Post by Evie ❤✿ on Sept 11, 2023 14:22:52 GMT -5
These are just a few terms. Can we think of any other gaming terms which have changed over time? Or any terms which aren't used very often anymore, or were only recently introduced?
Terms for errors in video games: According to this article (and the 1962 book Into Orbit a "glitch" used to be a specific term for an electrical fault.
"Another term we adopted to describe some of our problems was "glitch." Literally, a glitch is a spike or change in voltage in an electrical circuit which takes place when the circuit suddenly has a new load put on it. You have probably noticed a dimming of lights in your home when you turn a switch or start the dryer or the television set. Normally, these changes in voltage are protected by fuses. A glitch, however, is such a minute change in voltage that no fuse could protect against it"
(Via Wikipedia)
However, nowadays people may use the word "glitch" to refer to a flaw which is rooted back to the software/firmware/hardware, not just electrical interference. They may also more rarely use it to refer to something which was intended but appears off, as well as an "exploit" which may be accidentally (there is an expression which says "it's not a bug it's a feature"). It may also be used to refer to a "sequence break"/"skip" rather than the flaw which caused it. This has caused debate in gaming communities where people can say things like 'they're not glitches, they're bugs' and not accepting certain things as glitches.
The term "bug" in engineering also dates back further, predating electronic computers and software. Thomas Edison (while communicating with Tivadar Puskás?) in 1878 said this:
"It has been just so in all of my inventions. The first step is an intuition, and comes with a burst, then difficulties arise—this thing gives out and [it is] then that "Bugs"—as such little faults and difficulties are called—show themselves and months of intense watching, study and labor are requisite before commercial success or failure is certainly reached."
(Edison papers, Edison National Laboratory, U.S. National Park Service, West Orange, N.J according to a book by Thomas Parke Hughes called "American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870-1970" (page 75) published by Penguin Books)
Via Wikipedia
Curiously, he refers to them as faults and difficulties. I suppose when thinking about making something like a clock, if it didn't work in harmony with physics it would be called a "difficulty" (in weaker connotations) and a "fault" is stronger connotations. As I actually like exploiting bugs/glitches in games (and many others do too nowadays) curiously the term might have weaker connotations than "fault" did back then? (Unless you're a game developer who doesn't like them).
Later, developers used the word bug (or "software bug") to errors in the software, which lead to the term debugging to find and remove them. Nowadays this is typically done by extensive testing (e.g. by the developers, play testers, and companies/organisations Mario Club and Sarugakucho or the debug(ging) support/team). One of the means developers can do this is by setting breakpoints. The program counter refers to a computer/electronic game code it is currently executed, and developers can use tools to set breakpoints 'break' when certain conditions are true, such as execution of at a certain point in the Memory Map (a Game Boy for instance uses a 16-bit address bus, so it can access 65536 portions of memory. At the point of break, the game temporarily halts; the internal state of the hardware registers and memory can be observed, and the game can be resumed where it left off.
If you knew all of this data, you could also create save states to load the game exactly where it was rather than relying on the local save loading routine, which likely won't set certain areas of the RAM, registers, etc. (which Nintendo officially have called Restore Points). Pertaining to this, save states will typically store the SRAM too (and the save file isn't just restricted to save data, as for instance Pokémon Red/Blue/Yellow temporarily use the unbanked portion as a buffer when decompressing sprites or for storing the Hall of Fame data - which is why Pokémon Stadium says the game is "saving..." when you encounter MissingNo. also it actually is a partial save; because resetting the game after you encounter MissingNo. will corrupt the Hall of Fame even if you don't choose the save option, or the change box option, or the reset option at the Cable Club).
Later Game Boy games use a Memory Bank Controller to access further areas in the ROM, or RAM (Random-Access Memory which can be used for temporarily variables in the game due to its volatile nature degrading after power off), or SRAM/Cart RAM/External RAM/the Save File with bank switching operations).
(In lots of Game Boy games with internal clock batteries used for in-game features like a day and night cycle, when the batteries die or corrupt, which means many games like Pokémon Gold/Silver/Crystal have their save files lost to time, including the Mobile System GB downloadable content in Japanese Pokémon Crystal. However, the game Net de Get: Minigame @ 100 uses flash memory instead, which is less volatile; so it's possible the downloadable minigames can still be found in old copies of that game, but no one seems to have found it yet).
