What does Videogamey mean to you?

[Garthanos]

A repost because the threads are too similar they merged in my brain.

My problem with the term is that I consider 4e the least videogamey version of AD&D ever.

You don't run round picking up health packs (healing potions). You don't have an arcane magic system that makes absolutely no sense other than as a mechanical formulation (Vancian). You don't have really weird healing rules by which an almost dead 1st level wizard can be restored to back on his feet and in full fighting trim by a spell that wouldn't do much at all to a tenth level fighter (Cure Light Wounds). You don't have people that can keep going all day as long as the healing magics flow, or people who recover back to their full health readily and repeatedly (Healing Surges are part of that full health). Now to me that's all very videogamey so I get confused the other way.

Instead you have a group of action heroes with some default moves (At Wills), some signature moves (Encounter Attacks), and a bit they can do when pulling out all the stops (Dailies, Action Points). They get hurt, they draw on their reserves to keep them going, but the damage doesn't actually go away (they've now used the healing surges). Healing is based on the target's hit points. This is all genre emulation to me on a scene (or encounter) based cinematic game.

So I get confused by video-gamey used as a dig against 4e.

There are certainly elements which resemble action movies on purpose. (and applies to hit points and surges but not the core argument regarding video gaminess. Which is why I suggested it was a different apple on the tree entirely and why it being theer was evidence of orange and apple trees both being called - videogamy)

Here is my take the problem I see is there is a player role vs dm role ...and a perspective disconnect.

Video games have explicitly defined limited sets of actions.
And table top role playing games have explicit limited set of mechanics which are used to govern/under-pine the nearly infinite actions a character chooses to take.

In 4e the player is encouraged to visualize the infinite choices the character can take in terms of that more finite set of mechanics and differentiate them narratively...Character says I can sing thousands of songs but the Player looks at the character sheet which only lists ... "Rock Blues" and "Hot Dance". . The character may want to do something plausible like do a romantic dance it isnt in the characters specialties but seems obvious to the player and DM it is plausible. So the DM excercises her job..and uses page 42 to extend the games mechanics ie to stretch or take off the lid

... She has less job than she used to involving converting from narrative to simple mechanics a lot of those have been given to the player, but her job of being an enabler for going beyond the explicit rules is now even more important. And there are actual guidelines for it.. Page 42 is used as a short cut reference for this but it is not limited to being expressed on pages 42/43, that say "yes, but.." philosophy applies directly to the idea of opening up the mechanics .. and DMG guidelines encourage doing it in a controlled sort of way.

Somebody reading the players perspective and ignoring the dms (whose job always has been enabling going beyond the rules), may see more restrictions than there are.

 

[Celebrim]

Nice. So, you have no resposiblity to make yourself understood. It's all up to the listener to understand you. Wow. That's an interesting take on communication.

No, that's not what I said. I said I take no responsibility for making myself understood to you, and in general I cannot take full* responsibility for making myself understood to anyone. Nor can I take full responsibility for when someone becomes angry, especially when I'm not meaning to make someone angry. If the word 'videogamey' makes angry when you hear it such that you cannot understand it no matter how I make it clear how I'm using it - as some in this thread have explicitly claimed - then it’s clearly not up to me to make them listen.

Yes, at some level, it is up to the listener to understand me. I can only go so far. I can't force anyone to be reasonable. If the listener does not wish to listen, I cannot take responsibility for making them do so.

*Once again, we see how people try to use the language in a binary way that evades the meaning. When I say that I can't take responsibility for making someone listen, they immediately offer me the binary choice between full responsibility and no responsibility. However, that leaves a vast space of possibilities that they aren't considering.

 

[Celebrim]

As a side-note: The whole "videogamey" diskussion here reminds me how far videogames have advanced, especially crpgs. I doubt anyone thinks about older generation games like Ultima when using the term.

Actually, in my head I've been using older games as the model of what 'too videogamey' probably means because the latest generation of cRPGs are advancing to the point that they are probably becoming sufficiently 'Pen-and-Papery' to blur the point.

In my head, I've been comparing what people are saying about what they mean about the experience to the experience of playing Zork, Rogue, Nethack, Bard's Tale, Ultima, etc.

Or it could be that its just those games I'm the most familiar with.

Still, I think it's far more likely if the term has a pejorative connotation that they aren't refering to an element unique to the latest and greatest games. It would likely be something universal or nearly so to the experience of playing a computer game.

 

[Bluenose]

Well, props for actually making a better analogy than anyone else that has tried. The reason that 'book-y' is a better analogy that 'automobile-y' or 'giraffe-y' is that it seems to have a the features that the term 'videogamey' has, for example, they both seem to be common feelings people have in response to RPGs in a way that 'automobile-y' and 'giraffe-y' are not. In fact, in this thread, someone tried to define 'videogamey' as being the opposite of 'book-y', although the term they used was 'novelesque'.

