When we decided on the topic of “defining a video game”, it seemed rather easy at first. If you’re even here reading this, that means you have an interest in the subject, and in this day and age, if someone told me they didn’t know what a video game was, I would be rather shocked. And then I would get to converting them into a gamer as quickly as possible, for the sake of mankind itself.
While we know what a video game is, I don’t think the definition of the term is accurate. When I looked up the word “video game” on the Internet, it was defined vaguely as a “game played by electronically manipulating images produced by a computer program on a television screen or a display screen”, but nowadays, everything is done electronically on a screen, so what does that really mean? Because I, personally, don’t consider the Solitaire you have on your computer to be a video game, nor would I consider playing chess online or checkers or any of those other kinds of games to be video games, either. And yet, based on the definition, they are as much video games as Super Mario Brothers or Halo. What about those text-based games? Are they not video games, since they involve text rather than images? Continue reading The Big Question: What Really is a Video Game?
