Early names for "video games," and Death to "Videogames"

[LESS T_T]

Via RPS, this is somewhat interesting article that explores how people called video games in the early days of "video games": https://gamehistory.org/a-video-game-by-any-other-name/

A Video Game By Any Other Name

In July 1976, a reporter named Wendy Walker wrote an article for the Associated Press about a new arcade game she’d seen children playing in a shopping mall. The machine, Exidy’s Death Race, featured player-controlled cars scoring points by running over what appeared, to the reporter, to be human beings. (In fact, both the manual and the instructions on the cabinet called them ‘gremlins’.)

In Walker’s article — possibly the first occurrence of a video game being called out for inappropriate content — she struck a tone of moderate disapproval, comparing the sound effect played when a gremlin was run over to ‘the scream of a child’.

Over the next few days, over a hundred newspapers across the United States would syndicate the story. It was a ready-made package; it even came with a photo. The biggest decision an editor had to make was the headline that would run above it.

Which meant America’s newspaper editors had a problem: what do you call an arcade game before the term ‘arcade game’ emerges as a standard?

A review of the headlines written for this single article exposes a striking lack of consensus. The breadth of terminology used in 1976 gives us a fascinating insight into the brief period when arcade games had begun to find their way into public life, but before we’d figured out what to call them.

Spoiler

The Prosaic Headline


Some editors chose technically descriptive, though uninspired, terms:

(The Bee, Danville, Virginia)

(Mexico Ledger, Mexico, Missouri)

(Argus-Leader, Sioux Falls, South Dakota)

(Iowa City Press-Citizen)


If we don’t count the terse, headline-friendly ‘game’ (which was sometimes, oddly, wrapped in scare quotes), then the term most often employed might be surprising: the short-lived ‘computerized game’ had the lead (with ‘computer game’ a long way behind).

(Enquirer and News, Battle Creek, Michigan)

(Stevens Point Journal, Washington)

(Courier News, Blytheville, Arkansas)

(The Oshkosh Northwestern, Wisconsin)




The Contextual Description
Other editors opted to define the machine not by its nature, but by the locations that it might be found.

(Ironwood Daily Globe, Michigan)

(The Ithaca Journal, New York)

(Sentinel-Star, Orlando, Florida)

(Journal-News, Hamilton, Ohio)




The Uninformed Author
For many newspapers, this article might have been one of the first they’d ever printed about a video game. The headlines their editors chose could betray either a dogged determination to make a comparison to something their readers already knew about, or a lack of understanding of the fundamentals of the topic.

(The News-Item, Shamokin, Pennsylvania)

(The Advocate, Newark, Ohio)

(Naples Daily News, Naples, Florida)




The Glimpse of the Editor
Some headlines provided unintended insights into the people who wrote them. From the dismissive tone of the Mexia Daily News…

(The Mexia Daily News, Mexia, Texas)
…to the making-up-wordsness of the Colorado Springs Gazette-Telegraph…

(Colorado Springs Gazette-Telegraph, Colorado Springs, Colorado)
…while the editor of the Anniston Star was evidently so keen on finding a headline that would fit into the column width that the result was, if not illuminating, strangely minimalist and poetic.

(Anniston Star, Anniston, Alabama)


The Overpromise
And some headlines read more like a report of a bizarre accident or crime.

(The Daily Intelligencer, Doylestown, Pennsylvania)

(Santa Ana Register, Santa Ana, California)

(The Eagle, Bryan-College Station, Texas)


The Conspicuously Absent
Curiously, the names which in retrospect seem the most obvious were neglected entirely. ‘Video game’ wasn’t an unknown expression; by early 1976 it was regularly used in Magnavox and Atari advertising. But perhaps its association with home consoles had led people to think that was the only valid usage; no editor referred to Death Race by these words.

The second surprising omission was ‘arcade game’, a phrase that through the 1950s and ’60s was popularly used for mechanical amusements like pinball and shooting games.

A toy store advertises an ‘arcade game’ in 1963. (Akron Beacon Journal, Akron, Ohio)
But in the minds of 1976’s editors, it wasn’t yet associated with the newer breed of electronic amusements. Even with arcades mentioned in the article, no-one found their way to describe Death Race as an arcade game.



A Short-Lived Uncertainty
Six months after Wendy Walker’s article, a second round of Death Race news coverage was ignited when the National Safety Council condemned the game. In contrast to the earlier story, there were signs that certain names had begun to gain ground in the public consciousness:

(Press and Sun-Bulletin, Binghamton, New York)

(Akron Beacon Journal, Akron, Ohio)
It took a few more years for these terms to become predominant. By the time of the Space Invaders craze, ‘video game’ and ‘arcade game’ required no explanation; most of the alternate terms had almost disappeared.

It’s easy to look at history as an inevitable progression toward the present day. But, as a look back at the summer of 1976 illustrates, the terminology we use wasn’t predestined. Maybe if things had gone slightly differently, you’d be reading this article on a website with a different name.

