5 ms·

We Need a New Term for Video Games

16 points by donohoe 5y ago

leetrout 5y ago
https://archive.is/a7nNz https://archive.is/a7nNz
dr_orpheus 5y ago
The author of this article seems to think that social interaction in video games is a new thing. > many newer games blur the lines between video games and other types of social activities. Pokémon Go, Fortnite and Among Us... I agree that video games are reaching a wider audience now, but the big online multiplayer networks have been active for a couple decades now. For years for me, catching up with long distance friends has often been over a video game. It's a low social stress situation when you have something to focus on and talk about, but can also catch up on what's been going on in each others lives.
- wldcordeiro 5y ago
  Even non-long distance friends it's been a great way. The pandemic reinforced that. I had friends start playing games they never did before and I even started playing some I hadn't so we could socialize.
- Hamuko 5y ago
  Yeah, this is nothing new. I would log into World of Warcraft in 2008 just to be in the guild chat.
- gota 5y ago
  The author does not play video games, apparently. And (I hope) I'm not gatekeeping - she states it herself in the article: > "I’m excited for this development, even though my own avid video game playing ended in the era of BrickBreaker for the Blackberry." So it's likely she has not followed what games were, are or will be through the decades that turned them into major cultural phenomena. I wonder why she felt compelled to write a piece about something that is not part of her universe when there are so many journalists out there with plenty of experience...? I mean, it's one thing if you decide to write about niche stuff being an outsider; but trying to discuss (and influence) terminology of a field that is, by any metric, completely mainstrean... just seems superfluous
  - BitwiseFool 5y ago
    She had to meet an article quota and this is the best she came up with when faced with her writers block.
  - mrguyorama 5y ago
    The worst part about all this is that video games as a social network or social medium has been around since at least the late eighties! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_(video_game)
- cassianoleal 5y ago
  But even before the social aspects went online and remote, they were already there. The arcades of 20-30 years ago were a place to meet friends and make new ones, playing games, competing. Then we'd meet at each other's houses for FIFA/NBA/NHL championships, to play Street Fighter or Mario together, etc. Then there were the LAN parties, where friends would take their desktops with big CRT monitors so they could share a low-latency LAN for multiplayer gaming, whilst being able to talk to each other. It's really just that much of this is now online rather than in person, like many other activities.
flohofwoe 5y ago
Hmm. Games are already artificially split into so many different genres and subgenres that another "term" is the last thing we need. And outside of the relatively narrow "AAA blockbuster" genre, gaming has always been diverse and weird and wonderful (look at the Llamasoft games as just one example). It's only the "culture haute couture" which seems to have a problem with the rather pedestrian term "video games".
Hokusai 5y ago
> I know that games aren’t all stimulating paragons of human social connection, but it feels as if something exciting is happening. There’s more mushing together to arrive at new digital forms that emphasize interaction rather than passive reading, watching or listening. Social gamification could be the name. So, name it, and then ban it before all our lives become a rat wheel with micro transactions that trigger micro dosis of endorphins. Facebook likes or Twitter shared are still coarse approaches at what it can become.
matt_s 5y ago
I think we can keep the same term and socialize the term so it is more acceptable to those that might have a stereotype in their mind. Socialization via playing a game with friends goes back really far into human history I would imagine. Video based games are a different medium but the interactions are similar. It would be great for that journalist to do some deeper research on demographics of people playing games and if there are correlations with demographics and what types of games and platforms. I am going to guess there is a large untapped market for socialization capable games that aren't shooter/killer/conqueror types of games.
ddingus 5y ago
I would use the term interactive game for those games that do not include a video component.
ASalazarMX 5y ago
I would suggest "Monte Carlo Gaming", at least for a subset of these "revolutionary" games. The social aspect is leveraged to guilt the player into participation, skill is deliberately secondary to randomness and repetition, making them mostly gambling, and every interaction is recorded and statistically aggregated to extract the maximum profit in the form of microtransactions. This is the kind of games Las Vegas would be proud of.
- dragontamer 5y ago
  In video game circles, the term is "Gacha-games", from the Japanese Gachapon (which is a Japanese slot machine game). That most of the game games came from Korea / Japan / China probably biases the term in favor of the Japanese term. > This is the kind of games Las Vegas would be proud of. IIRC, the reason why Las Vegas slot machines don't do this is that its illegal for slot machines to do this. In contrast, the Japanese Gachapon were not subject to gameplay rules, and have grown quite elaborate. They're still random-chance slot-machines at heart, but they do a decent job of hiding it. Similarly, a "Gacha-game" is a game that has a slot-machine at its heart, but does a good job hiding it. ------- Example Gacha-games are Fate/Go, Fire Emblem Heroes, etc. etc. You get a random hero to join your team (and everyone knows who the best heroes are)... but the hero selection process is fully random. "Encouraging" players to sink money into more and more tries to get the hero they want.
