Games History

The earliest known interactive electronic game was created by Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann on a cathode ray tube in 1947. The game was a missile simulator inspired by radar displays from World War II. It used analog circuitry, not digital, to control the CRT beam and position a dot on the screen. Screen overlays were used for targets since graphics could not be drawn at the time.

On May 5, 1951, the NIMROD computer was presented at the Festival of Britain. Using a panel of lights for its display, it was designed exclusively to play the game of NIM; this was the first instance of a digital computer designed specifically to play a game. NIMROD could play either the traditional or "reverse" form of the game.

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Tennis for Two recreation

In 1952, Alexander S. Douglas made the first computer game to use a digital graphical display, OXO (Noughts and Crosses), for the EDSAC computer.

In 1958, William Higinbotham made an interactive game named Tennis for Two for the Brookhaven National Laboratory's annual visitor's day. This display, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, was meant to promote atomic power, and used an analog computer and the vector display system of an oscilloscope.

In 1961, MIT students Martin Graetz, Steve Russell, and Wayne Wiitanen created the game Spacewar! on a DEC PDP-1 computer which also used a vector display system.

The Magnavox Odyssey released in 1972

In 1966, Ralph Baer resumed work on an initial idea he had in 1951 to make an interactive game on a television set. In May of 1967, Baer and an associate created the first video game to use a raster-scan display, which was also the first video game to be played on a regular television set. The Brown Box, the last prototype of seven, was released in May 1972 by Magnavox under the name Odyssey. It was the first home video game console.

In 1971, Bill Pitts and Hugh Tuck developed the first coin-operated computer game, Galaxy Game, at Stanford University using a DEC PDP-11/20 computer; only one unit was ever built (although it was later adapted to run up to eight games at once). Two months after its installation, Computer Space by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney was released, which was the first coin-operated video game to be commercially sold (and the first widely available video game of any kind, predating the Odyssey by six months). Both games were variations on the vector display 1961 Spacewar!; however, Bushnell and Dabney's used an actual video display by having an actual television set in the cabinet. Pong, also by Bushnell and Dabney, was not released until 1972 - a year after Computer Space, and also using the same television set design as Computer Space.

Baer was involved in court battles over patents that spanned the 1970s and 1980s. These trials defined a video game as an apparatus that displays games by manipulating the video display signal of the raster equipment: a television set, a monitor, etc. The previous computer games did not use a video display, so did not qualify as such in the courts.

On February 13, 2006 Baer was given a National Medal of Technology by President George W. Bush in honor of his "groundbreaking and pioneering creation, development and commercialization of interactive video games

Theory

Although departments of computer science have been studying the technical aspects of video games for years, theories that examine games as an artistic medium are a relatively recent development in the humanities. The two most visible schools in this emerging field are ludology and narratology. Narrativists approach video games in the context of what Janet Murray calls "Cyberdrama". That is to say, their major concern is with video games as a storytelling medium, one that arises out of interactive fiction. Murray puts video games in the context of the Holodeck, a fictional piece of technology from Star Trek, arguing for the video game as a medium in which we get to become another person, and to act out in another world. This image of video games received early widespread popular support, and forms the basis of films such as Tron, eXistenZ, and The Last Starfighter.

Ludologists break sharply and radically from this. They argue that a video game is first and foremost a game, which must be understood in terms of its rules, interface, and the concept of play that it deploys. Espen J. Aarseth argues that, although games certainly have plots, characters, and aspects of traditional narratives, these aspects are incidental to gameplay. For example, Aarseth is critical of the widespread attention that narrativists have given to the curvaceous heroine of the game Tomb Raider, saying that "the dimensions of Lara Croft's body, already analyzed to death by film theorists, are irrelevant to me as a player, because a different-looking body would not make me play differently... When I play, I don't even see her body, but see through it and past it." Simply put, ludologists reject traditional theories of art because they claim that the artistic and socially relevant qualities of a video game are primarily determined by the underlying set of rules, demands, and expectations imposed on the player.

While many games rely on emergent principles, video games commonly present simulated story worlds where emergent behavior occurs within the context of the game. The term "emergent narrative" has been used to describe how, in a simulated environment, storyline can be created simply by "what happens to the player." Emergent behavior is not limited to sophisticated games, however- generally any place where event driven instructions occur for AI in a game, emergent behavior will inevitably exist. For instance, take a racing game in which cars are programmed to avoid crashing, and they encounter an obstacle in the track: the cars might then maneuver to avoid the obstacle causing the cars behind them to slow and/or maneuver to accommodate the cars in front of them and the obstacle. The programmer never wrote code to specifically create a traffic jam, yet one now exists in the game.