Sassy Black Friend

What’s the difference between gaming and playing games?

The post title is an innocent question I asked the boyfriend last week. It occurred to me that he refers to what looks like playing games online with his friends as gaming. Asking got me a sigh, rolled eyes, and no answer. It kind of made me feel like my mother. Which made me laugh so I told him that, which made him laugh. But I never did get an answer to my question.

On the sadly all too rare occasion that I indulge my love of Scrabble, I don’t call it gaming. So I thought maybe it has to be online? If it doesn’t involve my trusty Linksys router does that make it just playing games?

Like most seekers of shallow knowledge, I looked it up on Wikipedia. And found:

While the term gaming relates to game (any of a number of structured activities), it usually implies participation in particular kinds of games.

As used in the gamer subculture, the term can refer to participation in activities such as:

* Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, known as MMORPG, in which players assume fictional roles, as in an RPGs, but unlike RPGs huge numbers of players interact with each other in an online virtual world.
* Role-playing game, known as RPGs, in which players assume fictional roles, the term Role-playing game implys that the game is offline, whilst other people may play it there is no way for users to interact from the game.
* Tabletop game, any game played on a flat surface (often a table)
* Video game, any electronic game with a video interface
o see also Video game culture

Really not helpful. Thanks, Wikipedia!