What’s In A Name?
Wait! Fear not! I am not going to bore you with a literature piece but I’m about to discuss about naming relating to video games.
Rather than delving into the deceptively hard process of naming a video game, I’m more interested in knowing how you call your console/video game. Well, I don’t mean to say that you converse with your console or game, which is actually okay if you do, but what I really mean is how you call consoles/video games when they're mentioned in a conversation. What piqued my interest concerning this curious nomenclature case has to do with what I recently experienced.
A friend of mine would always mention his favorite childhood console as "Atari" and as hard as I tried, I could never know which Atari he was actually talking about. He couldn’t identify any of the Atari consoles in pictures that I would show him, nor could he find his childhood console in a retro video game shop we visited. I tried to explain that maybe he was mistaken about the console name but being as obstinate as always, he maintained what he said. He would further add that his favorite game was Aladdin and went on talking about how he lost his copy. So I dismissed this story as another one of his numerous elaborate fiction...
Later, another friend who’s from the same country as my “Atari-friend” came over for a visit and was looking into retro video games. When I showed her Super Mario Bros. she started talking about how she would be playing this for hours on on her Atari. Yes. That’s what she said. Atari. Well, unless any Atari could emulate the NES, there was something terribly wrong here...
After an inquisition with those two “Atari" owners, I figured that what they owned in their childhood was actually an NES, or more likely a clone since my friend broke several of his. And, for some obscure reason, they would all call it as an Atari. But I was not so surprised. In fact, I could relate! Back in my childhood, we had similar clones which we would call Family Game and that was the term we would use when talking about consoles/video games until we got old enough to differentiate Nintendo from Sega. Others would even generalize everything as a Nintendo.
I don’t know if you can relate to a similar story but I would be very much interested to hear about it if you do! So how did/do you call your consoles/video games, or anything else really, other than by its original name? There’s no convention for that and that’s what makes it all the more interesting!
You might have come across the above quote while adventuring into one of your literature class but it’s somewhat relevant here. No matter how you call consoles/video games, they are what they are. Giving them nicknames shows our affection to the medium, how much it matters to us. They never cease to amaze us.
Later, another friend who’s from the same country as my “Atari-friend” came over for a visit and was looking into retro video games. When I showed her Super Mario Bros. she started talking about how she would be playing this for hours on on her Atari. Yes. That’s what she said. Atari. Well, unless any Atari could emulate the NES, there was something terribly wrong here...
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You might have come across the above quote while adventuring into one of your literature class but it’s somewhat relevant here. No matter how you call consoles/video games, they are what they are. Giving them nicknames shows our affection to the medium, how much it matters to us. They never cease to amaze us.
