Those with access to computers were quick to utilize them for gaming purposes. Most computer users worked or studied at university, business, or government facilities. In the early ’70s, very few people owned computers. This scene was describing Spacewar!, a game developed in the 1960s at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) that spread to other college campuses and computing centers. Something basic is going on (Brand, 1972). non-business hours) in North America hundreds of computer technicians are effectively out of their bodies, locked in life-or-death space combat computer-projected onto cathode ray tube display screens, for hours at a time, ruining their eyes, numbing their fingers in frenzied mashing of control buttons, joyously slaying their friend and wasting their employers’ valuable computer time. A 1972 article in Rolling Stone describes the early days of computer gaming: The 1970s saw the rise of video games as a cultural phenomenon. Video games have grown from simple tools that made computing technology understandable to forms of media that can communicate cultural values and human relationships. The first video games functioned early on as a form of media by essentially disseminating the experience of computer technology to those who did not have access to it.Īs video games evolved, their role as a form of media grew as well. Tennis for Two created an interface where anyone with basic motor skills could use a complex machine. In a time before personal computers, these games allowed the general public to access technology that had been restricted to the realm of abstract science. These games would generate little interest among the modern game-playing public, but at the time they enthralled their users and introduced the basic elements of the cultural video game experience. Tennis for Two was a rudimentary game designed to entertain visitors to the Brookhaven National Laboratory.
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