Introduction

Currently, digital games refer mainly to various playable artifacts that require computer technology for their use. In academic and everyday language, the term is somewhat synonymous with "computer games", "electronic games" and "videogames", the last of which remains clearly the most common in popularity. For instance, a search in Google Trends shows videogames (or video games) to be 10–20 times more prevalent than any of its alternatives. That said, the implications of these prefixes—computer, digital, electronic, video—vary greatly, and have served as the motivation for many researchers (and industry stakeholders) to choose a preferred one depending on the context. On the other hand, it is important to keep in mind that the words "game" and "digital game" do not belong or translate to all languages very well (or at all), and other ways for capturing the meaning of the English "digital game" might be needed outside the present discourse. Below, I discuss the concept of digital games with a goal to provide alternative justifications for the different terminology.

The Term's History

The increasing academic interest toward play and games in general is largely due to the emergence of digital games. Although monographs were written on non-digital play activities already before the 20th century (e.g., Groos, 1898), perhaps the first book-length study on digital games was published in 1954 by Cushen, titled Generalized Battle Games on a Digital Computer (of which no copies remain to my knowledge). The economically successful digital games industry since the 1970s led researchers to give more and more attention to digital games, yet the first doctoral dissertations on the topic (Buckles, 1985; Malone, 1980) both used the term "computer game" in their title, referring to a wide range of artifacts from coin-operated arcade games to text-based adventure stories. In the 1990s, as commercial consoles from Nintendo, Sega and Sony proliferated globally, the word "videogame" arguably started dominating the English discourse in both academic and popular domains.

Although play and games had thus been studied systematically for decades in fields such as anthropology, biology, law and psychology, it was not until 2001 that an academic journal dedicated to digital games launched. The editorial team of Game Studies agreed upon the subtitle "the international journal of computer game research", which distinguished it from journals such as Simulation and Gaming (1970) and Gaming Research and Review Journal (1994) that actively publish research on analog games. However, from a post hoc perspective, the decision to focus on computer games was not so much about "computers" or "digitality" as it was about commercial games in the entertainment industry. In fact, while Game Studies has now abandoned the exclusive focus on "computer games" (Aarseth, 2017), to date, no article has been published in the journal without a connection to commercial games or related design.

The above exemplifies how the general trends related to computer and digital games are generally by-products of interest toward new commercial forms play and games, including non-digital card and board games. This also reflects the general meaning when we discuss digital games today, especially in contrast to just games: digital games are almost exclusively associated with the global multibillion industry, whereas (just) games tend to include children's games, sports and other activities with nonexistent or significantly different commercial elements.

Current Use

As it has become clear thus far, "digital game" is by no means the most accurate, historically correct or even popular choice for researchers and others who write about titles such as SimCity (Maxis, 1989), World of Warcraft (Blizzard, 2004), Angry Birds (Rovio 2009), Dark Souls (FromSoftware, 2011) and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (Valve, 2012). In the above sociohistorical context, we may next peek at the most central perspectives on digital games as a modern concept, without pursuing a complete conceptual analysis, nevertheless. The focus is on "digitality" here, and I refer those interested in a more in-depth discussion of "gameness" to other entries in this encyclopedia (such as Game Definition or Game Ontology).

Two related notes are worth addressing here, the first being: how to identify digitality when discussing games? Turing's old reminder that "everything really moves continuously" (1950, p. 439) remains relevant; namely, digitality as such is difficult to pinpoint and serves best as a layman's term for pointing at everything computerized. For instance, when discussing film or photography, one and the same work can be presented in analog and digital formats, with few critics or spectators considering the difference. Next to many such digitalized legacy media, the devotion to digitality in the analysis and research on games is on a different level. This is mainly because digital games are designed and programmed for specific human-computer interactions, which can (but need not) rather completely change the nature of the user activity in comparison to analog play. In digital games, the computer can automatedly change the material properties and possibilities provided to the player (e.g., Leino, 2010), which in analog games usually entails a human referee or mutual social agreement. In fact, it has been argued that digital games are most likely called "games" merely by convention, as they often share little or nothing with pre-digital game forms (Woods, 2007).

Second, one may further ask what kind of or how much digitality should there be for a game to be considered a digital one? For instance, numerous sports, board games and other activities as well as artifacts have digital elements, and there is no consensus among experts about the extent that matters. In lack of conceivable benefits for such rules, too, one may add that the pragmatic context should be a key factor when considering conceptualization (Karhulahti, 2020); moreover, legal and regulatory actions should carefully assess each particular case if the conceptual decision over the object has significant consequences for individuals or stakeholders (e.g., Lipton et al., 2005).

Following the above, it is relevant to note how the act of playing digital games has recently standardized into the term "gaming". In the pre-computer era of English language, gaming used to be virtually synonymous with gambling, but is now referring to digital game play almost exclusively. For instance, the World Health Organization's (2022) International Classification of Diseases 11 (https://icd.who.int/en) dodged the terminological dilemma between computer, digital, electronic and video games by using "gaming disorder" as reference to all these concepts. However, in this case, gaming explicitly excludes analog and gambling games, which reminds us of the significance of ongoing reevaluation of "game" terminology in contexts with conceptual sensitivity, such as clinical instances where human health is of concern.

A similar overlap is present in the recently proliferated notion of esports, which as a term tends to include all kinds of competitive play—now sometimes including chess and card games too, although the prefix "e" originally referred to "electronic" games. Evidently, for both researchers and practitioners, there is a frequent need to connect related cultural phenomena by coalescing them into a single term, which can be either confusing or useful, depending on end-users and their goals. This is also the challenge with previous attempts (e.g., Karhulahti, 2015; Smed & Hakonen, 2003; Tavinor, 2008) to define related terms: definitions that pursue universality lack context-sensitivity, i.e., distinct definitions are typically helpful for distinct purposes. In the end, there are not many contexts where word choices could be directly harmful, however, so the general recommendation is to relax with one's choice of (digital) "game" terminology and rather pursue internal consistency.

Summary

Digital game is one of the currently popular terms that mainly refer to computer-based games. In everyday life and research, almost all digital games are somehow connected to the design industry, which sets most digital games far from sports and similar analog games, but relatively close to card and board games (that increasingly occur in hybrid analog/digital forms). There are few pragmatically meaningful differences between computer, electronic, digital and video games as concepts, for which choosing one is usually a matter of taste rather than an analytic decision. At the time of writing, the act of playing digital games has come to be labeled gaming, which efficiently merges all the competing terms but still generates confusion due to its vague relationship with analog play and gambling.

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Author Information

Veli-Matti Karhulahti is a senior researcher at the University of Jyväskylä.

Acknowledgments

This entry was supported by the Academy of Finland (312397).

Citation Information

Karhulahti, V. M. (2022). Digital Games. In Grabarczyk, P. (ed.), Encyclopedia of Ludic Terms (Spring 2022 Edition). URL: https://eolt.org/articles/digital-games

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