I pondered this question in a piece for Warp Zoned back in 2012, and a lightly edited version of that article has been reprinted here. Walk over to yo

Video Game or Videogame? An Answer to the Most Important Question of Our Time

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2024-11-04 18:30:09

I pondered this question in a piece for Warp Zoned back in 2012, and a lightly edited version of that article has been reprinted here.

Walk over to your media shelf and pick up a copy of Wii Sports or Halo 3 or Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. Odds are at least one of these titles will be in your collection. What do you call the item in your hand? Some people consider these items part of the “interactive entertainment” medium, but most of us just call them something else.

Though they’ve existed for over forty years, no one has ever definitively answered the question… are they video games or videogames?

Of course, in the world of linguistics and orthographic study, just asking the question is bound to cause trouble. On one side you have the prescriptivists, who believe that all words and grammar should be strictly controlled for correctness, whatever that means. And on the other side, you have the descriptivists, who state that language should adapt to current usage. They’re the ones who push for the addition of joke words (like the millennial favorites cromulent and embiggen) to the dictionary, as writers have begun to use them far from their original source.

(Bonus descriptivist victory… I just noticed that cromulent is recognized by the Google Docs spellchecker as a real word).

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