Sihao Choy

Professor Rachel Feldman

Writing 2

11/23/2019

Video Game is Art

Shigeru Miyamoto said, “The obvious objective of video games is to entertain people

by surprising them with new experiences.”(Shigeru) Nowadays, video games are is one of the

most popular entertainments. Not only teenagers but also adults spend part of their spare time

on playing video games. Thus, it is obvious that video games brings happiness to people

because it is able to help people to relax themselves while they get out of the stressful and busy

time. However, because of the popularity of video game, some people, mostly are parents of

video game players, start to think that video games areis harmful for people because some

people are willing to spend most of their time on playing video games and this phenomenon is

what we called addiction. It is fair enough to say that the phenomenon of addiction exists, but

it is not appropriate to deny video games because somepart of the video game players areis

addicted to it. In fact, video games can also be good for the players because video games areis

not a program that used to waste player’s time, it can also be understood as a form of art. In

order to convince those parents who think video games areis totally harmful for people, I

choose the source article, which is called “That Dragon, Cancer: Video Game as Art Form

[Leading Edge]” by Eilon Shoshana, from my second writing project because it is an academic

article that can help me to explain the reason why video game is a form of art to those parents.

Therefore, Although it is difficult to translate a academic article into a informal genre, I think
it a good choice translate this source material into tweet, which is one of the most popular social

media, because of parents’ reading habit can fit Twitter perfectly.

In order to let my source article becomes attractive to parents, the help of the Twitter’s

platform is necessary because it’s convention of genre fit most parents’ reading habit. In a

picture book called “Optical Physics for Babies”, Chris Ferrie illustrate the optical physics that

“Light travels in a straight line until it hit something.”(Ferrie 9) It also has a picture under it to

illustrate the physic concept and it never uses the professional vocabulary such as “definition”

or “phenomenon” to let its audience to understand Ferris’s topic. Thus, it is important to choose

a good genre in order to reach the goal of convincing the audience. In the article “85% of U.S.

Adults Read the News on a Mobile Device”, David Z. Morris mentioned that “Ninety-four

percent of Americans aged 18-49 now read news on mobile devices.”(Morris) Obviously, most

of the parents have a job. If they do not, I can say that they spend most of their time taking

making care of the children. In a word, parents are usually busy, and they barely have time to

sit down and read a book. Thus, if I give them a scientific magazine, which is my source

article’s publisher, I believe those parents will not spend time reading the extremely long article

in it patiently because they have something else to do. Therefore, compare to a scientific

magazine, tweet is a will be the genre that parents are more likely to read because of its special

conventions. First, as the media of this genre, Twitter is an extremely popular and convenient

social media that can be access on the smart phone. Thus, most of the people have already had

it in the phone and it will not cost too much of parents’ precious break time. Second, tweet has

a limitation of letters. A tweet cannot contain more than 140 letters, which means none of the

tweet will be too tedious to read. In my opinion, A a paragraph of short text is obviously one

of the best ways for people who are busy to gain information. Third, a tweet can be created

with English that is easy to read, picture and video in it. Thus, a tweet will be straightforward

straight forward to parents to gain information especially when they are too busy to read some
articles with professional vocabulary that is difficult to understand in it. As a result, from my

perspective, the reason why I think parents will not read my source article is that they are

usually busy. Furthermore, a tweet will be the best genre to solve this problem because its

conventions let it becomes one of the least time-consuming genres in the world.

However, translating an academic article into a tweet is a difficult not an easy job

because tweet has a really informal style. In the article “The Translator’s Task”, Walter

Benjamin mentioned that “Translation is a mode. In order to grasp it as much, we have to go

back to the original.”(Benjamin 152) From For my perspective, this quotation means that the

information of original text is important, so we cannot easily abandon any of it during the

translation. However, it is difficult not easy to keep the whole article during the translation.

Moreover, I had a hard time to translate a academic totally formal article into a completely

informal article which also has to catch parent’s attention. While I was preparing for writing

some tweets, I read a lot of tweets on the Internet. Interestingly, I found that people do not

follow the rules of formal English. They do not care about grammar, punctuation or even

spelling of vocabulary. Also, people who write tweet will express their emotions with

extending vocabulary, continuous and redundant punctuations and emojis, which is a tiny

picture with emotional expression on it. After I found out these conventions of tweet, I started

to translate my source article into several tweets. I imitate these informal English and put my

emotion into the text, for example, I wrote “saaaaaaad” with a crying emoji but not simply

“sad” in order to express my sadness and I translate the professional vocabulary such as “Indie

Game” in my source article into “Video Game” in order to let parents understand it easily.

However, although I think I completely understand the technique of writing in new genre after

I had already solved the problem of choosing and using English, it is still difficult for me to

translate the whole article because I usually have to deal with the point angle of view. In my

source material, there are many speeches that were was not written by the author but spoken
by other people. Thus, I have to use the third person view to translate the text. Because I think

the whole source article is use for convincing my audience, I did not abandon any part of the

article including the speech part. In the end, I wrote 22 tweets to translate the source article

completely. Also, I think my translation will be effective in convincing my audience because

they are all short, interesting and reasonable to read. Combining these elements with the context

that includes the original meaning from the source article, which says video game is a form of

art, I think my audience will be convinced by my tweets.

In conclusion, compared to academic article, which has the convention of long,

professional, objective and calm, the tweet is short, informal, subjective and emotional. With

these differences, tweet is more attractive for my audiences, who are busy parents, because it

cost less time to get information. Thus, tweet is an effective genre that can help me to convince

my audiences that video games are is not always harmful because it can also be a form of art.

Work Cited

Ferrie, Chris, “Optical Physics for Babies”, Sourcebooks Explore; Reissue edition, 2017, 9
Benjamin, Walter, “The Translator’s Task”, Translated by Steven Rendall. TTR, 10 (2), 152.

https://doi.org/10.7202/037302arhttps://doi.org/10.7202/037302ar

"Shigeru Miyamoto Quotes." BrainyQuote.com. BrainyMedia Inc, 2019. 6 December 2019.

https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/shigeru_miyamoto_443920

Morris, David Z. “85% Of U.S. Adults Read the News on a Mobile Device.” Fortune, Fortune,
18 June 2017, fortune.com/2017/06/18/mobile-news-reading-pew/.