Anyway, one of the earliest uses of debugging was physical on the hardware side. On September 9, 1947 a moth was trapped in their computer at Harvard University. Apparently the engineers there were the first to "debug" a machine. However, since the term was used before way back as Thomas Edison and that quote is a little vague about it, perhaps the term was not as much associated with insects than it would become after that famous photo (provided by the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Dahlgren, Virginia).
In modern times (until the age of quantum computing), computers are based on the binary representation of data and code (series of 0 or 1). Also usually in modern times, this is represented in hexadecimal for convenience (0-255 because 2^8 is equal to 256; that means 255 is 11111111 in binary, which if converted back is easier to read than for instance 999 or 001111100111).
Furthermore, there is the term low-level programming. Whereas a computer language like "C++" can be seen as more intuitive to a human (e.g. "if... else") (these are higher-level programming) a language such as (Game Boy) Z80 is less so (e.g. "jr nz,05"). For low-level programming you can find in their simplest forms, opcodes (operation instruction IDs) and operands (parameters for those instructions); both stored in the ROM as bytes; so without analysis there would be no distinction between data and code in the ROM image (Read-Only Memory) (often just called ROMsto refer to games which aren't ISO (disc images named after the ISO 9660 optical disc file system) or BIOS ("basic input/output system" power on microprocessor) and a ROM like a BIOS but if the ROM itself isn't a system (example Game Boy Color Bootstrap ROM according to the current revision on The Cutting Room Floor.
This is also related to why arbitrary code execution (targeting the RAM to write code using temporary variables like the items Red has in the bag in Pokémon Red/Blue) works, because a bug in the program causes the program counter to jump somewhere unexpected, such as RAM. Here (in this case if the RAM pointer corresponds to some inventory items) it is misinterpreting data as code, which is how the "8F" glitch item works in English Pokémon Red and Blue (first jumping to the player's party, which can then be manipulated to jump to the player's bag or elsewhere); similarly the "ws m" glitch item in English Pokémon Yellow first jumps to the current storage box data, and the same can be achieved. You can similarly run arbitrary code in a specific scripting language introduced for that game if you force the game to enter that mode (such as Pokégear phone scripts in Pokémon Gold and Silver). Similarly, arbitrary RAM modification is using glitches to write to specific areas of the RAM, without necessarily executing that region of the bus. An example is text move abuse in Pokémon Red/Blue/Yellow, but you could say it requires an arbitrary script, because it abuses text command 03. Luckytyphlosion decided not to use it in this TAS submission.
Also, we have the relevant Wikipedia article about software bugs and the more recent use of "arbitrary code execution" in games (see the various sources cited there).
Wikipedia (software bug)
Wikipedia (arbitrary code execution)
In Japan, from how I gather they usually just say バグ (bug); they typically don't say グリッチ (glitch) in game communities. However in particularly old arcade games up to the 90s (maybe later too) they would say 裏技 (underhanded trick), such as an underhanded trick in Xevious, Mario, Pokémon Generations I and II. Actually this book by Satoshi Tajiri Pac-Land de Tsukamaete (Japanese: パックランドでつかまえて) touches on those things and controversy when the source material to Xevious got leaked to write a (in)famous book.
(In my own words because I previously wrote this revision of the Game Freak magazine NintendoWiki article)
"Xevious 1000 Man-Ten e no Kaihou (Japanese: ゼビウス1000万点への解法), "How to Score 10 Million Points in Xevious" was an early Japanese game strategy guide for Xevious, written by an expert player Yasuhiro Oomori (大堀康祐) (pseudonym: うる星あんず, Urusei Anzu) with the help of Nakagane Naohiko (中金直彦) in 1983. (ref: ゲームフリークはバグと戯れる―ビデオゲーム「ゼビウス」論 (The Game Freaks Who Play With Bugs – In Praise of the Video Game Xevious) book, translation for Geemu Media Mix Volume 5, Issue 1, December 2015 journal - Kinephanos)
After Satoshi Tajiri/Game Freak were asked to publish it together, they advertised it in Supersoft Magazine (スーパーソフトマガジン); a supplement to Mycom BASIC Magazine (マイコンベーシックマガジン). This guide was infamous for exposing Namco source material not intended to be known by the public; by comparison Satoshi Tajiri's feature on Xevious did not have this information. (ref: 「ゼビウス」がなければ「ポケモン」は生まれなかった！？———遠藤雅伸、田尻智、杉森建がその魅力を鼎談。ゲームの歴史を紐解く連載シリーズ「ゲームの企画書」第一回 (Denfaminicogamer))
Game Freak have been mentioned as having reprinted their own version of this book, but details whether they did as opposed to just advertising it are unclear. "
Game capture: In Japan isn't "game capture" sometimes used to refer to game strategy? Does anybody more knowledgable about Japan know about this? At least I think 伝説のスターブロブ２の主な出来事の年表 (Legendary Star Blob 2) used it this way.
