Wednesday, March 17, 2004
The Video Game Ombudsman along with The International Game Journalists Association (IGJA) have set up a Style Guide for videogames. The purpose is to compile a 'standard, industry-wide style guide'. All members of the forum of IGJA can post a new entry so it's a collaborative piece of work. It can be quite useful to have a standardized way of keywords, although many are up for debate (like video game or videogame, I much prefer the one-word spelling: videogame). Therefore it's a good thing the style guide is on a messageboard where everyone can discuss an entry. Hopefully for them it won't be discussions without an end.
Now all we need is an academic vocabulary put into a styleguide. It should be a database of how to write words but more importantly it should be a dictionary of some sort with terms commonly used by academic game researchers. The field should probably be a bit more evolved than it is now to come up with such a style guide and dictionary although there are already some early steps to be seen around. A good example is the dictionary on game-research.com.
They also have a 'Game Research reference database' which is 'an attempt to create a comprehensive collection of references to game related literature'. So far they have 529 entries. Another bibliography can be found on Ren Reynolds' website
A hot topic on the Gamesnetwork list a while ago was a reference database for citations and bibliography in academic writings. We know (although I do find it quite difficult still, and takes me ages to make a bibliography *grumble* when writing something so hail the blog ;)) how to quote something and refer to the appropriate book or website but how to refer to a videogame? Does the reference have to contain the publisher, developer, designer etc.? A more elaborate notion on this subject you can find at Stanislav Roudavski's site where he has put up a log of the discussion on the Gamesnetwork List and a reference guide draft.
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