From a Game to a Video Game

A video game is, above all, a game. But what’s in a game? Jesper Juul, a video game theorist and occasional game developer, addressed this question in his keynote speech to the 2003 Level Up conference, entitled “The Game, the Player, the World: Looking for a Heart of Gameness”. He defined a game as “a rule-based formal system with a variable and quantifiable outcome, where different outcomes are assigned different values, the player exerts effort in order to influence the outcome, the player feels attached to the outcome, and the consequences of the activity are optional and negotiable” (Juul, 2003). Although all six elements are not always present in games, they form a common basis for determining what is and what is not a game.

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Juul also noted that games are “transmedial”, i.e. they are not attached to a particular media, and have “non-electronic roots” (ibid.). Indeed, for millennia, games have existed, “the computer is simply the latest game medium to emerge” (ibid.), or at least was at the time, since nowadays handheld devices are invading the game scene.

In his keynote, Juul also evoked the values assigned to the different outcomes, for example being happy when winning and sad when losing. This is related to another important aspect of games, in which “there is a tendency that the positive outcomes are harder to reach than the negative ones” (Juul, 2003). This is very true in video games, especially in survival games, in which the player starts off with minimal resources in a hostile environment, and in roguelike games, in which he has no possibility to respawn (i.e. dies permanently). Examples of survival games include Minecraft by Mojang (2011), with Sword of the Stars: The Pit by Kerberos Productions (2013) exemplifying the roguelike subgenre.

Thus, according to Juul, video games as a whole fall under the “classic game model”

though some individual instances remain borderline cases. Indeed, to some extent video games challenge certain characteristics that make up a game. For instance, titles like the open-end simulation The Sims or the sandbox game Minecraft “remov[e] the goals, or more specifically, (…) [do] not describ[e] some possible outcomes as better than others” (Juul, 2003). Among other developments, the diffusion of “semi-official cheatcodes” enabling players to “modify some of the basic rules of a game” can also be challenging for the traditional game model.

Nevertheless, there is no doubt that video games still mostly encompass all six conditions identified by Juul.

But then, what makes a video game different from other games? Frasca (2001) defined a video game (which he spells in one word) as “any form[s] of computer-based entertainment software, either textual or image-based, using any electronic platform such as personal computers or consoles and involving one or multiple players in a physical or networked environment”. This comprehensive definition can be used as a theoretical framework for our work, since it encompasses many relevant aspects of our object of study. Indeed, on top of the entertaining purpose and the fact that a game is a software product, this definition emphasises the fact that a video game usually has textual and visual components, a variable number of players, and can be run on various platforms (to which we can add arcade and handheld devices like tablets and mobile phones).

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Now that the object of study has been clearly delimited, it is time to enter the terminological maze that surrounds it and explore the implications of using such or such denomination.

2.1.1.2 “Terminological Heterogeneity” (O’Hagan and Mangiron, 2013)

It is worth noting that academics have used, and go on using, a wide variety of terms to refer to video games and video game localisation: one concept thus corresponds to various terms in English, which may not be the case in other languages.

Indeed, apart from alternative spellings like “video games” and “videogames”, the most common concurrent denominations include the generic “games” as well as “computer games”,

“electronic games”, “digital games” and “multimedia interactive entertainment software” to refer to the concept defined above by Frasca.

As a starting point, both the Oxford English Dictionary and the Encyclopedia Britannica denote “video games” as two words, as do most people looking it up on the Internet as shown by research by Wolf and Perron in March 2008 (2009, p. 8). Strangely enough though, a considerable number of scholars and journalists use only one word to describe it, including journalists Thomas et al. who redacted The Videogame Styleguide and Reference Manual, a handbook in which they advocate for the harmonization of terminology in the field. Their

“videogame” entry specifies: “[a]lways write as one word” (2007, p. 65).