Nowadays, it has a different meaning (too) where recording video games and streaming is a norm.
In terms of connotations, despite being relatively positive, on rare cases it is punished by developers e.g. they might want to re-use the IP of an obscure game, they might want to ban visual novel spoilers for a recently released game which has also lead to controversy, example 1, 2)
Terms for prerelease information and unused content
In traditional nomenclature of a "software release life cycle", the term "beta" has traditionally been used to refer to software shortly after the feature complete phase (marking the end of the "alpha" phase), but the software may still contain bugs (according to NEXT Generation Issue #15 March 1996). Pre-alpha, alpha, release candidate (Tempest thinks they rarely also called this Gamma), and release to manufacturing (RTM)/golden master build (GM) being other terms, with RTM referring to when the software is ready for release.
On the Internet however, it has become popular to use the term "beta" to refer to any prerelease information (even things like concept art).
Some sites prefer the new definition of beta like Unseen64 (also "beta elements") (founded in 2001) and mixed parts of YouTube, while other sites such as the wiki The Cutting Room Floor and the Jul community discourage it (or they may have disallowed it if I remember correctly, I don't know if they still do), often preferring the term "prototype".
A long time ago, the now defunct Glitch City Laboratories (now a living archived version of the wiki and a dump of the forums and its successor Discord community remain) used to use the term beta as well, and Zelda Chaos still do?
In this old Atari Age thread (the source of the that "Gamma" claim, Tempest says even as early as your first line of code could be called a "prototype" but spacecadet says when he worked in game publishing they only had "alpha," "beta" and "master", with prototype being an older term possibly referring to the cartridge itself.
Prerelease information then refers to any content before release, but unused content refers to information found when data-mining video games. I don't know if it's necessarily true to say unused content is automatically prerelease information, unless in the case of games with more than one revision or patch with unused content removed later you count . In 2013, I created the splits on Starfy Wiki (first old revisions of former and latter) terms. Super Mario Wiki also have a single page using "pre-release and unused content", for the title now, but in late 2006- referred to them as beta elements.
Revision can be used to refer to more than one variation of a game, as can version (but usually things such as Pokémon Red and Blue Versions, the NTSC or PAL version, or the German version of The Legend of Zelda Link's Awakening). Nowadays we think of patch in terms such as the day one patch (the game is in a specific state and is
Hacking as opposed to data-mining for terms in exploring a game's code, but the former "hacking" could refer to also refer to a game related data breach without reverse engineering the game. When I was younger (I've always lived in England) curiously I only heard people say the term "hacking", even online. The term data-mining is old too though (1990s-) but I didn't used to see it online in terms of ROM hacking (for games which are packaged like a 'blob' of code and data after being assembled) or looking into a game's files (for games with a file system). Reverse engineering in terms of software is similar to opening it up or dissecting it. Nowadays disassembly and decompilation projects of games have been made such as Pokémon Red, Super Mario Bros., taking the code/data and presenting into a more organised form, potentially to be edited and/or re-assembled later. If a game has no disassembly project, you could only hack it through means such as hex editing (also called binary editing or binary hacking), where a hex editor displays the binary representation of a ROM/BIOS image etc. in hexadecimal form for editing data and code.
Dump in video game preservation communities is sometimes used in the context of dumping something and putting it on the Internet (or "dumped" as in it has been saved on the Internet), but in software it generally is like content extraction; since as above the data inside of a ROM, save file (etc.) can be extracted using a device and saved/viewed byte by byte in a hex editor even if it is just stored locally.
YouTuber (user of YouTube), Let's Player (video gameplay with reactions/commentary) Streamer (user of video streaming platforms like Twitch), VTuber (YouTubers with a virtual avatar and/or voice) are also relatively recent terms too in the whole history of video gaming
Video game as opposed to computer game. For me, Google Search says "About 549,000,000 results" for the former in quotation marks, and "About 20,200,000 results". Also in Japan they used to say TV Game ("About 13,300,000 results" for テレビゲーム). Japanese Wikipedia cites 『テレビゲーム文化論』桝山寛 ISBN 4-06-149573-9 to say these are video games for general consumers(?) (般消費者) but also says something about how traditionally they are played on televisions.