This reminded me that this great blog post by game designer Greg Costikyan in 2003, where he explains how "videogame" is a stupid term and why it deserves to die. So, the above article is my excuse to post this lost blog post on Codex: https://web.archive.org/web/20160410153247/http://www.costik.com/weblog/2003_02_01_blogchive.html

Death to "Videogames"

Recently, doing a technical review of a book Chris Crawford is writing, I took issue with his definition of videogame. He defined the term to mean "a console game."

That certainly isn't how it was originally used; it was coined to refer to this new breed of games appearing in bars and arcades everywhere, that relied on electronics to project an image on a screen--quite unlike the conventional pinball games and arcade amusements of yore. They were different, or so it seemed, because they involved video; they were video games, which, in the manner of all two-nouned English terms, ultimately became conjoined, until they were videogames.

When the first home game devices appeared--actually not the first, since Magnovox Odyssey predated Pong, but the memory of the press is fleeting--the games they ran, too, came to be called videogames.

Even before Pong, of course, people at academic computing centers had programmed little games for their amusement and the amusement of their friends; but these, by and large, ran on devices either attached to paper teletypes or monitors that displayed only text. Because the salient characteristic of these games was that, unlike an earlier generation of board and card games, they ran on computers, they were termed "computer games."

The first rash of games for "microcomputers" (that is, home computers), too, were mainly text-based, though some began to play with graphics--but they remained "computer games," at least for a time.

For many years, the two remained pretty distinct; even the development communities saw little movement between each other. In the US, after the Atari crash, computer gaming (and a greatly lessened arcade) was all that remained of digital gaming, and the first generation of computer game developers came to their fame. Then Nintendo proved that Atari was not the end, and the rebirth of console gaming began.

As the graphics capabilities of home PCs improved, the distinction between console and PC games began to fade--though even now, some distinctions can be drawn between them. E.g., you find few platformers on PCs, and strategy games basically don't work with the limitations of a console controller. But for all intents and purposes, today there are four main home game platforms: PS II, XBox, GameCube, and PC.

"Videogame" has, for the prevailing culture, gradually become a term that encompasses all digital games; Grand Theft Auto III is a videogame, and so is Quake Arena.

Oddly enough, the reverse transition has occurred in the academic community; academics look at digital games, and realize that it's the processor, not the use of visuals, that distinguishes digital from non-digital games. Consequently, they tend to eschew the term "videogame," and use "computer game" to describe both console and PC games.

And in the industry itself, you almost never hear anyone talk about "videogames." They aren't videogames, after all; except for the occasional cut scene, we almost never use video. We use images rendered on the fly--and the images are the surface of the game, the interface, the cotton candy. The meat of the game, the heart of it, is in the underlying code. These are games that run on processors, not on magnetic tape; algorithm and interactivity is what they are.

Instead, the industry tends to talk about the platform; there are console games, and there are PC games. And the PC is really just another platform--with its own peculiar characteristics, to be sure.

"Videogame" is a term that deserves to die; it actually says nothing about what the games it describes actually are. It won't die, of course; it's too widespread in the prevailing culture. But both the academics and the industry are right: video isn't what digital games are about. Indeed, given the visual crudity of the original videogames, it's hard to believe that even non-gamers could have thought that "video" was the single factor about those games that needed mentioning. But of course, the prevailing culture has never understood the game qua game.

Still and all, if you care about games, expunge the word from your vocabulary. We play games--and digital games are not so different from paper games. You can slice games any number of ways; by the platform on which they run: by genre; by visual style; by audience appeal; by artistic intent; by culture of origin; by medium. In all these cases, you can make fine, informed distinctions between different kinds of games, and the terminology you use to draw those distinctions can be enlightening. The term "videogame" has no such dignity; it draws a crude and indefensible line between games with graphics (like say, Pong) and games without (like, say, Zork)--or with graphics that don't show up on a screen (like, say, Risk). A peculiar line, indeed, when you realize that Pong has more in common with table tennis than with, say, Final Fantasy X.

If we are to understand games, we must learn to make meaningful distinctions. The term "videogame" makes none.

And you know the history. The name has stuck.

 

[agentorange]

"If we are to understand games, we must learn to make meaningful distinctions. The term "videogame" makes none."

video = moving images displayed on a screen.
game = game

makes sense and distinguishes it from boardgame, pen and paper games, etc.

 

[Ash]

The next step that is sorely needed is classification of the interactive experience/novel and its segregation from video games/the video game industry.
Many walking sims or visual novel "games" like Telltale aren't games. There needs to be game rules and challenge for that.
More and more the industry focuses on graphics, cinematics and storytelling. The game part has very much fallen to the wayside, so that's why this distinction is important to me.
Can all the cinematics/graphics whores, storyfaggots etc stop ruining what makes games unique as a result of their shitty priorities and step aside? Video Games still need those things to be the special medium we all love, but they should never overshadow the core to the extent is has gotten today, collectively.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

But are video games art?

 

[Glaucon]

The usage of common phrases and words isn't something that can be fully, rationally controlled. These things have a life of their own.