  - Hamuko 5y ago
    >Gachapon (which is a Japanese slot machine game) Gachapon are capsule vending machines, which unlike slot machines always spit some kind out of a prize out of them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gashapon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gashapon
    - dragontamer 5y ago
      > Gachapon are capsule vending machines, which unlike slot machines always spit some kind out of a prize out of them. Except when you get a 1-star hero in (insert mobile game here), that "prize" is virtually meaningless. I guess you're right in that there's "always a prize". But that doesn't mean that every prize is worthwhile.
dougmwne 5y ago
A nice piece of low effort fluff from the NYT. I'm not sure if there's any particular industry shift going on right now. There's some interest in cloud rendering from the big players and now most recently from Netflix, but it's not yet clear if this will have any significant impact or will lure away PC or Console players. The mobile phone side is pretty well established. Streaming is established. The next gen of consoles and PCs are being hampered by chip and GPU shortages. The Quest 2 is intriguing and has some half decent sales, but it's not clear if VR/AR are going to go mainstream any time this decade. Don't think I see any inflection points, but that's just me.
dragontamer 5y ago
Any old Maple Story / Neopet players here? We all know those games sucked (Neopets took a while before they added those Flash minigames and even then, those minigames weren't really ever that great). We stayed for the community and social environment. Even back in the 90s / early 00s, there were lots of "games" which were primarily a social experience rather than a gameplay experience. Maybe Club Penguin and Eve Online also fall into this category... I never got into MUDs, but some friends of mine described (some) MUDs as glorified IRC chat rooms where you play a bad game with friends. I expect this "social game" has been going on since maybe the 80s.
- MonaroVXR 5y ago
  Yes, MapleStory, I have met friends that I have on Facebook right now and MapleStory was amazing for me, the activity called Party Quest(running with people through several Quest at time basis was something else) I played MapleStory around ~2006 USA because the European servers weren't available. Good times, no, really.
Zababa 5y ago
> We may actually need to change our terminology because many new digital games are different from how we might traditionally define and imagine video games — those cinematic worlds of PlayStation or Xbox. The "we" here seems to only apply to the author, and people to whom "my own avid video game playing ended in the era of BrickBreaker for the Blackberry". This is not to judge/gatekeep the author, but they're talking about something they don't know. > Pokémon Go, Fortnite and Among Us are video games, but they are also hangouts for friends, pop culture moments, opportunities for political organizing and more. So was Call of Duty 10 years ago, MMOs 20 years ago, etc. There's nothing new here, apart from games getting more popular (and thus being considered "pop" culture). > I know that games aren’t all stimulating paragons of human social connection, but it feels as if something exciting is happening. I wouldn't agree here. I have fond memories of moments shared with friends on games, it feels a bit like we lived our own adventure, not unlike a trip really. For example, let's take Minecraft. Sure, our minecraft server doesn't "exists" in physical space the way a city exists. But we lived here. Real people spent real time and had real interactions, that left "physical" traces. The article should be something like "I discovered that my views of video games was really limited and incomplete compared to what's really happening", or something like that. There's no shame in not knowing everything, and sometimes a new way of looking at things from the outside can be precious. But for that, you have to recognize your own limits, instead of pretending to be seeing a new social phenomenon.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
alisonkisk 5y ago
The new term should be "games", now that "video" isn't the novelty it was in 1977.
- timbit42 5y ago
  How about eGames to differentiate from sports and board and card games?
armoredkitten 5y ago
I think the author ends up missing something about the social aspect that has shifted in video games. Other comments rightly point out that social interaction in video games is not at all a new phenomenon. But I do think the rise of Twitch streaming has legitimately changed the way we interact with video games (and with each other in the context of video games). Streaming and watching streams is incredibly popular among Gen Z (and earlier generations to a lesser extent), and that creates different dynamics. There are more interactions in the vein of a streamer interacting with fans, rather than a bunch of people collectively playing a game together -- though there is still that too. These streaming channels also have communities that build up around them, so people watching are interacting with each other as well. In some sense, gaming has moved from being solely an "entertainment-by-playing" industry, and added a level of "entertainment-by-watching" as well. I have fond memories of watching my friends play a game (as we passed the controller back and forth between levels/deaths), sitting on the floor in front of the TV with each other. But streaming communities focused around watching others play games feels like a new social phenomenon to me.
theklr 5y ago
Isn’t there already a term? Experiential Entertainment. Most of the suits prefer this title already, and allows video games to be a subset, as it’s also used for xR as well.

