I like storytelling art, so each year when I play the new “Call of Duty” I gravitate toward the story mode and don’t pay so much attention to the multiplayer stuff, which is not art and has no aspiration toward being art. These are all considered the same genre of video game, but they’re really separate products that appeal to distinct types of players. They often also include a third cooperative mode about fighting zombies or aliens. The annual “Call of Duty” series, which does have a meaningful cultural footprint, has both a linear, story-focused portion that you play alone and context-free competitive multiplayer. But that doesn’t matter because everything counts.Įven within a single video game there is very often more than one kind of video game. None of those things are really like any of the others. Whatever the flavor of the week in that argument is, of course, it’s definitely a video game, because if “World of Warcraft” and “NBA 2K” and “League of Legends” and “The Last Of Us” and “Farming Simulator” and “Super Mario Bros” and “Candy Crush Saga” are all video games, then “Firewatch,” in which you walk around a forest clicking on stuff until the plot progresses, is also a video game. The “game” part has been a sticking point in recent years in endless online debates about whether this thing that is definitely interactive entertainment but has no skill component is truly a video game. Others don’t know what artistic expression is or why you would care about whatever that is.Īlso Read: Why Hollywood Should Turn to Mobile Gaming to Replace Dwindling DVD Revenue (Guest Blog) Some video games are works of artistic expression. They’re rough simulations of everyday life including, probably, whatever you do for a living. They’re digital board games and card games.
They’re interactive TV shows and interactive movies. Video games are sports that take place in a computer. Compared to the scope of everything that counts as video games, movies and TV are indistinguishable from each other. If a person were to somehow grow up only on video games and then discover later in life all the other forms of entertainment we regularly consume, that person would probably be confused as to why we consider film and television distinct types of media. It’s confusing, even to those of us you’d call gamers. There are a million different kinds of video games, and each of them sorta functions as its own form of entertainment media. Since we don’t have concrete labels for all those individual types - just loose genre descriptions - we just say everything is a video game. The label “video game” casts an absurdly large net over a whole lot of different things. So I’m going to dive into the more complicated explanation here.Īlso Read: Yahoo Jumps Into eSports Coverage That really does sum it all up - but it’s not a very good explanation o f everything going on here.Īs the new person covering video games for TheWrap, I aim to provide good explanations for you, our readers. There, you can go home now because class is over and we’re done. The easy answer is that a video game is interactive digital entertainment that you “play” via a computer, a game console (like the Xbox or PlayStation) or a phone or tablet. There are two ways to explain what exactly a video game is: the easy, simple way, and the really complex way.