I say videogame, you say video game. what’s the difference?

Dec ´05
15 10:15 am
  • Posted by: Bryan-Mitchell Young
  • Category: rants

Over at Buzzcut, there is a post titled, “Videogames: Closing the Annoying Gap” which argues that “videogame” is preferable to “video game.” I couldn’t agree more. I’ve been thinking about this for a while and I just haven’t gotten around to posting about it. It is quite annoying to always have to search for both terms. It is also equally annoying to do a Google search for “videogame” and see “Did you mean: video game” but search for “video game” and not be asked if I meant “videogame.” (Of course there is also the term “computer game” which also gets used from time to time)

I think I prefer one word over two simply because it emphasizes the inseparability of the video from the game. I would actually prefer some sort of gamevideo term, but that isn’t a word in english. I also think using “video game” sort of makes it two separate things and that they aren’t a real synthesis of both.

The author of the buzzcut article argues that the difference is primarily geographic:

In the U.S., the habit it to write video games, as two words. In Europe, I usually see videogames.

I’m not sure I agree. I think the difference is deeper than that. Take a look at these search results on Google Scholar: “videogame” and “video game.” See a pattern in the results? Most of the search results for “videogame” are people who are actually researching videogames. On the other hand, however, most of the search results for “video game” are people who are really researching violence and the effects of videogames.

I noticed this a few months ago and the reason I haven’t posted on it earlier is that I am not quite sure what to make of it. I haven’t taken enough rhetoric courses (and no, there are no media, film, ethnography, or performance pages even though they are supposed to be equal parts of the department. But I digress…) to understand what difference that space really means. I suspect that it has to do with a kind of literacy or even respect for the medium. Those who use “videogame” have a different kind of literacy regarding the medium that those who tend to prefer “video game” do not. (Roger Ebert used “video game” in his review of Doom which started the whole deal with him). Of course I’m not saying that just because you use one term over the other means that you are smarter or more serious about videogames. However, I do think that it is interesting that the vast majority of violence stuff uses the two word phrase while perhaps not the vast majority, but a majority nonetheless, uses the one word phrase.

So anyone got any ideas? What is the meaning behind using one word over the other especially when they sound the same? This isn’t like “terrorists” versus “freedom fighters” or “invasion of Iraq” or “liberation of Iraq” but I do think that it is a similar kind of thing going on. A rhetoritician! A rhetoritician! My blog for a rhetoritician!

About Bryan-Mitchell Young

On Art and Violence

Now that the semester is winding down I’ve got a bit of time to blog (and write my last couple dissertation chapters and then revise all of them and write the intro and conclusion chapters…). A couple things have happened (and are in the process of happening) that have the gaming world buzzing: Roger Ebert wrote about videogames again and the Supreme Court is taking up the case of California’s law forbidding the sale of videogames to minors.

Regarding Ebert, he ends by asking, “Why are gamers so intensely concerned, anyway, that games be defined as art?” which echoes my own call for all of us to stop caring about “art.” Tons and tons of people have tried to convince him he’s wrong — so many in fact that I don’t even want to bother hunting down links to some of the stories that do it. I’m not interested in arguing with him because I don’t really care if he thinks games are art or not.

However, it is very disconcerting that he seems to think that he can judge games by looking at screenshots. Would he write a review of a film based on the text on the back of the dvd box? That’s pretty ignorant to think that he can judge games in that manner.

Unfortunately, this is just the top of the iceberg because look at the picture at the top of his post. Now I have no idea if he picked that picture or not. I would say that he probably didn’t but he did pick the rest of the pictures in the post so perhaps he did. Regardless, the picture didn’t just appear by itself. Someone chose that picture. What is in that picture? A kid. So someone whether it was Ebert of just some random web guy, wanted to pick a picture of a gamer and they picked a kid — once again perpetuating the stereotype that games are for kids and in this instance also seemingly indicating that games are in and of themselves childish. Wow. That’s pretty sad.

OK, now onto the Supreme Court…

I’m pretty confident that the Supreme Court will say this law is unconstitutional not only because lower courts have consistently ruled that laws regulating videogame sales are unconstitutional but also because of the recent Supreme Court decision declaring a law banning animal cruelty videos unconstitutional.

Today the Diane Rehm Show had a segment on the Supreme Court taking on the Videogame law regulating videogame sales and had Leland Yee, the California politician behind the bill, Craig Anderson, the guy who has never met a form of media that didn’t cause aggression, and a couple other people I don’t remember. Now, I’ve previously criticized Anderson’s vague use of the term “aggression” so I was pleasantly surprised that Diane Rehm’s first question to him was “what is the difference between agression and violence?” Anderson initially tried to avoid answering the question but then Rehm re-asked the question and Anderson admitted that while violence is generally understood as an extreme form of aggression, it is very rare for aggression to actually turn into violence. I think that it really key because in that statement Anderson (who also in this CNN video says that videogame-caused “aggression” isn’t really any worse than film or television-causes “aggression” ) says that videogames don’t really make kids violent.

If the most well known person who thinks videogames cause aggression doesn’t think they make you violent then that makes the case that they are so bad that we need laws against selling them much harder to prove.

Personally, I look forward to the SCOTUS shutting down these kinds of laws once and for all.

…well that and Jack Thompson getting involved and saying some crazy things…

Movies can be scary too…

Allow me a non-videogame-related rant here… It is still about moral panics surrounding children and media though so it could easily have been about videogames instead of movies.

I caught a story on the local NPR station last night about someone threatening a lawsuit against Redbox because they sell “R-rated” movies. I searched for something about the story and apparently it got picked up by a few local news outlets including the Indianapolis Fox Affiliate and the Louisville ABC Affiliate. According to stories the whole thing is being stirred up by Vanderburgh Country Prosecutor Stan Levco.

Of course there’s two little details that neither of the two stories linked to above or any of the other stories I saw seemed to mention: First, The MPAA rating system “is a voluntary system” and the ratings are not legally enforced. The only possible grounds for a lawsuit that there would be would be under obscenity or pornography laws. Levco almost certainly knows this. So why is he causing a stir? That leads to the second missing detail: Levco is running for re-election.

So this is just a ploy to get into the headlines so that Levco can say he is “fighting for families” and concerned about “family values” without having to do anything. The minute I heard this story I immediately wondered if the guy was up for re-election because that’s the only time public officials try to start legal proceedings related to media. I guess Levco couldn’t find any easy videogame targets.

Heaven forbid that any of the media outlets that aired this story would take two minutes to wonder why Levco was doing this or anything… That’s some good reportering there…

1 Comments Showing 50 most recent
  1. GBGames

    In the book “Difficult Questions About Videogames”, a number of the people responding to the questions would make the comment, “I don’t think it should be called videogames.”

    So a number of people “in the know” also use video game and were fairly vocal about not using videogame.

    You’ll also note that “boardgame” isn’t a word: http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=boardgame

    If boardgame isn’t a word, I don’t think videogame should be a word either. If videogame should be a word, computergame should be a word as well, and I think we can all agree it shouldn’t be.

    Regarding the use by different people: I think that “video game” should be used so that when people ARE looking for info on violence, they’ll come across more than just the works of people who are writing that there is a direct link between video games and violence.

    On the other hand, if a universally-accepted style guide actually says that it should be “videogame”, then that’s what should be used. I just don’t see a reason to use it when other words historically haven’t supported it. No one plays cardgames, which constitutes an entire subclass of games. Video games aren’t uniquely special to requiring a single word.

    But then, I haven’t exactly given much thought to the debate. B-)