 

[agentorange]

The next step that is sorely needed is classification of the interactive experience/novel and its segregation from video games/the video game industry.

Many walking sims or visual novel "games" like Telltale aren't games. There needs to be game rules and challenge for that.

More and more the industry focuses on graphics, cinematics and storytelling. The game part has very much fallen to the wayside, so that's why this distinction is important to me.
Can all the cinematics/graphics whores, storyfaggots etc stop ruining what makes games unique as a result of their shitty priorities and step aside?
Video Games still need those things to be the special medium we all love, but they should never overshadow the core.

Well, the funny thing is that the classification of Visual Novel already exists, like you point out. And before that Sound Novel (some still insist on using this term when they have less interaction than a Visual Novel). In Japan at least there have been cases where certain games were denied the classification of Visual Novel because they had too much gameplay (like the Silent Hill interactive story thing that had to be called a Play Novel because it had mini-games). So we already have these classifications, it's just for some reason people see being called a "game" as some kind of absolute end goal, despite the fact that being labeled a game in itself doesn't imply any measure of quality. It's funny that it's people like John Walker who insist on blurring the lines of these classifications; I am certain he would freak out if you dared to say that one of his favorite walking simulators didn't qualify as a "game," while in the next sentence he attacks the classification of game itself. To be fair I do think the classification of "Walking Sim" is pretty condescending and that's why people don't take to it well. You could just as easily call it something like a "Motion Novel."

 

[Ash]

There is classification and distinction, but it's more a genre classification and still falls under the video game umbrella: reviewed by the gaming press. Listed under "video games" in catalogues. Referred to in everyday speech/text as "games" and simply not recognised as not-games by the majority...

 

[Raghar]

I always used term "computer games", aka games that require powerful computing device to run.

 

[PorkBarrellGuy]

Will continue calling them video games solely because it chaps Costikyan's ass

 

[agentorange]

There is classification and distinction, but it's more a genre classification and still falls under the video game umbrella: reviewed by the gaming press. Listed under "video games" in catalogues. Referred to in everyday speech/text as "games" and simply not recognised as not-games by the majority...

At a certain point there is just always going to be a divide between the layman's use of certain terms and the more academic (for lack of a better term) or technical application of terms. For example in art history when the term "romantic" comes up it is referring to a very specific period and aesthetic movement, not to romantic comedies or books with Fabio on the cover--but this is the use that will generally come to mind if you mention romance to the average person on the street, and it would be pointless to get hung up on it. In the same sense "game" is just used as a convenient shorthand to most people, even if we personally prefer to use these terms more specifically when having deeper discussions about games. The gaming press is layman, they're not held to any kind of standards and they just function as an extension of the vast advertising machine of publishers.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

What about video games with Fabio on the cover?

 

[Ash]

snip.

I am aware the general public butcher the intended meaning of terms all the time and language evolves based on that. It's just I perceive non-games being classified as games to be a threat to the actual games, and that's why I am bitching about it.

 

[lophiaspis]

"Videogames" is not a medium. The medium is better described as computer simulations, with gamified simulations as a small subset of those. A lot of people get confused into thinking that challenge based interactivity, aka gameplay, is somehow an inherent part of the computer medium. But this presents a logical contradiction: How can it be a new medium that arose with computers, and at the same time a mere continuation of an activity that goes back to prehistory?

 

[J1M]

I like 'digital game' as an umbrella term. Also agree with efforts to distinguish digital entertainment with input responses from actual games.

 

[Bladeract]

Sounds like they want a more inclusive term that includes facebook games and other garbage. No thanks. If video game has any reason to go it's so that computer games won't be confused with the console garbage it's already confused with.

 

[Maggot]

gameo playo, kino, ludo, bing bing wahoo
all potential alternatives

 

[Bladeract]

At a certain point there is just always going to be a divide between the layman's use of certain terms and the more academic (for lack of a better term) or technical application of terms. For example in art history when the term "romantic" comes up it is referring to a very specific period and aesthetic movement, not to romantic comedies or books with Fabio on the cover--but this is the use that will generally come to mind if you mention romance to the average person on the street, and it would be pointless to get hung up on it. In the same sense "game" is just used as a convenient shorthand to most people, even if we personally prefer to use these terms more specifically when having deeper discussions about games. The gaming press is layman, they're not held to any kind of standards and they just function as an extension of the vast advertising machine of publishers.

So your a professional vidya gamer lol

 

[agentorange]

I am yes.

 

[flabbyjack]

I heard they used to be called 'interactive movies'

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[oddech_wymarlych_swiatow]

I always used term "computer games", aka games that require powerful computing device to run.

In Poland people still use this name because for long time Poles didn't even know what game console is. First consoles were introduces much longer after their original release dates (Atari 2600 clones - late '80, Famiclones - early '90) so they were considered as inferior hardware for lower class.

16 bit consoles were almost non existent (too expensive comparing to Famiclones and too limited comparing to PC/Amiga, just toys for spoiled brats). PSX/Saturn in '96 changed such point of view but 'computer games' term remained intact.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Videogames are dead. Videogames don't need to be your product.