Oof. Stinging but awesome play on words. “Datagame” is itself problematic because data can also be analog. Many games can be described as “datagames” as the game is focused on data, often the physical items used to play the game are just helpful representations of data- a piece on a common board game just helps to recall and standardize your game position. Many such games including chess can be played without anything but two people with good memory who can keep track in their head of where things are specially or mathematically. This is part of why so many early forms of “video game” entertainment and so many simple/cheap forms ape classic games like cards or chess etc. the games center around the information and therefore it is easy for a computer to track it, and the physical representations of the game data are simple and easy to simulate.
Likewise “digital game” is somewhat limited as well- since again, the games themselves or the hardware for the games to run may combine analog components or elements.
The term “video game” is fairly apt in most cases as in this case “video” means visual- sort of like “audio” relates to sound. While we don’t tend to use the term as much anymore because it was tied heavily to marketing and technical standards and other technical or marketing terms have superceeded it- “video” is defined as the recording, reproduction, or transmission of moving images. While older sprites seldom if ever “moved” in a sense that their “animations” were just the cycling of frames, it could be said that within the hardware of the game system they were moving and that movement relative to the digital reality is transmitted to television. Newer games often do contain actual “movement” where animations are pre rendered and displayed on screen- but in the end animation is technically the simulation of…
.. movement so some might call foul. Hold on there. It is simulating a certain movement to the human eye- sponge bobs face doesn’t really “move” but the image and elements of the image move. If we plot a single frame of an animation, 2D or 3D etc. and compare it to another frame in the sequence, and we assign a grid dividing the image into squares of .1x.1 mm or some size of our choosing or the spec for the process- we can measure where elements of the image move from one image to the next! So we have movement, and that movement is being transmitted using visual technology for you to see!
Thusly “video game” applies to a game which is designed around being played using a technology which transmits movement digitally in a manner a human can see. The implications are generally clear but can get muddled in semantics and the definitions aren’t universal. We have to remember that before what we know as “video games” “video arcades” and “video games” already existed! Back to the early 20th century at least amusements included a series of still images where one looked through a lens and analog mechanisms lit and flipped through the images rapidly to produce a sort of short movie. If we fast forward quite a bit we find some of the earliest “digital games” weren’t what most would consider video games….
… asides games using lights or LED type technologies or even analog mechanical elements to represent data kept in analog or digital computers like simple “sports” games and card games or common gambling games like slot machines etc- we enter the era of teletype!
Some of the earliest “complex” games like video games gained inspiration from pencil and paper role playing games or “choose your own adventure” books and periodicals.
These early text based games had no graphics generally and were made entirely of characters. Later games would see graphic elements or even limited GUI introduced. The original “Oregon Trail” game is an imperfect example many are familiar with- but we need to go back further.
Games like “Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy”, the “Zork” series, 9 Princesses in Amber, the risqué “Leather Goddeses of Phobos” and many more were in some incarnation “pure text games” or had later ports which were purely played by text but might have flourished added for “advanced” hardware such as still screens of a backdrop or title lemurs with graphics. “Text games” were usually just a black/green/blue screen with a cursor. Words would appear and describe the characters surroundings and the player could type in commands as long as they were structured so the parser could understand or accept them in order to “look around” move such as “move east” or interact with objects or characters; with the results being displayed as text as well.
As text games advanced they allowed for inventory- picking up and using items where programming allowed, but it usually wasn’t a menu, you may be able to type a query and get a list of your inventory or you might just have had to remember or write it down so you knew what you carried. Likewise there were no maps and having a good memory or making maps and writing notes as you went was often critical to success. These games were relatively simple and could be played on many computers,
Especially earlier models, and devices that didn’t have a display large enough or capable of handling more than simple text.
So when video games emerged they weren’t the first form of moving entertainment game or the first form of digital or “computer data” based games. They were the first games where computer data and processing was used to create an image that appeared to move and represented the data of the game and was displayed on a screen where that information could be interacted with using the screen as the space the player and game both occupied. Text games are largely a forgotten medium which exists mainly on nostalgia as technology has advanced to where “simple” devices posses the power to render graphics 30,40+ years more advanced than the technology that was used for text games and store magnitudes more data. They could be frustrating and complicated by nature and so “classic” game aesthetic tends to mimic later games like those of the late 80’s and early 90’s if not much newer games which aren’t so limited and alienating to modern players.
