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Nachimir

Video games video-games videogames

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Don't worry. It's OK here: we hate all video games equally.

Or is it "video games"? :shifty:

It's probably "video games,"

It's neither! It's both!

Anyone stating that there's only one correct term is completely ignorant of the natures of both English, and language. It's a living thing that evolves over time, often unrecognisable over the span of centuries. Different tweaks can happen very fast though.

English is absolutely packed with compound terms that we all accept without qualm. Cheesecake, shoelace, fireball, bedtime, pigtail, bookworm, lighthouse, upstairs, doorbell, mudguard, gemstone, handbag, buttfuck: "Video game" is as correct as "video game" or "video-game".

If you're running a magazine, newspaper, or website like Gamasutra, then having a style guide that keeps your news items and articles consistent and professional looking is a good thing. Confusing any given style guide for an objective form of correctness is a feat of ignorance and deserves a resounding "Fuck you".

I seriously want this debate to fuck off and die. Steve Gaynor had this to say on Twitter the other day to someone asking about "Video game" versus "video game":

never write "Video game." Never ever. Pretend I didn't just do it. Such an obnoxious affectation. let's try to legitimize ourselves by removing a space between two words! haroo!!!

What the fuck? That doesn't even make sense, but like "gameplay versus graphics" it's a prime example of just how inbred games industry discourse can become. It actually makes me angry to see otherwise intelligent game developers and journalists wasting their time on it. It's trivial bullshit that ignores thousands of years of history stacked in opposition. Very, very few, if any people outside the games industry give a blood soaked shit about the "correct" form for Video game, but it seems likely that by sheer weight of repetition it will become a single word like many compound terms before it. The industry faces far more pressing and important issues, and the only obnoxious thing in this recurring linguistic debate is picking a given compound or non-compound term and telling everyone else it's the right one, presuming that this whore of a tongue can be tamed and made rational. Language doesn't work like that, especially not English which is one of the most muddled, deep rooted and culturally promiscuous languages on the planet.

A few days after we'd been discussing this at work, someone pointed out Stephen Fry's latest podcast, on language. It's excellent, listen to it.

Edited by Nachimir

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To-day I call them "video games", but tomorrow I might call them "video games". To never will I call them "video-games", though. HAR HAR APPALLING JOKE.

Actually, I tend to call them "computer games", because I always feel like I'm trying (and failing) to sound American if I call them "video games". But somehow "computer games" seems slightly more pathetic. OH GOD TOO MANY QUOTE MARKS.

These things are forever changing, so "correctness" eventually just comes down to a combination of convention and personal preference, I guess. Which isn't to say that there is no such thing as correct and incorrect English; simply that the grey area of stuff that doesn't fall definitively into either category is quite enormous.

"Computergames" will never be right, though.

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I've always just used "Video game", so nobody's going to stop me doing so any time soon.

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If you are able to communicate then language has served it's purpose. Anything else is superfluous.

Then why are you going through the effort of capitalization, standard written forms for words and such? Chances are you made a typo at some point when typing that (maybe superfluous, caused trouble for me at least). Why fix them? We'll get what you're saying.

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If you are able to communicate then language has served it's purpose. Anything else is superfluous.

Yeah, poetry is bullshit.

Or is that "bull shit"?

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Just because it's superfluous doesn't mean I can't or shouldn't find it rewarding to spell things correctly - it's just not worth getting in a flap about is all.

I find getting in a flap about it rewarding.

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Yeah, poetry is bullshit.

You don't have to be correct to be poetic; merely mindful of and creative with language.

I have a bit of a history of linguistic pedantry, but I try to restrict it to myself these days, if only because it's particularly embarrassing to have your own errors pointed out after harassing people for so long about theirs.

I find the way prints things like "2million" without a space quite jarring, though, I must admit.

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I saw Paxman discussing the apostrophe with some professor of language. They both seemed to agree that it was pointless, but I get totally confused if they aren't there when I read something. I hate having to keep correcting my teachers for their misuse of them.

And I believe that roughly 80% of poetry is pretentious nonsense that no thought was put into. When you feel the need to write a comma in the title of your piece, you know you're an arse. "I'm so edgy because I write with erratic spacing and sentence structure".

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That's surprising. I'd say pretty much 95% of any art form is crap, so poetry is pretty well off.

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The problem with the apostrophe is that it's over-worked. If anything, we should have a second apostrophe. I've read that the apostrophe's use to denote possession has its roots in the misconception that "Bill's dog" is short for "Bill, his dog" or something. Hence, it was originally understood to be just another indication of omission. I think it's helpful to have something that distinguishes possession from plurality, but I also think it'd be helpful to have something that distinguished possession from abbreviation. Theoretically we could have another mark, or, perhaps better, we could have a different suffix for one or the other, making the distinction obvious in speech as well. If, for example, plurals had the suffix "-en", things would be clearer. Of course, this will probably never happen, and certainly not any time soon, so we'll have to make do with the system we have.

Ultimately, we could probably get used to any functional writing system, given sufficient time and exposure to it. We become accustomed and attached to a particular form of English, but in another situation it would have been another form. Different writing systems do have different implications, not only for the process of learning, but also for the mode of thinking they foster. At least, they do if Proust and the Squid is to be trusted, which I'm reading at the moment.

Tangent: I keep relying on the same few words and phrases. I'm forever saying "ultimately" and "on the other hand" and "anyway" and "of course" and "or something" and so on. It's a struggle to keep things from becoming irredeemably repetitious. So if notice any of that, I know about it.

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I was very concerned by the title of this thread, but that post was quality, Nachimir.

I pretty much always use "video games" and kind of prefer the way it looks on a screen, but lots of other people that I respect use the compound form. And you're right; normal people don't give a shit about this argument.

If you spell it video-games, though, you're probably German and incorrect.

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Nachmir,

Mega tangent, but returning to the apostrophe: I was aware of the "Fraser, his pancake" use, and I tried to explain to my English teacher last year that the apostrophe does only have the single purpose of replacing letters that would otherwise be omitted through speech. The confusion over its supposed plurality doesn't need to be there, but I suppose since it is an onerous task for many to grasp the most basic functions of the punctuation mark that to be taught such an in depth background to a single character of written language would be inherently prohibitive to many.

In this case, I agree that there could be an "Apostrophe Mark. II", but my main fear is that this would simply cause even more confusion. Imagine if it were two apostrophes in a row, then you'd have people writing: "Bananas sold here", "Banana's sold here", "Banana''s sold here", "Bananas' sold here" and "Bananas'' sold here". There does seem to be massive hesitation on the part of a fairly sizable chunk of people to sort out their use of the mark, so either way you swing it there will be increased bemusement. Keeping it as it is and attempting to drum it into the heads of successive generations may be the only way to overcome the problem.

[brkl, I would say that 95% of all art is nothing more than decent, but not crap, and thinking about it, of the remaining 20% of poetry, probably only about a third is of any merit whatsoever. Pah, I just don't like it, leave it there :getmecoat]

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