In the end I went with BBS and BBSes — but I’ve always felt that more important than which one I went with was consistency throughout the body of work. Start switching back and forth and you’ll drive your readers mad.

The problem with “videogame/video game,” and where the confusion comes (I think) is that people compare it to “computer game.’ A “computer game” is a game that is played on one’s computer. A “video game” then should be a game that is played on one’s video. That doesn’t make sense. The term there is “console game” — along with “computer game” and “arcade game” (sorry for all the quotes). A “videogame” is the actual game. And I guess it would be case closed, if anyone ever said that they were going to go play a “computer videogame”.

Sigh. I’m going back to boardgames. Er, board games. Er … ah, screw it.

While I’m not trying to overestimate the importance of a space (or lack thereof) here – we can keep studying games quite productively in either case – I also don’t agree that “language evolves” by itself and that those concerned with games shouldn’t care about terminology like this.

Changes in language are made, wittingly or not, by speakers and writers. Experts, including those who choose style guidelines for their books in a new field, do have a responsibility to think about issues like these and to try to make good choices, because terms have an influence on how people study, think, and create.

I do expect people in the field, not descriptivist linguists, to be the ones who take a stand on whether “videogames” or “video games” is best. ButImustadmitthatthelastsuggestionwouldsolvetheproblem…

A simple rule of thumb is, if it doesn’t contain a microprocessor, but a video screen (TV-set, etc) it certainly is a video game. If it contains a microprocessor it depends on how it is designed. Some game consoles, like the NES have support for video games with video based collision detection.

Computer games, on the other hand, don’t necessarily require a video screen. Many of those games like Startrek or Hunt the Wumpus work just as well on teletypes. In fact, even more modern games like Tetris, a Russian game btw., can run over terminal lines.

But come on it’s not like computer games have a big impact on society or economy. There’s probably more money in cat litter than in video and computer games combined.

Back in the day, “video games” meant games running on standup arcade machines or consoles (Asteroids, Pac-Man), while “computer games” meant games run on PCs (Zork, Wizardry). Computer games generally were very much their own thing, with their own aesthetics, traditions, and approaches. As the editor of Platform Studies will appreciate, many of the reasons for this were bound up with the strengths and weaknesses of the platforms themselves. Computers could store huge amounts of data compared to consoles, offered a keyboard for input and could easily generate text for output, and could easily save and restore state thanks to their disk drives. On the other hand, they were often much worse than consoles at displaying fast graphics. These factors in addition to cultural ones led to fairly simple action games holding sway on consoles, while computers often hosted more cerebral adventure, RPG, and strategy games. Both camps, naturally, tended to stereotype and look down on the other (“brain-dead console games,” “those boring PC games with their 350-page manuals”). Later, as consoles started to get better at storing state and data and to offer more options for input and output, and as PCs got better graphically, these distinctions started to go away, and the two strands began to merge. The trend kind of came to fruition with the XBox, which is essentially a PC in disguise. So, now to most people the terms “videogame” (now ubiquitous enough to start to merge into the compound, a process I suspect will be complete within a decade or so) and “computer games” mean effectively the same thing. Which can create a problem for those of us writing histories of the medium, as we suddenly need to separate the two terms once again and educate our readers on why we need to do so.

None of which helps much with your “video- and computer games” problem, of course. :)

Nope… language evolves. I can see why it’s an interesting problem from a linguistic perspective, but in most cases everyone will just know what you mean. Don’t worry about it.

Those games at the arcade, though, I don’t know what to call them.