There are two ways to explain what exactly a video game is: the easy, simple way, and the really complex way.
The easy answer is that a video game is interactive digital entertainment that you “play” via a computer, a game console (like the Xbox or PlayStation) or a phone or tablet. There, you can go home now because class is over and we’re done. That really does sum it all up — but it’s not a very good explanation of everything going on here.
As the new person covering video games for TheWrap, I aim to provide good explanations for you, our readers. So I’m going to dive into the more complicated explanation here.
The label “video game” casts an absurdly large net over a whole lot of different things. There are a million different kinds of video games, and each of them sorta functions as its own form of entertainment media. Since we don’t have concrete labels for all those individual types — just loose genre descriptions — we just say everything is a video game. It’s confusing, even to those of us you’d call gamers.
If a person were to somehow grow up only on video games and then discover later in life all the other forms of entertainment we regularly consume, that person would probably be confused as to why we consider film and television distinct types of media. Compared to the scope of everything that counts as video games, movies and TV are indistinguishable from each other.
Video games are sports that take place in a computer. They’re interactive TV shows and interactive movies. They’re digital board games and card games. They’re rough simulations of everyday life including, probably, whatever you do for a living. Some video games are works of artistic expression. Others don’t know what artistic expression is or why you would care about whatever that is.
But they’re all video games.
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