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"The most intense thing about Missile Command, though, was the weird crazy moment at the end, when the ICBMs are raining down and you knew you were about to lose it, that was totally euphoric. Because you knew you were going to die. . . . And after the fireworks display, you get to press the restart button and youÕre alive again." J. C. Herz, Joystick Nation

In one way or another, all games involve interaction. In most, this interaction is with another player, but even in single-player games, the rules stand as a framework for the behavior of the participants. In the card game Solitaire, the playerÕs actions are guided through an interaction with the way in which the game is designed. John G. Kemeny, former president of Dartmouth College and computer pioneer, wrote in 1972: ". . . for many inexperienced users, the opportunity of playing games against a computer is a major factor in removing psychological blocks that frighten the average human being away from free use of machines." The growth and proliferation of inexpensive video games in the late 1990s meant that most children's first interaction with a computer (because video game consoles are in fact single-purpose computers) came at a very early age. Computer games serve as recreation and also, in the case of multiplayer games, as a means for interacting with other people. When a video console or a computer is connected to the Internet, players can interact with other players anywhere in the world.

Computer and video games began as advances in computer technology started to allow more complicated human interaction in the late 1950s. One of the earliest computer games can be traced back to 1958, when William Higinbotham, eager to create a demonstration for the public of Brookhaven National Laboratory's facilities, created a multi-player game of electronic tennis. Although immensely popular with visitors, Higinbotham's game never made it out of Brookhaven. The game that would introduce computer games to the world was created four years later at MIT. Called Spacewar!, it was driven by Steve Russell's fascination with pulp science fiction, but was in fact the result of many people's work. Spacewar allowed two players to control spaceships that flew through an imaginary space while firing torpedoes at one another. It ran on the PDP-1, one of the earliest mainframe computers that had a screen. Earlier computers used either punched cards or a teletype to communicate with its users.

Although again wildly popular with anybody who played it, the group at MIT figured its creation had no real commercial viability (and the practice of selling a software was not widespread) and so gave the code away to anyone who wanted it. It eventually was installed as standard software on the PDP computers it ran on. It was even used as a diagnostic tool by those who repaired the computer. By the mid-1960s, it had spread across college mainframes and spawned hundreds of variations. Shortly after Spacewar! came a generation of text-based games, beginning with Hunt the Wumpus, in which players undertook a quest to find a monster.

More sophisticated games soon followed. Adventure, using only text, created a richly detailed world for players to explore. In his book, Hackers, Steven Levy wrote, "In a sense, Adventure was a metaphor for computer programming itselfÑthe deep recesses you explored in the Adventure world were akin to the basic, most obscure levels of the machine that you'd be traveling in when you hacked in assembly code." Many contemporary games follow the same structure as Spacewar! and Adventure: so-called twitch or arcade-style shoot em- ups like Asteroids and adventure or exploration games like Ultima. It would take almost ten years after Adventure was written for video games to catch on with the world outside of college mainframes, when less expensive chips allowed the creation of smaller and more economical machines. Although Pong was not quite the first arcade game (Computer Space, an adaptation of Spacewar! preceded it by a year, in 1971), it was the first successful one. Created by Nolan Bushnell, it attracted a wide variety of people to its simple "avoid missing ball for high score" instructions.

Atari became a household word, and games such as Space Invaders, Asteroids, Defender, and Pac-Man followed. While simple consoles were available for home useÑthe Atari 2600, Coleco, and othersÑgames with sophisticated graphics and play were found in the video arcade, a collection of single-purpose freestanding games, whose roots can be found in the penny arcades and nickelodeons of the end of the nineteenth century. As the personal computer became common in homes, video games lost some of their appeal (and revenue). Whereas early video games were almost entirely about physical prowess and pattern recognition, owing as much to pinball as to Spacewar!, computers of the time had less intuitive controls and encouraged slower, strategy-based games. More often than not, computer games were offering a sort of primitive virtual experience as Adventure had done: Take on the role of a character and explore a new, unique world.

Indeed, the popular game Zork was no more than a more sophisticated rewrite of Adventure. Whereas Adventure had used a limited two-word vocabulary to allow interaction with the world, Zork permitted the player to enter full sentences to describe their actions, and the game would respond with equally verbose descriptions. Completely text-based, the heart of Zork was still solving puzzles and collecting various treasures, but the game was also trying to create a compelling, novelistic world.

Similar in its attempt to create another world was the Wizardry series. Wizardry used a point-of-view perspective to portray a three-dimensional maze through which players wandered, trying to kill an evil wizard. A few years later came the Ultima series, which opted for an overhead, God's-eye view, and was noteworthy not only for its attempt to create an entire world (complete with mountains, cities, and oceans surrounding the ubiquitous caves and dungeons) but also for its efforts to present moral quandaries for the player. The cushioning distance of video games was challenged when players found that not only did their actions have lasting, ethically-based consequences in the game, but also that these ethical dilemmas were the heart of the game. Things were still progressing on campus mainframes in a different direction. Despite not having the new graphical frills of personal computer games, MUDs (Multi-User Dungeon) had a lasting popularity. MUDs allowed groups of people to interact in their primitive dungeon environments, offering up the first seeds of a style that would not fully catch on until the 1990s and the commercial dominance of the Internet.

By the late 1980s, more visually sophisticated console games such as Nintendo and Sega revitalized the market that Atari had started long before. Console systems, with their sophisticated graphics capabilities, dominated the more action-oriented games while home computers, with their better storage capacity, offered simulations, strategy games, and virtual worlds. And then there was Doom, a first-person computer game whose players roamed around an alien planet killing demons. It was as fast-paced and dynamic as any video game, as immersive and frightening a world as anybody had offered, and perhaps most importantly, Doom was a return to the sort of hacker philosophy of those earliest days at MIT. Doom could be played as a network, allowing multiple players to wander the game together or against each otherÑa virtual arena for the digital age. Additionally, Doom allowed its players to modify the game, creating their own levels, graphics, and weapons. People did not just play Doom; they became a part of it.

Games continue to become more complex and more immersive. Their graphics are amazingly detailed, their sounds comparable to big-budget movies, and entire teams of people labor at creating them. Most games now allow some form of networking option, and entire virtual worlds have been created for people to play online. Ultima itself has evolved into Ultima OnlineÑa huge networked world in which players can still explore, killing monsters, buying houses, opening up shops, and joining organizations of like-minded players. At this point, computer and video games are more than just a cultural phenomenon: They are culture. As an industry, they make more money than movies, music, or any other form of entertainment. The military has used them for training and to recruit soldiers, politicians have used them as a scapegoat, and people routinely barter their online properties for real-world dollars. Most importantly though, generations have been raised on them and can now relate through the shared cultural experience of their first game of Pac-Man or Doom. Built on a principle of sharing information, virtual experience, and creating new modes of interaction, video and computer games offer us a glimpse of the creative potential of society. The question is, what of a generation raised on these games?