, portmanteau “videogame,” over the alternatives, which I’ll get to in a second. But first, here are a couple of viewpoints on the usage.
The first comes from The Videogame Style Guide and Reference Manual, written by David Thomas, Kyle Orland, and Scott Steinberg. You can find it here.
I don’t agree with all their terms, but it’s a great starting point, and someone had to do it. The authors ask,
Has our industry evolved from its component parts of “video” and “game” to become “videogame,” a one-word cultural idiom unto itself? What about “interactive entertainment?” (6).
And later,
“Videogame” or “video game” – one word or two? It all depends on whom you ask, which continent you live on, and which media outlet you work for. And it’s not the kind of debate that anyone will resolve soon. But someone had to make a choice and draw a proverbial line in the sand. So that’s what we did, because that’s what journalists and editors have to do every day – make tough decisions. We hope this guide will save you the trouble of agonizing over minutiae and let you spend more time actually writing. (8)
I wish I could say they have saved me from agonizing over minutiae, but alas, no such luck.
In choosing “videogame” over “video game” or another alternative, the authors list four criteria behind their decision:
1) Ease of comprehension for a general audience.
2) Common usage and accuracy.
3) Convenience, with respect to writer use/remembrance.
4) Official styling , as preferred by game developers and publishers.
While applauding the attempt, Perron and Wolf, the editors of The Video Game Theory Reader 2 (2009), argue that the style guide’s “decision to go with the one-word ‘videogame’ seems to have been arbitrary. The choice seems to run counter to one of their criteria,” namely, #2, since “video game” is the most common usage according to various search engines (VGTR 2, pp. 7-8).
I agree that the style guide authors violate their own criteria, but this is hardly a reason to rule out “videogame.” Moreover, I didn’t see any justification given for using “video game,” though I may not have been reading carefully enough. Why is that any less arbitrary?
Here’s why I like the one-word term, “videogame,” and I will try to be a bit less arbitrary, at least at first.
For starters, a videogame is more than simply a game which has been “video-ized:” neither component, video nor game, is originary nor supplemental to the other; they mutually constitute each other in profound ways. One without the other – video without game – would be something entirely different than what it is. Of course, games existed before videogames, as did video, but videogames change the game form in many ways, which I hope to discuss in greater length in a future post.
For example, Monopoly the board game has been made into a videogame, but is it the same game – or same thing – in both iterations? Well, no. The experience is completely different, in fact. It might seem trivial, but the act of physically rolling the dice and physically moving the thimble past Go provide a different experience than pressing a controller button for rolling virtual dice.
Likewise, the experience of playing Call of Duty or Battlefield would likewise change considerably without the in-home console, controller, and all the meaning-baggage which comes with that. With the explosion of popularity in the FPS genre, Paintball – a “real life” game! – has also seen a sharp rise in popularity. Now, CoD and Paintball have common traits to be sure, as they both offer representations of the combat experience, but the experience of playing each game differs significantly from the other. The video, game, and all the other components which go into a videogame make it its own, unique object/artefact/thing, or whatever else you’d like to call it. Again, the component parts influence each other in fundamental ways, and I think the portmanteau best reflects that.
Now for some less theoretical reasons for choosing the “videogame” moniker. I just think the medium deserves its own term, as the style guide authors allude to. The videogame industry is an economic and cultural powerhouse, leaving lame old Hollywood, for instance, trembling in its wake. I love seeing Hollywood trying to cash in on our medium, and more often than not, failing. The ludic aspect of videogames is just so integral that it seems silly to even try to make movies out of them. Movies may be interactive, as some argue, but not in the same manner as videogames. As an aside, I like Bogost’s “procedural enthymeme” concept from Persuasive Games to describe ludic interactivity (another contentious term, I know). But on the subject of “movies,” they weren’t always called that – “moving pictures,” and the like were used at one time when they were new. There is precedent! So yeah, the videogame deserves the respect of its own term.
Even less theoretically sound, but more practical, “videogame” saves us much needed room for word count limits! I recently struggled to get an article under 11,000 words, but it would have been even harder if I would have used two words every time I wanted to say “videogames” instead of one! Slightly updated version of the old – 11.5 font, .75 inch margins trick? Yup, but I’m cool with that.
So what do you guys think? I’m willing to be persuaded to accept another form for sure. I’ve tried using them all at one time or another, but I like videogames.
Jason
