Video Games: From Oscilloscope Tennis to a Global Art Form

What Counts as a Video Game?

A video game is an electronic game in which a player interacts with a machine through some kind of input device, such as a joystick, a gamepad, a keyboard, a mouse or a touchscreen, and the machine answers with visual feedback on a display. That display might be a television, a computer monitor, the screen of a phone or handheld console, or the lenses of a virtual reality headset. Almost all modern games are also audiovisual: music, voices and sound effects reach the player through speakers or headphones, and many controllers add vibration so that a crash or an explosion can be felt as well as seen.

The key ingredient is interaction. A film plays the same way every time, but a game changes depending on what the player does. Every press of a button is read by the machine, which updates the state of the game world and shows the result, often dozens of times every second. Some games also use a microphone or a webcam, letting players talk to each other, control the game with their voice or body, or stream their play live to an audience.

People use several names for the same idea. "Computer game" usually refers to games played on personal computers, "console game" to games played on dedicated machines connected to a television, and "mobile game" to games on phones and tablets. Today the lines are blurred, because many titles are released on all of these platforms at once.

The First Experiments

Video games were not invented by a single person on a single day. They grew out of experiments by engineers and scientists who wanted to show off what new electronic machines could do.

Games in the laboratory

In 1947 Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann filed a patent for a "cathode-ray tube amusement device", in which a player turned knobs to aim a dot of light at targets drawn on a plastic overlay. It was never sold, but it is often cited as the earliest interactive electronic game using a screen.

In 1958 the physicist William Higinbotham built Tennis for Two for a visitors' day at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. It ran on an analog computer and showed a side view of a tennis court on an oscilloscope screen. Two players used small controllers to hit a bouncing ball over the net. Visitors queued to try it, which hinted at how appealing such machines could be.

In 1962 a group of students and staff at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, led by Steve Russell, created Spacewar! on a PDP-1 computer. Two spaceships fought around a star whose gravity pulled them in. Because the program was shared freely, copies spread to other universities, and it became one of the first games played on many different computers.

From Arcades to Living Rooms

The first home console and Pong

The engineer Ralph Baer, working at a defence electronics company, had the idea of playing games on an ordinary television set. His prototype, known as the "Brown Box", became the Magnavox Odyssey, released in 1972 as the first home video game console. It had no sound and used plastic overlays stuck to the TV screen to provide colour and scenery.

The same year, the young company Atari, founded by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, released the arcade game Pong, designed by Allan Alcorn. It was a simple table tennis game, but it was so popular that it launched the arcade industry. Coin-operated machines soon appeared in bars, shopping centres and dedicated arcades.

The golden age of arcades

The late 1970s and early 1980s are often called the golden age of arcade games. Space Invaders (1978), created by Tomohiro Nishikado for the Japanese company Taito, made shooting waves of descending aliens a worldwide craze. Pac-Man (1980), designed by Toru Iwatani at Namco, gave games one of their first famous characters and appealed to players who were not interested in shooting games. Its original Japanese name was Puck Man.

Meanwhile, home consoles with interchangeable cartridges, above all the Atari 2600 released in 1977, brought arcade-style games into homes. Players could now buy new games without buying new hardware.

Crash and revival

By 1983 the North American market was flooded with consoles and low-quality games, and sales collapsed in what became known as the video game crash of 1983. Many companies went bankrupt. A famous symbol of the crash is the Atari game based on the film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, unsold copies of which were buried in a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico. For years this was treated as a legend, until an excavation in 2014 dug up some of the cartridges.

The industry was revived by the Japanese company Nintendo. Its Family Computer, or Famicom, appeared in Japan in 1983 and was released in North America in 1985 as the Nintendo Entertainment System. Nintendo controlled which games could be published for it in order to keep quality up. Super Mario Bros. (1985), designed by Shigeru Miyamoto, with music by Koji Kondo, became one of the best-known games ever made.

How a Video Game Works

Underneath the colourful worlds, every video game is a computer program. Most of them are built around a repeating cycle called the game loop:

1. Read input. The program checks which buttons are pressed, where the mouse is pointing or how the controller is tilted.
2. Update the world. It moves characters, applies rules such as gravity and collisions, runs the behaviour of computer-controlled opponents and keeps track of score, health and time.
3. Render. It draws the new picture and plays the matching sounds.

This loop runs again and again, typically 30 or 60 times per second, and sometimes far more. Each picture is called a frame, so speeds are measured in frames per second. If the loop is too slow, the game feels sluggish and choppy.

The hardware behind the screen

The central processing unit (CPU) handles the game's logic, while the graphics processing unit (GPU) specialises in drawing millions of pixels and three-dimensional shapes very quickly. Modern 3D games describe objects as meshes made of many small triangles, cover them with images called textures, and calculate how light should fall on them. GPUs became so good at doing many simple calculations in parallel that they are now also used in science and in training artificial intelligence.