That definition didn't go very far because he then had to define 'novelesque', which is no easier than defining 'videogamey' in the first place. It could be, once we understand what is meant by both words better that 'novelesque' really is the opposite of 'videogamey', but at this point we just don't know what to make of that comparison.

The analogy I would have used is 'cinematic', which is a word that I use in a very precise way, but is in general usage by gamers in much more general ways. The only real difference between the term is that 'cinematic' doesn't draw out 'the haters' quite as much because its usually used to mean a positive attribute of the system rather than a negative one.

The problem I see, whether you use "videogamey" or "novelesque" or "cinematic", is that on their own those terms mean very little. It doesn't matter whether you're talking about video games or novels or films, there's more than one genre/style involved. It would seem to be far more sensible to use more precise language than to provide a term that is so vague that it's possible to derive a meaning from it that is neither meant nor desired. Although it's quite possible that the vague term is preferred by some people as they find it's easier to defend a statement when other people don't know what they mean.

 

[Umbran]

In this case, I think that the term is in wide use precisely because the underlying issues are difficult to describe. People don't necessarily know why it feels 'videogamey' to them, or they may know but have difficulty articulating it because the specialized language that would make it easy is either unknown to them or else doesn't exist.

That may be - but using a vague term that doesn't really communicate the underlying issues clearly doesn't move things forward. The discussion of the underlying issues still has to happen if they use that term.

I can understand not having the words on hand to describe a feeling. Why not say so? "I'm at a bit of a loss to describe it, but here's an example of what I mean..."

Specific examples, don't necessarily reveal the underlying generality, but it is a start.

 

[Celebrim]

I agree. There isn't any way to be completely unambiguous. English is a bad language for precision, IMHO.

Depends on what you want to be precise about. English a terrible language for being precise about moral values and emotions. However, as the foremost borrower language on the planet with the most loan words and the most synonyms for everything, it's one of the most descriptive languages available. There are 20 or 30 subtle variations and shades of meaning for almost every word imaginable, and unlike say French, you can freely borrow words into it if you need a subtle variation not provided and proclaim that this borrowed word now describes that subtle variation. The real difficulty with English is that most people aren't fluent enough in it (because most people only use 2000 or so words, and real English fluency takes about ten times that amount) to master all the subtle variations in thought provided by it, so they tend to use words as very loose synonyms when in fact they don't mean the same thing. Lazily spoken English is understandable, but it isn't as clear as it could be.

But we can minimize it. One of the big rules is to avoid using a broad term when a more specific one will due.

People keep making this complaint, but as of yet, no one has actually suggested the more specific word.

I was unaware of the first definition from 2006.

I gathered that. Or rather, I gathered that you only knew one definition, but I didn't know which one. I didn't know if you knew the phrases real meaning, or if you only new the phrase to mean what it meant to those that had misunderstood and misused it.

I've only ever heard the term in recent years and always with the second definition.

Right. That's why I lumped it with the phrase, 'The exception proves the rule'. Most people who use the phrase 'the exception proves the rule' use it in a nonsensical way that completely obscures its the originally understood meaning. 'The exception proves the rule' is shorthand for a complex and valid thought. Because that thought is complex, it's not understood clearly by everyone who hears the phrase used, so they misuse it. This results in most people's understanding of the phrase being entirely the wrong one - one that doesn't make sense if you think about it.

If you think about 'too big to fail' literally, you see that the words don't contain the idea 'too big [to be allowed] to fail'. The literal meaning of the words 'too big to fail' is 'too big to fail'. The meaning you are familiar with has been attached to them for various complex reasons. But, because you understood the new meaning from context, you never paused to consider why that meaning would be attached to words that didn't actually clearly state the new meaning. That's partly because 'too big to fail' was a buzzword, a bit of shorthand. Humans have a bad habit of when they hear something attaching their first instinctive understanding to it and then latching onto it and defending that instinctive understanding to the death if need be.

Either way, it's definition appears to have mostly changed over time. Which happens in English. I think the old definition has fallen out of common use.

Yes. But the point is, I didn't know which definition you knew. So if you said something was 'too big to fail', I wouldn't without context know what you meant.

It might still be being used in specialized industries or something, but I doubt if I used the term with my friends that we'd have any difficulty understanding that we all meant the "new" definition.

Maybe not, but that's not very flattering to your friends.

That's the problem with English...words and phrases shift meaning. But as long as we are all using the "current" definition of the word or phrase, there's no misunderstanding.

Really? Quite often words have five or six current meanings, and as someone who is very interested in artificial intelligence, its my opinion that probably they really have 20 or 30 and part of the problem of teaching language to a computer is we don't know how to define them and gloss over those various shades of meaning in a way that computers cannot. One of my hopes for AI research is that as we really come to understand language, we'll begin to be able to employ it more intelligently than we do.

In fact, there are only 2 possible outcomes of that post: People will read into it and assume I mean one thing or another(which I may or may not) or everyone will reply with "What do you mean?" requiring a second post using words that mean something.

