It feels odd to create a new thread to answer a question, but I agree that the original thread had derailed.

I use the word “gaming” primarily for playing board games. I belong to a group of “gamers” who has had weekly game nights for more than three decades. We coordinate attendance by email, and we often use phrases like “I will be gaming at Joe's this week".

The other way I use the word is for exploiting details of a ruleset to get away with something, as in “gaming the system”.

I have never heard this word used for game development, and I think it would be confusing if used that way.

Good points, @alvaro . Something I hadn't explored in the original thread was the 2nd definition from dictionary.com

2. the playing of games developed to teach something or to help solve a problem, as in a military or business situation.

That definition covers war gaming, the running of simulations to run scenarios for making emergency plans. A valid use of the term.

Of those who use “gaming” to refer to game development, one excuse I heard is “development means programming/engineering, so we can't use the term as an umbrella term for the entire field of endeavor." Those folks could use “games” instead of “gaming” in many cases, as in “I work in games” or “let's revolutionize games.”

Those folks could use “games” instead of “gaming” in many cases, as in “I work in games” or “let's revolutionize games.”

If this is in reference to a context like this one, I don't think the ‘gaming’ in the definition is being used in reference to game development at all. I read the phrase “Let's revolutionize gaming” as “Let's revolutionize [the playing of games, by creating a revolutionary game]”, not “Let's revolutionize [game development, with our novel approach]”.

This reminds me of the first game that I finished in OpenGL, called Blind Poker. It’s originally a game using playing cards. It’s a game, and playing it would be considered gaming (ahem… GAMBLING), right? The game was designed by two First Nations people, and I (white as a ghost) did the code and graphics! We generally play for 25 cents per hand. The goal is to get the best Poker hand.

it’s a fun little game. Revolutionary even, but anyways. The precompiled binary for Windows is at: https://github.com/sjhalayka/blind_poker​​

I’d run that in VMWare… who knows what kind of fucked up Chinese viruses have Infected it over the years LOL