“The name “game” is always going to confuse people. You only really work out what something should be called after a name’s codified. Names for mediums are always kind of made up on the fly. “Novel” has a particularly tortured history as a word. Comics comes from the fact they were the funny pages in the paper - but soon became anything but. A century down the line, they realised they should call comics “sequential narrative”, which cuts to the core of what the medium is. It’ll never stick, because it’s so bloody ugly and there’s already a name everyone knows. C’est la vie. We’re stuck with novels, comics and games - and novels that aren’t novel, comics which aren’t comic and videogames which aren’t…”
—
Kieron Gillen reviewing The Path for Eurogamer
It’s a masterful summary of this whole “What am game?” debate that for some reason I’m still continuing with in 2013. (see latest installment)
