Gameology: Commentary and Resources for the Game Studies Community

It's true that many Europeans use the compound word because of its equivalence in romance languages (cf. "videojuego").

But I use the term "videogame" for rhetorical reasons. Separating the words, in my opinion, suggests that videogames are merely games with some video screen or computer attached. But, I believe that videogames are fundamentally a computational medium, not just the extension of a medium like board or role-playing games (although there is also a genealogy there). I think that closing the space, in part, helps consolidate this concept. Personally, I'm only interested in gaming as it relates to computation. That doesn't mean I don't think gambling or board games or whatnot are useful, it just means that they are not my primary focus.

As for the argument that "videogame" implies video display, as Patrick suggests above, I don't really care. I'm more interested in common usage, and the fact is that people use "videogame" to refer to the kinds of artifacts I want to talk about. I think video qua television screen is a vestigial effect of the arcade era and nobody is really confused about it.

For the same reason I abhor terms like "interactive entertainment." I think inventing terms like this is a bit like trying to rename film or photography. More precise terms are more dangerous because they will lead to fragmentation. Jane McGonigal and I have had inconclusive conversations about whether ARGs and other so-called "big games" are videogames. I contend that they are, if they make significant use of computation (so, Cruel 2 B Kind, the game she and I created, is a videogame for me!). "Videogame" is a fine equivalent for "film" if we'd just stop worrying about it so much. And forcing the term into broader usage will help expand the medium much more than making up new words for each sub-type.

Incidentally, my stake-in-the-ground on this is on page xiii of Unit Operations. I'll paste it in here when I'm on a computer with the Word file... (too lazy to copy right now) ;)