Video Games and Entymology

I recently watched this video.


It comes from a series of videos about video game design, but their method is so thoughtful that I have found that it applies to quite a few other areas of creativity.

By this point you may have guessed at the purposeful misspelling in the title of this post. Well, I warned you in the blog title.

But, on to more time consuming discussion. This video is about the word "Game" as used in the video game industry. Within the past few years there have been an increasing number of not fun games created. When I say that I don't mean that they aren't good games, I just mean that their primary purpose is not to entertain.

To me this creates an interesting look into how words develop. The tone of this video seems to suggest that the word game isn't useful, and that we should abandon it in favor of a new term: Interactive Experience. Early on in the video the speaker makes a comparison to poetry and suggests that it's crazy to question whether or not a piece of writing is actually a poem if it doesn't conform to certain rules (i.e. rigid meter or rhyming couplets). But the truth is that the scholastic community did question poems that broke those rules. And eventually they came to the conclusion that the term "poetry" was broad enough to contain these new expressions, they just came up with new names to contain the newer, free form poetry.

That's how language works. Us silly humans are always making up new stuff. If we find a new medium to work in, then we explore it. If someone pays us, we explore more. If people are willing to pay enough, or pay enough attention, then the business minded part of humanity jumps in to exploit it.

And they need something to call it.

"Why?" you ask. (You know, it gives me a perverse pleasure forcing that on you. You may not have even wanted to ask that question and I just attributed it to you. Writers are sick.) Because that's how we have learned to communicate. We make a written or audible symbol and someone else sees or hears the symbol and interprets it.

But words, spoken or written, are only useful for communicating an idea if we have a similar understanding of their meaning. Definitions are useful because they allow us to communicate. (One of my favorite discussions of the usefulness of words and definitions is by C.S. Lewis in his paper, Mere Christianity.)

The term "game" is historically used to denote play, and there's no doubt that our current "video game" started there. The new term the author of this video suggests, "interactive experience", would be useful for a discussion about interactive experiences, but it fails at telling me what kind of interactive experience (which is currently the problem with the word game). The word is undergoing a change.

It may be useful to adopt "interactive experience" as a term for the medium and leave "game" to it's old usage. I say useful because the use of a term is found in its ability to communicate an idea. If we're divided about what "game" means, then the word loses validity. Another option would be to keep the word "game" and just lump the other kinds of experiences in with new adjectives to keep them apart (e.g. fun game, strategy game, intellectual game, game that makes you question your own sanity, etc.). One problem I see in using the word "game" is that the word has other ties. We already have a definition that is associated with other activities (e.g. soccer, chess, uno, tag, etc.) and they are usually tied to fun or entertainment. If we continue to use the word "game" for every interactive video experience then we lose a bit of meaning. I'm not saying it can't work. I'm just saying that this is a problem I see. "Interactive Experience" for me, lacks some of the original connotation attached to the word "game".

The difficulty is that we are creating new experiences that are categorically different than what games and video games have historically presented. We've invented a new category that is related, but is genuinely different. If it weren't, then we probably wouldn't be having this argument. We'd find something else to argue about.

So we've got multiple interactive experiences being created. Lumping them together as "games" has caused confusion. A new term that embodies the whole is useful in this case.  "Interactive Experience" is as good as any I can think of. It would sometimes be nice to force everyone to agree on categorization methods or terms, but language seems to evolve much more fluidly. We'll see if "Interactive Experience" catches on as a description of the medium. Though in the end, I think it will probably be most useful to people talking about interactive experiences or trying to sell them. People who want to play games will still just play them.