So to a modern person the need to distinguish the genres might not seem relevant or may not even be something someone would be aware ever existed; but at one point it was necessary to distinguish between these types of game. I guess the closest relatable thing might be how we distinguish games such as first person shooter games as “battle royal” or “arena” or other ways because often times while they are all “FPS” “video games” the fans of one type aren’t fans of all. The same is true with “rouge like” games or “Metroid animals” or any number of distinctions between seemingly similar games of similar overall construction but distinct play styles or mechanics. Obviously the need to distinguish “video games” from games like board games or other older forms of gaming should be clear. If someone asks if you game in 2022 they probably aren’t inviting you over for parcheesi, but the opposite would be more true 40+ years ago.
This is common- “football” is a term that distinguished a game played with a ball on foot as opposed to a game with a ball played on horse. “Football” games would generally long ago have been more the games of the lower classes who didn’t have the money for horses or the places and resources to play games on horseback. We call Formula one or NASCAR “motor sports” or “power sports” to distinguish these types of sport involving machines heavily in competition from other types of sports. So the overall concept of the distinction makes sense and when we add in the definition of the word “video” and the time the term was coined- we can see that the name is actually pretty apt and for the most part holds true to this day. We do sub designate things-
DVD and streaming are “video” technology and YouTube and others have used the term “video” but the word tends to have an antiquated perception and is strongly tied to Video Cassettes and antiquated concepts like “video stores” which largely
Have rebranded and found newer language to distinguish their brand and technology from the older cassette technology. The V in DVD did stand for “Video…” after all. DVD is largely depreciated and the industry and public stepped further from the “video” label with “blue Ray” and the like as names. In the world of gaming, “VR” stands generally as its own label- they tend to be called “VR games” not the lengthy and awkward “VR videogame” or such. At present most people don’t refer to “VR games” as “video games” because VR still isn’t that prevalent and “video game” has certain implications in the popular consciousness.
Should we really call them “VR games”? To the original point if we call them all “data games” then wouldn’t we just call a VR game a “data game”? But you need special hardware to run VR games…. And thusly we can see from a modern perspective here a distinction comes in. You’re basically telling people what hardware is required to play the game. There are also of course those who distinguish “computer games” from “videogames” as a class where a “videogame” may exist on console or other system as well as computer, a “computer game” is a game which runs on computer. As console technology has advanced the overlap of games that receive release across platforms grows- but a console IS just a computer. The earliest examples were often computers games were placed on or gaming computers. The Original Nentendo entertainment system was called the Famicom AKA family computer in most markets, the “Super Nintendo” was the “super famicom.”
Consoles tended to shy away from the “computer” name in short order however because they wanted to appeal to an audience that might be intimidated by computers. The idea was largely to eliminate the complexity or perceived complexity of the computer. This system was refined over time of course, but at their core consoles are computers as are handhelds and arcade machines etc. in that sense they are all “computer games” in theory- but obviously if you say a game is a PC game you usually mean that game cannot be played on a “vanilla” console. It’s also the case that while we could say effectively 99.9% of “videogames” in modern terms are computer games, not 99.9% of computer games are or historically were “videogames.” So this is where the whole precision of language things comes to. We have quite a few words and categories and genres and descriptors to help identify what we are talking about and in most cases when a person says what kind of game they are playing we can generally get it.
The term “video game” is fairly apt in most cases as in this case “video” means visual- sort of like “audio” relates to sound. While we don’t tend to use the term as much anymore because it was tied heavily to marketing and technical standards and other technical or marketing terms have superceeded it- “video” is defined as the recording, reproduction, or transmission of moving images. While older sprites seldom if ever “moved” in a sense that their “animations” were just the cycling of frames, it could be said that within the hardware of the game system they were moving and that movement relative to the digital reality is transmitted to television. Newer games often do contain actual “movement” where animations are pre rendered and displayed on screen- but in the end animation is technically the simulation of…
Some of the earliest “complex” games like video games gained inspiration from pencil and paper role playing games or “choose your own adventure” books and periodicals.
These early text based games had no graphics generally and were made entirely of characters. Later games would see graphic elements or even limited GUI introduced. The original “Oregon Trail” game is an imperfect example many are familiar with- but we need to go back further.
Especially earlier models, and devices that didn’t have a display large enough or capable of handling more than simple text.
Have rebranded and found newer language to distinguish their brand and technology from the older cassette technology. The V in DVD did stand for “Video…” after all. DVD is largely depreciated and the industry and public stepped further from the “video” label with “blue Ray” and the like as names. In the world of gaming, “VR” stands generally as its own label- they tend to be called “VR games” not the lengthy and awkward “VR videogame” or such. At present most people don’t refer to “VR games” as “video games” because VR still isn’t that prevalent and “video game” has certain implications in the popular consciousness.