Define: Video Game

Define: Video Games
There comes a time when a person has thought and written or spoken so much about a subject that the fine points begin to matter more than the bigger ones. In particular, I have been obsessing over an idea this past month:

What is a video game?

The video game can be traced back to what? Space War and Tennis for 2 in the late 60s. Then you have video games moving from mainframes and heading onto consoles. Then you see video games making their way into the emerging computer markets through things like the Timex Sinclair, Apple ][ and so forth. The PC market was concerned with digitizing wargames and various other types of simulations. However, their more successful cousins on consoles outsold everything and crashed hard. Here is where the trouble begins. PC Games became things nerds do, Console games became the thing for kids from Japan and the world moved on while the games themselves somehow infiltrated any and all personal computers. If you look at the Nielson State of the Video Gamer (which does not define what they mean by video game), you will see the most played game is solitaire. The largest group of gamers are females on the PC, playing solitaire, ages 25 and up with females aged 55 or higher consuming the most PC game time (also solitaire or hearts). But that is not the game industry most of us refer to yet these are the statistics most researchers employ when they discuss how a significant portion of the gaming population are female. They do this, not because they want to cover up male dominance of video games, but because the definition of what we mean when we say video games is as cloudy as Turok on N64. Of all the definitions of video games or gaming that are out there, There are two definitions of video games I enjoy:

Blackwell Dictionary of Sociology:
“Video games are played via a dedicated console connected to a television (e.g., Sony's Play Station) and computer games are played on a personal computer, or PC. These two forms of digital play comprise a lucrative sector of the global entertainment complex, an immersive, simulation-based interactive medium, a high-profile domain of youth-oriented popular culture, and a preferred leisure activity for millions of media consumers. Emerging early in the new millennium, game studies is the field of multidisciplinary scholarship devoted to the analysis of video and computer games. The origins of digital play lie in the US military–university complex Cold War-era technologies that were intended to combat the “socialist threat” and to boost industrial productivity were turned upside down – from work to play – when, in 1962, student hackers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology created Spacewar?, one of the first computer games. This breakthrough was harnessed in the 1970s by Atari, the US corporation that led the transformation of digital play into a cultural industry. A harbinger of the “information society,” the spread of video arcades and the launch of the first home-based consoles in the 1980s saw interactive entertainment suffuse cultural space, commodify “free time,” and prepare many young people for the digital age.”

Persuasive Games (Ian Bogost):
“Videogames are an expressive medium. They represent how real and imagined systems work. They invite players to interact with those systems and form judgments about them. As part of the ongoing process of understanding this medium and pushing it further as players, developers, and critics, we must strive to understand how to construct and critique the representations of our world in videogame form. (Preface).”

There are also more basic concepts about what people mean by game

Other definitions
• "A game is a system in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome." (Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman)

• "A game is a form of art in which participants, termed players, make decisions in order to manage resources through game tokens in the pursuit of a goal." (Greg Costikyan]

• "A game is an activity among two or more independent decision-makers seeking to achieve their objectives in some limiting context." (Clark C. Abt]

• "At its most elementary level then we can define game as an exercise of voluntary control systems in which there is an opposition between forces, confined by a procedure and rules in order to produce a disequilibrial outcome." (Elliot Avedon and Brian Sutton-Smith)

• "A game is a form of play with goals and structure." (Kevin Maroney)

There is also Roger Travis who has started calling video games by the term practomime. Essentially, he is talking about the Performative Play Practice. You can read about it beginning: http://livingepic.blogspot.com/2008/06/performative-play-practices-1-are.html

While each of these definitions works in some fashion or another, the historical progression of definition as a derogatory item limits any author’s ability to really define what a video game is. With the formative years of the technology behind us, a new era of formation is needed; one that eschews previous development in favor of actually and consciously exploring a medium (and it is a medium) that allows for representation of real systems and exploration of imagined ones.

In the end, it does not work to try and define what a video game is. It does not work because the parameters of what we mean when we say video game are not yet fully defined. By parameters here, I mean a variety of different things. In basic terms, I mean all at once the glue that holds video games together, the categories of games, and the boundaries of video gaming.

Essentially, the answers to these (and a significant amount of other) questions:
1. What is the definition of a video game

2. Who is making video games

a. What is the trending within gender in making video games

b. How do those trends translate to the digital environment
3. Where are those people from

4. How does culture of origin influence different games that come from homogenous groups of game makers meant for heterogeneous groups of game players

5. If a game includes minority groups on a development team (both in Japan and in America or Europe) how does gameplay or cultural messages change

6. Who is playing video games

7. Is there a difference between what females play over males

8. Is there a difference within ethnic groups in what they play

9. How does what a person play reflect personality traits later in life

10. What influence does HCI instruction in early childhood mean to video gaming

11. How does governmental system influence game design

12. How do economic systems influence game creation

13. All economic systems have opposite or anti-system groups, how do these groups interact with larger corporate interests in Europe/Japan/America/Australia/elsewhere

14. How do video games grow or change?

15. What are the parameters of video game change

16. How are display devices influencing games

17. How are games influencing display devices

18. How have games that inevitably have signals of a display device changed over the years

19. How do programming languages change with each iteration of an operating system or console

Each of these topics is broad enough to write a paper about, or a book if one had the time. I will be trying to use this list to guide my academic work over the next few years. The questions will change, more will be added, but we all need to start somewhere.