[game_preservation] Descriptive terms for Video Games

[Jim Leonard]

On 6/15/2011 12:01 AM, Rowan Kaiser wrote:

> On the other hand, there's genre as a social construction, which,

> regardless of accuracy (how is /Tetris /a *puzzle* game? It's an

> abstract action game!) is used and will be used. This, Jim, I think is

> where you had problems with your RPG classification. You may consider it

> inaccurate, but the social construction is popular shorthand. It is how

> gamers understand games, I think.


Just because 95% of gamers do something incorrectly doesn't make it 
right :-)

But seriously, this is a long-standing debate in the dictionary world as 
well.  One side believes that words like "doh" and "ain't" and "thru" 
should remain out of dictionaries because they're colloquial euphemisms, 
whereas the other side claims the purpose of the dictionary is to 
reflect the language currently in use.  Companies that produce 
dictionaries fall into the latter camp, so you now have the priviledge 
of looking up "Doh!" in the Oxford English Dictionary, making it an 
official word of the language, I guess.

I don't believe crowdsourcing should govern a field where crowd 
inconsistency is something it is trying to solve.
-- 
Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org)            http://www.oldskool.org/
Check out some trippy MindCandy at        http://www.mindcandydvd.com/
A child borne of the home computer wars:  http://trixter.oldskool.org/