Scholars’ divergences of points of view do not only concern which term to use but go deeper and relate to the distinction between each term. For example, Buckingham et al. allege that “computer games” is used in the UK regardless of the platform, and would thus be “a more inclusive term” than “video games” which might not include PC games (2006, p. 6). Yet, other British authors like Newman (2004) and the journalist Poole (2000) use the word “videogames”

to encompass everything, including PC games. Other scholars like Raessens and Goldstein (2005, quoted by O’Hagan and Mangiron, 2013) argue that both “video games” and “computer games” are platform-specific, and advocate for broader terms like “digital games” and

“electronic games”. Taking this argument into consideration, the hypernym “games” used by Chandler and O’Malley (2012) would work as well. Still, this term may be a bit too generic in general discourse, though perfectly understandable in a specialized context.

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On the other hand, although he frequently uses “video games” in his works, Bernal Merino suggested the term “multimedia interactive entertainment software”, with “MIES”

being its shortened form (2015, p. 15). This proposal presents the advantage of being comprehensive and descriptive, emphasizing the fact that video games stand at a crossroads.

Yet, this option has been discarded in this thesis due to its length, a constraint that might not be ideal for a term that is to be repeated several times over the work. Furthermore, we thought that such denomination might sound too complex for a concept otherwise clear in most people’s minds. In other words, this proposal resulted from an intense academic reflection but did not really seem to capture usage of terms in everyday life.

The following table is a recap of the terms encountered in the various types of sources we consulted. Note that only terms falling under Frasca’s definition (i.e. broad enough and not platform-specific) were included

8 Term /

Source

Games Video games Videogames Computer games Electronic games Digital games

Multimedia

1 Based on their English welcome page, since most of the website and publications are only available in Japanese.

2 As it is complicated to assess the terminology employed by most gamers, the name and general interface of a popular entertainment product rating website and of four popular gaming forums were examined. Results were coherent with the researcher’s experience in terms of naming the abovementioned concept.

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Table 1. Terminological divergences on naming a generic concept in English

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Some terminological inconsistencies may be noticed among the productions of a same author/organization. For instance, in its 2008 consumer study, the ISFE used the two-word form

“video game”, whereas it spelt it in one word in its 2012 version, frequently using the hypernym

“games” in the report itself. Similarly, in its 2010 “Essential Facts about the Computer and Video Game Industry”, the ESA made a distinction between “computer and video games”, using both terms together throughout the report, thus deeming that neither is generic enough.

Yet, the 2017 version, though also featuring both terms in its title, clearly favours the option

“video game” as the most generic by using it consistently on its own throughout the report.

These instances clearly show that the terminology in the area remains unstable and keeps evolving alongside the products it covers.

Given this “terminological heterogeneity” (O’Hagan and Mangiron, 2013, p. 65), various arguments were examined in order to settle for one term in this paper. As exemplified in the beginning of the work, we finally decided to keep the term “video game” with the hypernym “game” being used as a shortened version. This choice was dictated by the large dominance of the term both among scholars and in marketing campaigns (O’Hagan and Mangiron, 2013), the media and, above all, gamers themselves, both in forums and in everyday life. This last point is crucial since this category of population is the primary focus of this study.

On top of that, although according to Raessens and Golstein (2005, quoted by O’Hagan and Mangiron, 2013, p. 64), “video games” is mostly used to describe games operated on consoles, this definition is still highly debated. Furthermore, as O’Hagan and Mangiron emphasized, “the division between game consoles and computers is increasingly blurred” (2013, p. 64) as there are more and more so-called cross-platform games, i.e. games that are released on various platforms. Thus, contrary to O’Hagan and Mangiron (ibid., p. 65), choosing to use the term

“video games” did not imply a stronger focus on console games but was to be understood in a general sense considering all the above-mentioned arguments.

Furthermore, for the purpose of this research, following O’Hagan and Mangiron (2013, p. 66), the denominations “players” and “gamers” will be used as synonyms.

After settling on the terms that are to be used throughout the thesis and distinguishing games according to the platform they may be operated on, we shall turn to a different way of classifying games, separating two categories that may entail different localisation processes.

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