Wordplay with a Distracted Apprentice
Maybe ten decades from now someone will stumble across us arguing about what to call these things and laugh. I’ve always spelled it video-space-game, because I think of the term “video game” as a compound noun, like “comic book” or “hot dog.” The New York Times and The New Yorker also put the space in there. Kill Screen uses the one-word “videogame,” in line with what the Videogame Style Guide (obviously) prescribes. The Wall Street Journal recently used “video-game,” which is probably the worst of them all; the dash just brings attention to itself and evokes old-timey language like “bumble-bee” or “black-bird.” Daily Variety goes in the opposite direction and calls it a “vidgame,” which for some reason feels insulting (though I suppose that’s the point of much of their vernacular).
Space or not, “video game” is a pretty unsatisfactory term if you think about it. It shares a problem with “comic book” in that it is really a misnomer: most comic books are not comic at all, and “video” games depend on many vast domains besides the purely visual. Plus, “game” imparts an air of triviality; we use “game” in a lot of phrases that indicate a certain distance from consequences with a negative connotation, like “gaming the system,” or “dating is just a game to him,” and so on. Both terms have alternatives proposed by their industries, “interactive entertainment” or “electronic entertainment” and “graphic novel” or “sequential art,” which feel like conscious attempts to escape prior undertones of frivolity.
The movies have lots of great terms for themselves, though. I’m a little jealous of this. There’s “film” (from the physical medium), “the cinema” (from the cinematoscope), “motion pictures” (mock-serious, but still better than “interactive entertainment”), and, casually, a “flick,” shortened from “flicker show,” which is a really beautiful and evocative word.
But we alas have video games or videogames or vidgames or games. Where can we really go with this? “Video” is itself is a neologism, created just last century from the Latin videre, “to see,” and coeval with snappy little words like audio or radio. At a time when extremely silly confections like blogosphere or webinar seem to catch on despite themselves, I kind of miss these old-school technological coinages. And “game” is an Anglo-Saxon word, woefully imprecise, meaning a dozen different things in all kinds of contexts. Maybe instead we can summon the Latin ludere “to play,” from which we already get a couple game studies terms like ludology or ludonarrative, and pop it into yesteryear’s word making system.
Yes, that’s it: we’ll call a video game a “ludio” and be done with it.
Levity | September 12, 2010
Reader Comments (17)
Until I started reading lots of US "videogame"/"video game" blogs I always called them Computer Games. At least that term made more sense. Even consoles are just specialised computers.
Luderoscope?
The Apparatus Ludomus? (A portmanteau of Ludo and Domus)
Eh, that's all I've got. Sunday, etc.
Final thought: does this make lovers of games ludites?
Ludio sounds good too, though, but I never liked the term ludonarrative. It comes across as trying a little too hard, kind of like sequential art.
Then again when previous connotations must be retained, we come up with terms like webinar...
I dig what you're saying about movies, but that terminology has had over a century to evolve. There's also the fact that the media it was printed on didn't change for most of that time, so it was safe to call it "film". "Computer game" is no longer an apt term to cover all types of videogames, obviously, and really wasn't even universally applicable back when the choice was between playing on a Commodore 64 or an Atari.
Computer game sadly casts out some videogames not on computers (and is a long word too!). Digital game is something more technically apt (and I am surprised you've not seen it Matthew) - but is a very academic term, rarely seen in the press at all!
Digital games is used to represent it more "technically accurate" (including things not visual/video based for starters). It was used on a white paper I helped with about the importance of videogame history; but to be honest it was just to be consistent and because the lead used that term more.
The issue perhaps is more differentiating the game aspect from just games in general. Hide and Seek is a game, Monopoly is a game, football is a game; yet to make it specific to a interactive technology based medium means using something that doesn't tie it to technology makes it confusing.
They might look back and laugh; I don't think they will though (or at least any more then they do looking back to films). At least for historians, terms changing and evolving are a normal and common thing to happen. Sure, Paleo-future shows us that old technology pieces are ripe for odd terms being used, but it is pretty normal.