Game engines and teams

Few studios write every line of code from scratch. Most use a game engine, a toolkit that already handles graphics, physics, sound and input. Widely used engines such as Unity and Unreal Engine are also used by independent creators and even by film and architecture studios. A large modern game can be made by hundreds of people, including programmers, artists, animators, writers, composers, voice actors, designers and testers, while some highly successful games have been created by one person or a tiny team.

Types of Games and Ways to Play

Games are often grouped into genres according to what the player mainly does, rather than the story or setting. Some common genres include:

• Platform games, where characters run and jump between obstacles, as in Super Mario Bros.
• Puzzle games, such as Tetris, created in 1984 by the Soviet programmer Alexey Pajitnov.
• Role-playing games, in which players guide characters who grow stronger over a long adventure.
• Strategy games, which reward planning, resource management and careful decisions.
• Simulation games, which imitate real activities such as flying a plane, running a city or farming.
• Sandbox games, which give players freedom to build and explore, as in Minecraft.
• Sports and racing games, based on real or imagined competitions.

New hardware has also changed how people play. Handheld devices such as Nintendo's Game Boy (1989), sold with Tetris, made gaming portable. The Sony PlayStation (1994) and the Nintendo 64 (1996) helped make three-dimensional worlds normal. The Nintendo Wii (2006) used motion-sensing controllers, inviting families to swing virtual tennis rackets in the living room. Smartphones turned billions of people into potential players, and in 2016 Pokémon Go used phone cameras and GPS to place creatures in the real streets around players, a technique called augmented reality.

Facts and Figures

• Industry researchers estimate that around three billion people around the world play video games, on phones, computers or consoles.
• The global games market earns well over 150 billion US dollars a year, more than the worldwide film box office and recorded music industries combined.
• Minecraft, first released in 2011, has sold more than 300 million copies, making it the best-selling video game of all time.
• Tetris has appeared on a huge range of devices, from early computers and the Game Boy to modern phones, and is one of the most widely ported games ever.
• Mobile games now make up roughly half of the industry's revenue, a dramatic change from the arcade and console era.

Why Video Games Matter

Culture and art

Video games are now treated as a serious cultural form. In 2012 the Museum of Modern Art in New York added fourteen video games, including Pac-Man and Tetris, to its permanent collection as examples of interaction design. That same year the Smithsonian American Art Museum held an exhibition called The Art of Video Games. Since 2015 The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York, has inducted titles into the World Video Game Hall of Fame. Game music is performed by symphony orchestras, and game characters such as Mario and Pac-Man are recognised around the world.

Learning and science

Games can be powerful tools for learning, because they give quick feedback and let players experiment without real-world risk. Flight simulators have long been used to train pilots, and educational games teach subjects from mathematics to history. In 2011 players of Foldit, a puzzle game about folding proteins, worked out the structure of an enzyme from a virus related to HIV, a problem that had puzzled scientists for years. Cognitive scientists have also found that people who regularly play fast action games often perform better on some tests of visual attention.

Community and competition

Online play connects people across countries, and competitive gaming, known as esports, fills large arenas and attracts millions of online viewers. Livestreaming lets players share their games as they play, and many young people now watch games as well as play them.

Healthy habits

Like any pastime, games are best enjoyed in balance with sleep, exercise, schoolwork and time with friends. In 2019 the World Health Organization included "gaming disorder" in its international classification of diseases, describing the rare cases where gaming takes over a person's life. To help families choose suitable games, rating systems such as the ESRB in North America (founded in 1994) and PEGI in Europe (introduced in 2003) label games by age and content.

Lesser-Known Details

• One of the first widely known Easter eggs, a hidden secret placed in a game by its makers, appeared in the Atari 2600 game Adventure (1980). Its programmer, Warren Robinett, hid his own name in a secret room because the company did not credit designers at the time.
• Early consoles had so little memory that designers had to be extremely inventive. In Super Mario Bros., the bushes and clouds use the same shape, just in different colours.
• The Magnavox Odyssey could not keep score. Players had to keep track themselves, and the console came with paper score sheets, dice and playing cards.
• Tetris was created at the Dorodnitsyn Computing Centre of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow, and the rights to sell it became the subject of complicated negotiations between Western companies and the Soviet government.
• Many famous characters were shaped by technical limits: Mario received a cap and a moustache partly because hair and a mouth were difficult to show clearly with very few pixels.

From a dot of light on an oscilloscope to vast online worlds shared by millions, video games show how quickly technology and imagination can grow together. They are entertainment, but they are also a showcase of computer science, design, music, storytelling and teamwork.