[game_preservation] The Videogame Archivist

[Panagiotis Kouvelis]

It reminds me of the state music was some years ago, are Manowar a power 
metal band, or an epic metal, they say that they play true metal and I 
always believed that they are a battle metal band, in one of their songs 
they sing about rock'n'roll also :-)

The term Electronic Games seems more right at the moment, but I'm also 
into Videogames in one word. Also I believe that we have the titles 
"analog" and "digital" to separate what we can compute for now, after 
all we tend to rise the digital accuracy and someone can say that also 
analog signal tend to quantization in a deeper level than our own 
builded machines that calculate a higher level of discrete signal. I 
also believe that there is a distinction between digital and analog 
designs but in the videogame term thing that we are discussing here I 
would say that it is also good to choose a term that the bigger 
population will relate, that was always a good practice when biologists 
named their newly found species, so I vote for "Videogame" and with that 
"Computer Videogame" could be another option for the computer driven 
applications.

On 10/1/2011 8:49 μμ, Martin Goldberg wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 10, 2011 at 4:32 AM, Andrew Armstrong<andrew at aarmstrong.org>  wrote:

>> Ahh, but aren't all videogames also computer games? :D (do we even have a

>> proper answer?)

> Yes, the technical answer is no. ;)

>

>

> The Odyssey, dedicated consoles like PONG, and video coin-op machines

> of the early 70's - they're all state machines based on discrete

> logic.  They have no CPU, are not programmable, and certainly do not

> follow any of the standards of Von Neumann Architecture to qualify as

> a "computer".

>

> If you want to go by the idea of "computer" being simply a

> computational device (ala pre-general purpose computers when

> "computer" referred to an actual person, usually a woman, doing the

> caclulations manually on a computational assistance device or

> glorified calculator) you could stretch it to that.  But I wouldn't

> call that accurate either.  Ralph for instance has stated on more than

> one occasion when I questioned him on this exact subject, he in no way

> considers the Odyssey a "computer".

>

> With this in mind, you're left with Henry's "digital games" being the

> most accurate.  That is as long as you don't get in to an argument on

> "digital" and "analog".  Some electrical engineers still consider

> devices that use digital logic and components to be analog if they're

> being driven by an RC or "analog pulse" vs. a crystal driven digital

> one.  Hybrid systems.  Given the fact that most pre-digital IC driven

> mainframe and mini computers used this pulse method (because that's

> what was available), according to these people it also means they're

> actually analog computers as well.

>

> I don't subscribe to that, as a lot of other people in the computer

> sciences don't.  But it still brings up the constant conundrum we're

> in - chooising descriptives that describe the context we're trying to

> convey but still remain technically accurate.

>

>

> Marty

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