Verbing Stories (Working Title)

A Q-tip By Any Other Name…

Bah. Like what a sheep does.
I make this noise because I just discarded about a page of notes and writings on the wrong subject. I was over-reaching myself, and that's not something I'm supposed to do on this blog.

Following my last post, the question I really want to be asking and exploring is “what is a video game.” I feel the need to answer this question because I made the claim that video games are the youngest artistic media the human race has yet come up with and that we haven't any good way talking about them. To prove true the first half of that recapitulation, I would have to define what a video game is, so that I could continue to describe how it is unique. These are a couple of really major sticking points here, so I'm going to shut up about this now and move on.

What I really need to talk about is the later portion of my claim, the part that deals with us not being able to talk about the games that we know are of the 'video' variety and are already out there.

According to wikipedia (all hail), video games can be broken down into three types and seven genres.
There are casual game, core game and serious game types which contain games that may be called Action games, Action-Adventure games, Adventure games, Role-Playing games, Simulations, Sports games or Strategy games. I believe this to be a quite silly method of breaking down video games.

Granted, this is only a brief summery of the major categories lain out by wikipedia, other 'notable' genres include party (Mario Party 8, perhaps?), Music (Guitar Hero), and puzzle (Tetris?). Still, I do not feel that these ten designations are adequate to describe the complexity verging on modern video games.
We all know what film noir is. When I say that the Maltese Falcon was the first Noir film, we all know what kind of movie it's going to be. We know the trends, we know what to expect. When I say Jonathan Blow's Braid is a Platformer – well, Naughty Dog's Jak and Daxter is also a Platformer, isn't it? Epic's Unreal Tournament 3 is a First Person Shooter. What about Valve's Portal, or Looking Glass' Thief: the Dark Project? Both are First-Peron. And have Shooting.

I just don't feel that calling Daisuke Amaya's Cave Story a Platforming-Shoot'em'up does any justice to the title. We can do better, and I intend to figure out how.

Following this update will hopefully flow a torrent of titles tagged with relevant buzzwords. Hopefully meaningful and stable patters will emerge from this aggregation of distinction and perhaps grow into something akin to an collection of video game genres. Fingers crossed.

Understanding

Video games have a long and rich history. By “Long,” I mean somewhere between 62 and 48 years (depending on your definition of “game”), and by “Rich,” I mean the fastest growing sector of the entertainment industry. That right there, kids, is what we in the business call “Irony.”
Jokes aside.

Video games are the youngest and (this is an unrelated note) the least understood of any artistic media.

So yeah.
That's probably wrong. For so many reasons.
First (and most annoyingly), are video games really art? Art that matters, anyway. If a Campbell's soup can can be “art,” anything can be “art” in that “low” sense, right (you can thank Roger Ebert for that gem)? And are they really the youngest? Surely we must have come up with something separate from all these other technological media in the last half-century (I'm actually curious about this. Responses welcome). Next, what's all that about video games not being understood? There have been articles published in major academic journals about the subject. There are dozens, if not a hundred, conventions on games every year. There are even colleges devoted solely to the training of the next generation of game designers.
So somebody prove me otherwise.
Someone. Turn that big angry statement up there against me. Convince me it's wrong. Tell me how video games work. How they engage their audience, why some of them make me think. Tell me how their stories hold together while I'm running around collecting a bunch of golden spiders (or whatever). Tell me where the fourth wall stands. Where it breaks, who put it there. Tell me why Half Life 2 is a better game than Blood Rayne. Tell me why I like looking at Shadow of the Colossus so damn much. Tell me what kind of video game the last one you've played is.
And don't take a leaf out of my book and be an ironic asshole about it. Be concise. Make me understand.
Can you do that?

I brought up a number of really big point in this post, more than I really intended to touch on. They're all points I aim to take a close look at, nail down and understand. Someday. Today's not that day, though. The point I really wanted to make cropped up very late in that little tirade and concerns the way in which “professionals” talk about video games; how–maybe how well, video games are actually understood. As you already saw, I posit they're not.
One of my professors went on this fun little rant about paradigms earlier this semester, how sciences (and some arts) start off not even having one. That's where I think we're standing now, with video games. We don't have a modern, codified or even genuinely intelligent way of talking about video games. And I think that's bad.
The word 'jargon' has a lot of pejorative sentiments surrounding it, for good reason. Every time something is made more specific, it is made, by definition, less inclusive. But that's the way today's world of economic specificity needs to be. Dentists don't need to know what the difference between TIG and MIG welding is. But welders do. For the study of video games to progress in any meaningful way, I feel that a jargon needs to be built up around the industry. Video game researchers and developers need a way of talking about video games, so we can really start talking video games.

More on this soon.