Historical Evolution of Gaming Terminology

R not Robot or not. John Mark wrote in roobot at the uncomparable dot com saying I was watching another pedantic nerd show actually on Dropout and someone made the claim Any game on a screen counts as a video game. Daily word games on the New York Times Games app video games. So what's a video game Matt wrote in and said, what is a video game? It was in the water or something? Major game titles like Halo and Destiny seem obvious, but what about a mobile game like Candy Crush? Cabinet arcade games like Pacman probably count. But what about bar topop video poker kiosks? Does playing the New York Times crossword on my phone constitute playing a video game? Now, first off, Matt and Mark, you gott to talk because you guys are thinking on the same wavelength. But John, you love a video game. What is a video game? And is and and is a wordle a video game I like the video game showism that tries to exclude mobile games from being Candy Crushand Crush video g games Let's get that one out of the way real fast. Just because it's on your phone doesn't mean it's not a video game. Candy Crush is certainly a video game. U so the the word games that are on your phone Um I mean I'm inclined to say yes I feel like it's possible to have something that you play in a web browser or on your phone that's like a word game that is not a video game if it has so little video. Game partarts to it. likeike if it is just a straightforward, you fill in the boxes, there's nothing to it But I don't think that's true of most of these things. Most of them do something, like highlight a thing or change the color of the squares to show what you've got or put an outline around the thing, or when you mouse over the three across, it shows where three across is in the puzzle. If you do any of those things, it doesn't take much to get you into video game world Like I said, I can' imagine a very static kind of web one point zero web page where you do a crossword puzzle that I would say is not a video game I don't think any of the ones that are out there now count as that. I don't play these so I don't know, but I imagine we're on in the New York Times app has video gamess to it Animations and stuff. Is that what it takes is a little reszlezzle? little not resleazzle. You need interactivity. need like you need the thing to respond to your input. It can't just lie there. like a piece of paper, doesn'tpond to your input. You write on it and the marks appear where you put your pencil, or your pen, but there's nothing else to it. Andt I don't think any of the word games behave like this I think when you do stuff in them O things light up or change or you know, or you hit a submit button and then it tell you whether you're right or wrong and that's a video g Yeah, yeah. okay. I So like a PDF of a crossroord puzzle, deffinitely not a video game. Right exactly. even though it would be you'd be using it on a computer screen or in on your phone and you could type into the little squares because PDF's have little text fill in fields in them, but it's not a video game because there's No interactive elements, essentially. Yeah. Also, if you print it out, use a pen, not a video game, just sorry.'t don't do. So the answer is it anything on the screen? I'm going to say no, but it's it's most things on the screen because once you put it on a screen, even if it's a word game, people can't help but do some interactive things where the screen responds to what you're doing in a way that gives feedback to the game you're playing essentially. It shows you how broad the term really is at this point, right? V game is not a gen There are genres of video game, but like video game is a fairly broad encompassing thing because technology is with us and games are with us everywhere. mostost of them have interactivity and so You might as well. I mean, I think back to the early days, right? V game This is the term came to be because of the idea that if you used an output that was capable of video, then you could have a level of and was driven by computer. you had a level of Interactivity and animation that Yeah, Yeah, you had an input device and you would react to what you saw and then you would do something and what you did would then be reflected in some way on what you were seeing. And that's that's the loop, the input output loop. Although, interestingly, you mentioned it being broadened the first video games probably had a lower level of interactivity than Wordle, the New York Times. Like Pong I mean, I guess there's a fast moving thing so you think it's more interactive, but like a text adventure is probably similarly interactive to Wordle in terms of what you see and how you react to it and then what you see next? In fact, I would say what's funny now is we've reached the point where video game seems like a silly term in a way because Most games video games. So Well, I just said you're stuck with you're stuck with a historical term Yeah. and even if as it loses its specific meaning, we just keep using it because we want everything better to call Um, I mean, that's why you get, um u the u related phrases of like tabletop game Where before video games happened, you didn't have to make that distinction. Yeah All right. What about computer games? Be that was a distinction for a while is the difference between like a game you had to play on a personal computer versus a game that you could play on a like a console, like an Aari or a Nintendo. Yeah, Well obviously everything has a computer now. So again computer has really But there was a time when that was a differentiator of like the things computer games were like There was more that you could do with it because it had a keyboard and there was and it it was more kind of general purpose, whereereas video games were more, but those all kind of washed away too historically. Th those combine pretty quickly. Yeah And yeah and video games ended up winning like because it's the broader term because there is video on a computer game right. So yeah, exactly. R or not