Words from the Field

I recently had a couple of questions regarding gaming journalism that I wasn't quite sure of; 1: how to best reference initial awareness of a new thing, and 2: how exactly the "videogame/video game" issue should be dealt with. Thus, I asked a new games journalist that I tremendously respect - Kieron Gillen. Here are some of his words:

There isn't really one [way to cite initial sources], basically. RPS being a conversational blog, I normally mention where I found the actual story in the first line. Other, more formal blogs, just drop it in at the end. To be honest, that seems a bit rude in most cases, as that minimises the chance of sending hits to your source's way. And that's surely the point, yeah? POLITENESS IN ALL THINGS.

Regarding videogame/video game, I use videogame, but I'm far from standard (or even coherent) in my language. I think making it clearly a neologism focuses on the fact we're talking about a unique cultural entity. It's not really about video and games any more. In fact, videogames aren't always games in a classical sense. It's something else, and making it a new word makes it clear that we're talking about a new thing.