False dilemma. There are many more than two possible outcomes to that post (binary thinking again), the most obvious of which is that someone will say, "What a coincidence, I had that exact same experience and I know exactly what you mean!" Part of the reason your analogy is such a bad one is that when the phrase 'videogamey' is exchanged, there is a comparitively high incidence of this third outcome (something I've already demonstrated when I showed that about 3/4 of the people who actually answered the question said basically the same thing).

 

[Celebrim]

The problem I see, whether you use "videogamey" or "novelesque" or "cinematic", is that on their own those terms mean very little.

I agree. They are, as I've already admitted, shorthand for large complex ideas. In order to understand their meaning, you have to have some understanding of the large complex idea and some understanding of what part of that complex idea relates to what the person is describing.

So I hope you see that this 'problem' doesn't really undermine what I'm saying at all.

It doesn't matter whether you're talking about video games or novels or films, there's more than one genre/style involved. It would seem to be far more sensible to use more precise language than to provide a term that is so vague that it's possible to derive a meaning from it that is neither meant nor desired.

It would be more sensible. But I suspect the problem here is that the precise language for doing so doesn't exist or is isn't in wide usage. I'd have to go digging through FORGE to see if someone has defined language for discussing the things that seem to be at the root of this. I know some of FORGE-speak, but not enough to describe this in those terms or even whether this is something that has been precisely described.

As for the complaint that the term is so vague that it's possible to derive a meaning from it that is neither meant or desired, I find that to be rather odd complaint in as much as many words and terms fit that description. And even if more precise language did exist, all that would happen is that we would know have some consensus definition for what the shorthand term 'videogamey' meant - and that's not something I have an objection to. 'Videogamey' would still then be a supercategory of some list of more precise ideas.

Meanwhile, I note that my precise definitions aren't considered worthy of argument even when I provide them. People who want to argue against me would rather speak in generalities about the reasons for their objection, namely that the word supposedly can't be defined. The repeated complaint that I'm being 'too vague' after having provided an Aristolean definition and specific examples, or that there is no evidence that a consensus definition exists don't provide me alot of evidence that the people making the counter-claims are motivated by strong commitments to using language in precise and accurate ways.

Although it's quite possible that the vague term is preferred by some people as they find it's easier to defend a statement when other people don't know what they mean.

It's possible, but one of the rules of being a good listener is not to assert that your lack of understanding is solely due to some mental defect of the speaker when trying to understand them. It's just as likely that people are continually engaging in ad hominem attacks on those that use the word (including the one you just made) because they find dismissing things that they don't understand easier than trying to understand them. Asserting that the other side is simply insane or stupid gets us no where, and while doing it in a way that slips under the mod's radar is a popular EnWorld sport, if you really care about understanding I'd rather you didn't engage in it now.

 

[Celebrim]

That may be - but using a vague term that doesn't really communicate the underlying issues clearly doesn't move things forward. The discussion of the underlying issues still has to happen if they use that term.

Agreed. But, but at the risk of being too repetitive here, isn't that what we are doing now? Isn't, not to put too fine a point on it, that the very reason this thread isn't being locked by the moderators? Because, if we were actually just using the term in a pejorative fashion as some here assert, then I can't imagine that the thread would have lasted this long.

I can understand not having the words on hand to describe a feeling. Why not say so? "I'm at a bit of a loss to describe it, but here's an example of what I mean..."

But, isn't that exactly what people who use the term 'videogamey' are doing, most especially, here in this thread? I don't deny that people could misuse the word or use it as a simple pejorative, but even words that are today used as simple pejoratives began as words with other meanings (I won't list them, but anyone can google them up).

Specific examples, don't necessarily reveal the underlying generality, but it is a start.

Agreed, hense my attempt at an Aristolean definition and my discussion before attempting anything so precise as a Socratic definition.

 

[Jdvn1]

People keep making this complaint, but as of yet, no one has actually suggested the more specific word.

I suggested "4E works better as a video game" or referring to the specific unliked aspect of 4E being discussed or raised as an issue. (ie, if we're talking about healing surges, say you don't like healing surges, possibly mentioning that you don't like that it reminds you of something else)

Majoru Oakheart suggested "unrealistic" or "unintuitive" where appropriate.

Umbran offered:

But with minimal extra effort, you could instead say, "The power structure reminds me of MMORPGs like 'City of Heroes', and I find that uninspiring in a tabletop game." Or maybe, "It seems to me too focused on the combat action, one encounter after another. Relentless, like a side-scroller videogame, with too little focus on the narrative we're trying to create."

... Point is, there are tons of better ways to say something, many more specific words.

There may have been more suggestions.

Really? Quite often words have five or six current meanings

By the way, if someone could narrow down "videogamey" to just five or six meanings, that'd be a huge step in the right direction.

 

[Oryan77]

I'm just waiting for the day when I can criticize a video game by calling it 'too pen&papery'.