16 points by donohoe 5y ago

https://archive.is/a7nNz https://archive.is/a7nNz

The author of this article seems to think that social interaction in video games is a new thing. > many newer games blur the lines between video games and other types of social activities. Pokémon Go, Fortnite and Among Us... I agree that video games are reaching a wider audience now, but the big online multiplayer networks have been active for a couple decades now. For years for me, catching up with long distance friends has often been over a video game. It's a low social stress situation when you have something to focus on and talk about, but can also catch up on what's been going on in each others lives.

wldcordeiro 5y ago
Even non-long distance friends it's been a great way. The pandemic reinforced that. I had friends start playing games they never did before and I even started playing some I hadn't so we could socialize.
Hamuko 5y ago
Yeah, this is nothing new. I would log into World of Warcraft in 2008 just to be in the guild chat.
gota 5y ago
The author does not play video games, apparently. And (I hope) I'm not gatekeeping - she states it herself in the article: > "I’m excited for this development, even though my own avid video game playing ended in the era of BrickBreaker for the Blackberry." So it's likely she has not followed what games were, are or will be through the decades that turned them into major cultural phenomena. I wonder why she felt compelled to write a piece about something that is not part of her universe when there are so many journalists out there with plenty of experience...? I mean, it's one thing if you decide to write about niche stuff being an outsider; but trying to discuss (and influence) terminology of a field that is, by any metric, completely mainstrean... just seems superfluous
- BitwiseFool 5y ago
  She had to meet an article quota and this is the best she came up with when faced with her writers block.
- mrguyorama 5y ago
  The worst part about all this is that video games as a social network or social medium has been around since at least the late eighties! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_(video_game)
cassianoleal 5y ago
But even before the social aspects went online and remote, they were already there. The arcades of 20-30 years ago were a place to meet friends and make new ones, playing games, competing. Then we'd meet at each other's houses for FIFA/NBA/NHL championships, to play Street Fighter or Mario together, etc. Then there were the LAN parties, where friends would take their desktops with big CRT monitors so they could share a low-latency LAN for multiplayer gaming, whilst being able to talk to each other. It's really just that much of this is now online rather than in person, like many other activities.

flohofwoe 5y ago

Hmm. Games are already artificially split into so many different genres and subgenres that another "term" is the last thing we need. And outside of the relatively narrow "AAA blockbuster" genre, gaming has always been diverse and weird and wonderful (look at the Llamasoft games as just one example). It's only the "culture haute couture" which seems to have a problem with the rather pedestrian term "video games".

Hokusai 5y ago

> I know that games aren’t all stimulating paragons of human social connection, but it feels as if something exciting is happening. There’s more mushing together to arrive at new digital forms that emphasize interaction rather than passive reading, watching or listening. Social gamification could be the name. So, name it, and then ban it before all our lives become a rat wheel with micro transactions that trigger micro dosis of endorphins. Facebook likes or Twitter shared are still coarse approaches at what it can become.

matt_s 5y ago

I think we can keep the same term and socialize the term so it is more acceptable to those that might have a stereotype in their mind. Socialization via playing a game with friends goes back really far into human history I would imagine. Video based games are a different medium but the interactions are similar. It would be great for that journalist to do some deeper research on demographics of people playing games and if there are correlations with demographics and what types of games and platforms. I am going to guess there is a large untapped market for socialization capable games that aren't shooter/killer/conqueror types of games.

ddingus 5y ago

I would use the term interactive game for those games that do not include a video component.

ASalazarMX 5y ago

I would suggest "Monte Carlo Gaming", at least for a subset of these "revolutionary" games. The social aspect is leveraged to guilt the player into participation, skill is deliberately secondary to randomness and repetition, making them mostly gambling, and every interaction is recorded and statistically aggregated to extract the maximum profit in the form of microtransactions. This is the kind of games Las Vegas would be proud of.

dragontamer 5y ago
In video game circles, the term is "Gacha-games", from the Japanese Gachapon (which is a Japanese slot machine game). That most of the game games came from Korea / Japan / China probably biases the term in favor of the Japanese term. > This is the kind of games Las Vegas would be proud of. IIRC, the reason why Las Vegas slot machines don't do this is that its illegal for slot machines to do this. In contrast, the Japanese Gachapon were not subject to gameplay rules, and have grown quite elaborate. They're still random-chance slot-machines at heart, but they do a decent job of hiding it. Similarly, a "Gacha-game" is a game that has a slot-machine at its heart, but does a good job hiding it. ------- Example Gacha-games are Fate/Go, Fire Emblem Heroes, etc. etc. You get a random hero to join your team (and everyone knows who the best heroes are)... but the hero selection process is fully random. "Encouraging" players to sink money into more and more tries to get the hero they want.
- Hamuko 5y ago
  >Gachapon (which is a Japanese slot machine game) Gachapon are capsule vending machines, which unlike slot machines always spit some kind out of a prize out of them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gashapon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gashapon
  - dragontamer 5y ago
    > Gachapon are capsule vending machines, which unlike slot machines always spit some kind out of a prize out of them. Except when you get a 1-star hero in (insert mobile game here), that "prize" is virtually meaningless. I guess you're right in that there's "always a prize". But that doesn't mean that every prize is worthwhile.

