Games Are FUNdamental!

Games are a fundamental part of our human existence. We’ve been playing games, alone and with each other, since we first started to think about things other than sex and survival. Games provide venues that allow us to practice skills and mental processes that augment survival in the real world. Games are fun!

As we ride the digital tsunami that has transformed our world and our lives we find that games, transformed by “virtual reality,” are becoming a mainstay in our life styles. Just try to get a kid off the X-Box!

“Virtual Reality” is nothing new. There are many different kinds of games. One of my favorites is ancient: chess. Based on conflict between two opposing forces, each equal to the other at the beginning in material and space, chess players engage in “virtual” war. Early versions of the game were played before Jesus came along.

Nevertheless, the digital revolution is adding new dimensions to a science known as “game theory.” I started playing online multi-player games in the early 1990’s on AOL dial up. “What’s dial up?” you ask. Heh!

One of my favorite digital games is called a “First Person Shooter” (FPS). The screen shows a player’s eye view of the “world” in which he/she plays the game. At the center of the screen is a targeting reticule, usually a cross-hair, and at the bottom usually a weapon of some sort. Strategy and tactics, like chess, are the overarching principles that determine success or failure.

I like to think of strategy and tactics games like the FPS as “chess in real time.” Like chess, FPS games have two sides. A basic FPS is man against the machine, or better yet, man against the programmer. Many online FPS games, however, are multi-player games where two teams (or more) of players square off against each other.

Not only are these games great mental exercise, due to the Internet they are also responsible for new paradigms in social networking. They have created a “virtual society” that cuts across borders and boundaries.

History Lesson

Back in the mid 1970’s I used to frequent and play gigs at a tavern, near the local junior college, called “The Junction.” Mixed in with a number of pinball machines, flashing lights and dinging bells, was a machine that sported a video monitor and two sets of buttons in a box about the size of a small refrigerator.

It was “Pong,” and it cost a quarter to play. You could play against the computer or one of your friends (which would cost an extra quarter). It was quite popular with the bar’s patrons and would often be the only machine in use. Moans, gasps, horse laughs, and cheers would regularly emanate from groups of people clustered around the machine and its players.

Pong was the first video game I ever played–the first video game. I had a small handheld computer, not much more than a souped up calculator with 8k ram (!), a 2.5 x .75 in LCD screen, and a tiny alphanumeric keypad. The book that came with it had example programs you could code, in BASIC, into the machine. I used a cassette (heh, look it up) player to save the programs as the computer could only run one program at a time.

There was a program called “Lunar Lander,” that, when played showed a series of numbers on the screen that represented the downward force and the altitude. A control was provided for thrust and the object was to use that thrust to slow the downward impetus to zero by the time the altitude also reached zero (landed). I crashed a lot at first but eventually could do it every time.

How interesting! I thought about what I had learned with that little exercise. I learned, in a small way, how to code in BASIC. Back then, lines (up to 1000 on the little computer) were numbered and the programs ran in sequence. When writing a program the coder would start with line 5 and skip to 10, then 15, etc., . . . That was so you could go back into the code and insert lines without having to rewrite the whole thing. I learned about organizing things in logical sequence. Speaking of logic I also learned the basic logical operators used in programming. I also learned how force can be measured and metered with mathematics. What an awesome way to present information!

Due to the success of Pong, similar arcade machines began to pop up. Notable among these were: Asteroids (wish I had the quarters back from that one, I’d be writing from the Caribbean), Battlezone, Tempest, and the iconic, paradigm shifting, PacMan.

It was game on, man! It wasn’t too long before the lone Pong machine at the junction was joined by Xevious, Ms. PacMan, and another iconic quarter eater called “Donkey Kong.” The only pinball machines left were two that paid off if you got 3 or more balls in a row.

No cell phones back then, no wifi, the Internet was still a curiosity for most people, AOL was the main ISP on dial up. Heh, a 56k modem was smokin’ hot!

Here’s a little blurb from ponggame.org:

Pong is one of the first computer games that was ever created, this simple “tennis like” game features two paddles and a ball, the goal is to defeat your opponent by being the first one to gain 10 points, a player gets a point once the opponent misses a ball. The game can be played with two human players, or one player against a computer controlled paddle. The game was originally developed by Allan Alcorn and released in 1972 by Atari corporations. Soon, Pong became a huge success, the first commercially successful game. In 1975, Atari release a home edition of Pong (the first version was played on Arcade machines) which sold 150,000 units. Today, the Pong Game is considered to be the game which started the video games industry, as it proved that the video games market can produce significant revenues.

Nolan Bushnell founded Atari at 1972 in order to create games and ideas and license them to other companies for mass production. Pong was actually a training exercise for one of Atari’s employees – Allan Alcorn. Once it was finished, Nolan made a few adjustments in order to make the game more interesting (like changing the ball’s return angle) and added simple sound effects. The first Pong Arcade machine was installed in a local bar, and was so successful that Atari decided to produce and sell the game by themselves, rather than license it to other companies. In 1973 the company finally got a line of credit from Wells Fargo and started an assembly line, by the end of the year, Pong arcade machines were shipped to locations all over the U.S. as well as to other countries.
Although Atari sold more than 35,000 Pong machines, this figure is only about one third of the total number of Pong machines that were sold globally, since many Pong clones appeared shortly after the debut of the original Atari Pong game. The way Atari chose to compete with the Pong Game clones was to produce more innovative games such as “Double Pong” which was a pong game with four players, two in every side and a bigger screen. <end quote>

Pong is still fun and still evokes the emotional response from players and viewers alike. To find out about the state of Pong art these days visit:

http://www.ponggame.org/