The History Of Gaming: An Evolving Community

  

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Since its commercial birth in the 1950s as a technological oddity at a science fair, gaming has blossomed into one of the most profitable entertainment industries in the world.

The mobile technology boom in recent years has revolutionized the industry and opened the doors to a new generation of gamers. Indeed, gaming has become so integrated with modern popular culture that now even grandmas know what Angry Birds is, and more than 42 percent of Americans are gamers and four out of five U.S. households have a console.

The Early Years

The first recognized example of a game machine was unveiled by Dr. Edward Uhler Condon at the New York World’s Fair in 1940. The game, based on the ancient mathematical game of Nim, was played by about 50,000 people during the six months it was on display, with the computer reportedly winning more than 90 percent of the games.

However, the first game system designed for commercial home use did not emerge until nearly three decades later, when Ralph Baer and his team released his prototype, the “Brown Box,” in 1967.

The “Brown Box” was a vacuum tube-circuit that could be connected to a television set and allowed two users to control cubes that chased each other on the screen. The “Brown Box” could be programmed to play a variety of games, including ping pong, checkers and four sports games. Using advanced technology for this time, added accessories included a lightgun for a target shooting game, and a special attachment used for a golf putting game.

According to the National Museum of American History, Baer recalled, “The minute we played ping-pong, we knew we had a product. Before that we weren’t too sure.”

The “Brown Box” was licensed to Magnavox, which released the system as the Magnavox Odyssey in 1972. It  preceded Atari by a few months, which is often mistakenly thought of as the first games console.

Between August 1972 and 1975, when the Magnavox was discontinued, around 300,000 consoles were sold. Poor sales were blamed on mismanaged in-store marketing campaigns and the fact that home gaming was a relatively alien concept to the average American at this time.

However mismanaged it might have been, this was the birth of the digital gaming we know today.

The Future

The move to mobile technology has defined the recent chapter of gaming, but while on-the-move gaming is well-suited to the busy lives of millennials, gaming on mobile devices also has its limitations. Phone screens are small (well, at least until the iPhone 6s came out), and processor speeds and internal memories on the majority of cellphones limit gameplay possibilities. According to a recent VentureBeat article, mobile gaming is already witnessing its first slump. Revenue growth has slowed, and the cost of doing business and distribution costs have risen dramatically over the last few years.

Although mobile gaming has caused the death of hand-held gaming devices, consoles are still booming, and each new generation of console welcomes a new era of technology and capabilities. Two industries that could well play a key role in the future of gaming are virtual reality and artificial intelligence technology.

The next chapter for gaming is still unclear, but whatever happens, it is sure to be entertaining.

Virtual reality (VR) company Oculus was acquired by Facebook in 2014, and is set to release its Rift headset in 2016. The headset seems to lean perfectly toward use within the video games industry, and would potentially allow gamers to “live” inside an interactive, immersive 3D world. The opportunities to create fully interactive, dynamic “worlds” for MMORPG, in which players could move around, interact with other players and experience the digital landscapes in a totally new dimension, could be within arms reach.

There have been a lot of advancements over the last few years in the world of language-processing artificial intelligence. In 2014, Google acquired Deep Mind; this year, IBM acquired AlchemyAPI, a leading provider in deep-learning technology; in October 2015, Apple made two AI acquisitions in less than a week. Two of the fields being developed are accuracy for voice recognition technology and open-ended dialogue with computers.

These advances could signify an amazing new chapter for gaming — especially if combined with VR, as they could allow games to interact with characters within games, who would be able to respond to questions and commands, with intelligent and seemingly natural responses. In the world of first-person shooters, sports games and strategy games, players could effectively command the computer to complete in-game tasks, as the computer would be able to understand commands through a headset due to advances in voice recognition accuracy.

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