Almost as long as there is a computer, there are video games. Nelson Barnard/Getty Images

Noah Wardrip-Fruin, University of California, Santa Cruz

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Who invented video games? TJ, 7 years old, Worcester, Massachusetts

Some people just like to play. Give them a ball, a pen, or a bunch of leaves and they will find a way to play with it. In fact, there are enough people who like to play. Almost any time someone invents a new thing, people will find a way to play it.

Christopher Strachey did not invent modern computers. He didn't see it until 1951, a few years after others first created the first batch. But he was friendly with Alan Turing, one of the inventors of modern computers, when he was in university in the UK.

Mark I is considered the first computer because it can store programs written for it. Anders Sandberg/Flickr, CC

Therefore, when Strachey heard that the University of Manchester had installed a new Mark I computer, he was able to ask Turing for a programming manual. He studied the manual and then had the opportunity to write a program for the computer. People are so impressed by his work that he will soon be able to use the computer while his teacher is on vacation.

Strache developed a checkers program during the school break, which was very complicated at the time. It shows the circuit board-the cathode ray tube on the screen. Players write their actions on a teletypewriter, which is electronically connected to the computer, prints the actions on paper and sends them to the computer. The machine "expects" different possible actions and counteractions, choosing what it should do next, and making fun of the player's particularly bad actions.

The first video game was a digital version of checkers. Wikimedia Commons

I called this game "MUC Draughts" in my book "What Pac-Man Eats" because Strachey never named it. MUC stands for Manchester University Computer, and the draft is the British name for Checkers. I think this is the first video game. But there are many fun people out there, so others may come first. Around the same time that Strachey created MUC Draughts, AS (Sandy) Douglas created a tic-tac-toe game for the EDSAC computer at the University of Cambridge, which was also displayed on the cathode ray tube. In the future, we may find that other fun people made other video games for early computers.

People still play video game versions of board games and card games, but when someone says "video games," you usually don't think of them first. Usually people think of a video display showing a simulated space where the player can control one or more functions-perhaps sliding over buildings and characters in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild or Civilization Sky.

The next important step towards this type of game (as far as I know) is now called two-person tennis-although it didn't have a name when it was created. William Higinbotham, Robert V. Dvorak and David Potter at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York (Brookhaven National Laboratory) produced it as a demonstration for the 1958 Visitors' Day. They used an old-fashioned analog computer to create a side view of the tennis court, showing the ground, the net, and the ball flying over the net. But after the visiting day, it was taken apart.

Space war! It is another demonstration project, released in 1962 by a team of MIT engineers, including Steve "Slug" Russell, Peter Samson, Dan Edwards, and Martin Graetz. It took the computing world by storm.

Rolling Stone even sponsored a "Space War! Olympic Games" in 1972-an amazing level of publicity in an era when most people have never even seen a computer with their own eyes, let alone play video games.

Space war! It was the first video game to attract public attention.

Space war! It is the first game that can accomplish all the things people usually expect from video games today. It has a simulated space where objects move around. In this case, it is outer space, with stars and the central sun exerting gravity in the background. There are player-controlled elements in that space, especially the two spaceships locked in battle. And there is a visual boom, for example, whenever the player moves around with a propeller, flames will appear from the back of the ship.

With the release of the Magnavox Odyssey console, video games first entered the home in 1972. Ralph Baer, ​​Bob Tremblay, Bob Solomon, Bill Rush, and other engineers at Sanders Associates are trying to find a way to play games on home TVs. They came up with the idea of ​​hitting the ball back and forth: electronic table tennis, which is the predecessor of the popular game Pong.

Since then, video games have become a growing force in world culture-supported by people who like to play.

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Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Professor of Computational Media, University of California, Santa Cruz

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original text.

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