To me that seems wholly backwards to the direction that should be taken. The eyes of the world are on us. If the world calls them "video games," and we do too, in casual conversation, then instead of running from the word and it's potential for negative or nebulous definitions, we as a community should seize the term for our own and define for ourselves what it means. If our best and brightest write and do amazing things under the mantle "video games," people will notice THAT, and the term itself will start to mean something else, something more specific.
I think we should enthusiastically embrace and reclaim, not shamefully avoid and distance. We spend so much time fretting that "video games" means nothing or means everything. To me that seems not like problem, but an opportunity.
Let's look to movies. What's that word mean? It comes from a camera, but it's not a still picture. It moves. It's a movie. It's a cute word. Hard to take too seriously if you think about it, but people take them seriously all the time. Or they make and watch movies that aren't serious, and that's okay, too, and they don't need separate nomenclature.
I never call them films, though. Too pretentious.
Lesson: "Movie" is a silly word I can apply to both serious things and frivolity. "Film" is so self-conscious and pretentious I can't use it in any context unless I'm referring to physical film.
I would agree with the content of the comment above even if it hadn't been written by a Jake, because names are trivial, and only as handy as their ability to identify something effectively and sound sonically pleasing.
video game video game video game video game video game video game video game video game video game video game video game video game video game video game video game video game video game video game video game video game
Seems fine to me.
This is all a bit too in depth perhaps though for this discussion, and of course subject to arguments from yourself that they are computers (although where to draw the line is usually established at the software level).
Basically; in any case, that is why "computer games" is not in fact an all-encompassing technically true term to use (especially historically), although today, all of the things you mentioned are true! So I'll certainly say anyone discussing things off hand today could use the term nearly completely accurately (since no one really makes many new electronic games nowadays).
@Jake 1: It'd need some hard checking of a huge range of websites and magazines (not just game focused ones too) to get a view on if "videogame" versus "video game" was used for any particular reason; I think there would be no evidence either way, and some places just use a style guide thought up by someone else for no particular reason other then standardisation. Second guessing the reasons behind most sites is a bit difficult; there's too much variety to pin it down like that.
@Jake 2: I'm in the UK, and because of the different culture, we use a mix of movie and film (we have a "Film Four" and "Sky Movie" channels on TV, "Film" sections in most newspapers and the Radio Times, BFI - "British Film Institute", BAFTA - "British Academy of Film and Television Arts", cinemas vary between showing Films and Movies), so it isn't anything to do with being pretentious here! It's just a more commonly used term. The USA is obviously entirely different, and I suspect Australia and Canada might have their own conventions or uses of the words too. I don't think it applies the same way to videogames since all the terms are reasonably common in, say, game site news, although the academic terms (as with films - eg "motion picture") like ludology are obviously different and much more specific (and if they need such terms, why not let them use them? :) ).
Funnily enough the Wikipedia article does state the terminology (as you suggest) isn't a worldwide view with the use of film/movie: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film#Terminology_used
In any case, they've had a lot longer to work out what is useful to keep and lose. This discussion is good to suggest since, well, it might come down to several terms all basically meaning the same thing culturally, and that's useful to note. I've stated several differences in the technical definitions of "computer game", "digital game", "video( )game" and so forth; they do exist but in general the terms are just jumbled up, so it all appears to anyone that it is the same stuff in the end so are interchangeable to most people.
Hope this doesn't come off as argumentative, I in no way am saying you're wrong about the film uses in America, you're perfectly correct there :)
“Videogame” just doesn’t look as attractive as “Video Game” when set in a headline. To the majority of people, I know they are going to think a space is missing or something.
I'm pretty conflicted about it too. Just from a pure legibility perspective...
The worst part about "video game" is that you're subjected to the hyphenated adjective, such as in "video-game music."
I prefer "videogame" in general, but I acknowledge that capitalized ("Videogame"), it looks kinda off. Not to mention that it invites a silly pronunciation (rhymes with "monogamy") if you misplace the emphasis.
And of course, there are all the connotations that "game" brings with it, as Matthew brought up in his post. Ultimately, I'm not sure if there's much we can do. The comic-book community hasn't managed to sway popular vernacular, and they've got more than 40 years on us.
My only hope is that the named will change the name. As the medium continues to grow, the meaning of the word "game" will mature with it.