Friday, May 04, 2007

Words confuse me.

After a couple of recent updates I've decided I'm going to have to add some common games industry words to the custom dictionary for Google toolbar's spellchecker. Not too long ago I remember a discussion on the Chaos Engine about the correct hyphenation for these terms (and if they should be hyphenated at all), and being a bit lazy I thought I could get an update out of it, instead of just looking at that (and besides, I seem to remember no solid answers being arrived at).

Anyway, I'm currently thinking the following:

  • Gameplay, not game-play or game play because they both look funny (hey I'm not saying this is a scientific study).
  • Cut-scene instead of cutscene. Though I'm not too sure about this one, both look kind of right to me.
  • Mini-game. If I'm remembering my English language teacher correctly, this is right because the 'mini' is a prefix.
Is there any kind of industry standard for these? It's one of those things that you sometimes stumble across quite by accident that make you realise just how young the industry is, and how much more we have to do.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

We use gameplay, cutscene and minigame, even though Word doesn't recongize any of them. The dashes seem to insert a pause in the word; in our normal parlance there isn't any.

Anonymous said...

Mini-game or minigame is one that particularly bugs me... I have no idea which is really more appropriate. I suppose the mere fact that my current design task requires me to write the term pretty regularly is more distressing overall.

Anonymous said...

Minigame is the correct pronunciation.