The Concept of Game - Game Design Theory - page 16

are covered in Chapter 2 ) that surround us in naturally evolved systems,
and we must harness them for our own purposes.
Video Games and the Value of Words
As I mentioned earlier, it is my opinion that the term video game has
caused an incredible number of problems for the players, creators, and
marketers of digital games. This label has made things harder for ev-
eryone involved in the world of digital games. The term is far too broad
and encompasses many things that are very different from each other. It
is difficult to judge interactive systems by the same yardstick if one is a
puzzle, one is a contest, and another is a game.
Simulators and puzzles are not genres of games, but the use of the
term video game sends that message, with significant ramifications
Some of the negative effects of this term follow.
For both consumers and marketing people. The product being
sold is undefined There are defined genres—such as first-person
shooters (FPS), real-time strategy games, and role-playing games
(RPG) (and I should note that the genre is often not listed either
on a game's box or on its promotional materials)—but these cat-
egories can be vague and not provide a true picture of what the
software actually is. For example, a game could be called a plat-
former, but that doesn't tell you whether the software is a game
(such as Spelunky ) or a puzzle (such as Braid ).
For critics. People using the same yardstick to judge a dry-flight
simulator on one hand and Super Mario Galaxy and Street Fight-
er on the other are almost certainly going to have difficulty Dif-
ferent interactive systems are trying to achieve different things,
and few critics are expert enough in all of them to provide useful
insight for any of them. This is a major reason why video-game
criticism is generally little more than a summary of what the
game is and whether or not the reviewer enjoyed it.
For creators. Some design decisions make a lot of sense for a sim-
ulator but almost no sense for a game. For example, having to
worry about your fuel in a dogfighting simulator makes sense,
but you might want to disregard that element for a dogfighting
game so that players can focus on the aspect of dogfighting re-
lated to making interesting decisions. (There will be more on this
in Chapter 4 .)
The worst part of the term video game is that we lose the ability to
identify pure games that happen to be played with a computer, such as