A Short and Simple Definition of What a Videogame Is

This paper, presented at the DiGRA 2005 conference, proposes a short and simple definition of the videogame: a game played through an audiovisual apparatus that can be based on a story. Its central aim is to offer a reusable academic definition that is grounded in existing theory on games, play, interactivity, and narrative, and to establish a foundation for future videogame design methods. The author argues that videogame studies only began seriously in recent years, despite the medium's industry being more than thirty years old by the time of writing, and that a clear definitional starting point is needed before design practice can be informed by scholarship.

The definition is built by examining each of its components against established theory. The paper draws on Roger Caillois, Johan Huizinga, Eric Zimmerman, Chris Crawford, and Wolfgang Kramer to characterize games and their rules, quantifiable outcomes, and the distinction between play and game, and it notes that toy-games and puzzle-games complicate narrower definitions. The audiovisual apparatus component is tied to the computational, interactive nature of the medium, following Jesper Juul's account of automation and rule enforcement. The story component is treated as optional, since abstract games such as Tetris show that narrative is not essential, and the paper considers whether videogames are better understood as simulations.

The author also surveys the videogame's history, dividing its first three decades into four periods, from the pioneering years of 1971 to 1978 through to the present era of large-scale, online productions. Drawing on examples such as Space Invaders, Pac-Man, and Sim City, the paper argues that the early and mid-period titles reveal what a videogame is and how diverse the form can be. The study is conceptual and qualitative rather than empirical, relying on literature review and historical illustration instead of survey data or sampled datasets.