I totally agree, there's no need to further explain the term in most cases - certainly not in your book - and, as I said, distinguishing based on the type of screen (TV for consoles, monitors for PCs/computers, handhelds, etc) is completely missing the point.
My clarification does lead to some interesting conclusions though, which may be of interest to some of us on here. For example, let's take three distinct examples of games: Dragon's Lair, Electro Mechanical coin operated games (such as pinball), and D&D tabletop games.
Someone who takes the "video" in videogames literally as being the defining characteristic of videogames, would say that Dragon's Lair is certainly a videogame, pinball resembles aspects of one, whereas a D&D game has almost nothing in common (other than the fact that some videogames later borrowed themes and rules from such games).
According to my clarification it's the opposite!
Dragon's Lair has almost nothing in common with the core essence of videogames (there's no real simulated universe within, no computation whatsoever - it's just a sequence of clips that the user can view if he remembers an arbitrary sequence of button presses that end up being conceptually equivalent NOT to ingame interactions but to "play" and "stop" commands on a video player).
EM games are equivalent to a tiny subset of videogames but fail to qualify as such because they are entirely dependent on ONE and only one type of computation: physical reality. Obviously a videogame can also perfectly simulate those types of computations in order to produce an almost identical gaming experience.
On the other hand. a D&D session has some very interesting properties: there is a very rich artificial universe with a large number of world entities and rules that are all intricately interconnected - the universe actively "runs" and interacts with the human users in "realtime". The one thing missing here is not the "screen" (as one could imagine a tabletop game being played ON a screen - but still using a human dungeon master to drive the experience), but the fact that instead of a CPU an actual human mind is used to simulate and "run" the universe, constrained by the game's rules of course.
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"You must not give the world what it asks for, but what it needs."
-- Dijkstra
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You wanna know what my Biff is ??
I just HATE manure !!
I totally agree, there's no need to further explain the term in most cases - certainly not in your book - and, as I said, distinguishing based on the type of screen (TV for consoles, monitors for PCs/computers, handhelds, etc) is completely missing the point.
My clarification does lead to some interesting conclusions though, which may be of interest to some of us on here. For example, let's take three distinct examples of games: Dragon's Lair, Electro Mechanical coin operated games (such as pinball), and D&D tabletop games.
Someone who takes the "video" in videogames literally as being the defining characteristic of videogames, would say that Dragon's Lair is certainly a videogame, pinball resembles aspects of one, whereas a D&D game has almost nothing in common (other than the fact that some videogames later borrowed themes and rules from such games).
According to my clarification it's the opposite!
Dragon's Lair has almost nothing in common with the core essence of videogames (there's no real simulated universe within, no computation whatsoever - it's just a sequence of clips that the user can view if he remembers an arbitrary sequence of button presses that end up being conceptually equivalent NOT to ingame interactions but to "play" and "stop" commands on a video player).
EM games are equivalent to a tiny subset of videogames but fail to qualify as such because they are entirely dependent on ONE and only one type of computation: physical reality. Obviously a videogame can also perfectly simulate those types of computations in order to produce an almost identical gaming experience.
On the other hand. a D&D session has some very interesting properties: there is a very rich artificial universe with a large number of world entities and rules that are all intricately interconnected - the universe actively "runs" and interacts with the human users in "realtime". The one thing missing here is not the "screen" (as one could imagine a tabletop game being played ON a screen - but still using a human dungeon master to drive the experience), but the fact that instead of a CPU an actual human mind is used to simulate and "run" the universe, constrained by the game's rules of course.
---------------
"You must not give the world what it asks for, but what it needs."
-- Dijkstra
---------------
You wanna know what my Biff is ??
I just HATE manure !!