dougmwne 5y ago

A nice piece of low effort fluff from the NYT. I'm not sure if there's any particular industry shift going on right now. There's some interest in cloud rendering from the big players and now most recently from Netflix, but it's not yet clear if this will have any significant impact or will lure away PC or Console players. The mobile phone side is pretty well established. Streaming is established. The next gen of consoles and PCs are being hampered by chip and GPU shortages. The Quest 2 is intriguing and has some half decent sales, but it's not clear if VR/AR are going to go mainstream any time this decade. Don't think I see any inflection points, but that's just me.

dragontamer 5y ago

Any old Maple Story / Neopet players here? We all know those games sucked (Neopets took a while before they added those Flash minigames and even then, those minigames weren't really ever that great). We stayed for the community and social environment. Even back in the 90s / early 00s, there were lots of "games" which were primarily a social experience rather than a gameplay experience. Maybe Club Penguin and Eve Online also fall into this category... I never got into MUDs, but some friends of mine described (some) MUDs as glorified IRC chat rooms where you play a bad game with friends. I expect this "social game" has been going on since maybe the 80s.

MonaroVXR 5y ago
Yes, MapleStory, I have met friends that I have on Facebook right now and MapleStory was amazing for me, the activity called Party Quest(running with people through several Quest at time basis was something else) I played MapleStory around ~2006 USA because the European servers weren't available. Good times, no, really.

Zababa 5y ago

> We may actually need to change our terminology because many new digital games are different from how we might traditionally define and imagine video games — those cinematic worlds of PlayStation or Xbox. The "we" here seems to only apply to the author, and people to whom "my own avid video game playing ended in the era of BrickBreaker for the Blackberry". This is not to judge/gatekeep the author, but they're talking about something they don't know. > Pokémon Go, Fortnite and Among Us are video games, but they are also hangouts for friends, pop culture moments, opportunities for political organizing and more. So was Call of Duty 10 years ago, MMOs 20 years ago, etc. There's nothing new here, apart from games getting more popular (and thus being considered "pop" culture). > I know that games aren’t all stimulating paragons of human social connection, but it feels as if something exciting is happening. I wouldn't agree here. I have fond memories of moments shared with friends on games, it feels a bit like we lived our own adventure, not unlike a trip really. For example, let's take Minecraft. Sure, our minecraft server doesn't "exists" in physical space the way a city exists. But we lived here. Real people spent real time and had real interactions, that left "physical" traces. The article should be something like "I discovered that my views of video games was really limited and incomplete compared to what's really happening", or something like that. There's no shame in not knowing everything, and sometimes a new way of looking at things from the outside can be precious. But for that, you have to recognize your own limits, instead of pretending to be seeing a new social phenomenon.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

alisonkisk 5y ago

The new term should be "games", now that "video" isn't the novelty it was in 1977.

timbit42 5y ago
How about eGames to differentiate from sports and board and card games?

armoredkitten 5y ago

I think the author ends up missing something about the social aspect that has shifted in video games. Other comments rightly point out that social interaction in video games is not at all a new phenomenon. But I do think the rise of Twitch streaming has legitimately changed the way we interact with video games (and with each other in the context of video games). Streaming and watching streams is incredibly popular among Gen Z (and earlier generations to a lesser extent), and that creates different dynamics. There are more interactions in the vein of a streamer interacting with fans, rather than a bunch of people collectively playing a game together -- though there is still that too. These streaming channels also have communities that build up around them, so people watching are interacting with each other as well. In some sense, gaming has moved from being solely an "entertainment-by-playing" industry, and added a level of "entertainment-by-watching" as well. I have fond memories of watching my friends play a game (as we passed the controller back and forth between levels/deaths), sitting on the floor in front of the TV with each other. But streaming communities focused around watching others play games feels like a new social phenomenon to me.

theklr 5y ago

Isn’t there already a term? Experiential Entertainment. Most of the suits prefer this title already, and allows video games to be a subset, as it’s also used for xR as well.