The Sociopolitical Ramifications Of Computer Gaming Essay — страница 2

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universities, huge businesses, and government-funded research laboratories. It was in one such laboratory that the first computer game was developed. William Higinbotham was a mild-mannered gentleman of 47 in 1958. Quick to laugh and even quicker to reach for a pack of smokes (he was a prodigious chain smoker), Higinbotham was a researcher at the Brookhaven National Laboratory and an aficionado of pinball. His job description also included the task of tour guide for the myriad tours that visited the lab for a look at what their tax dollars were up to. During his tenure as tour guide, Higinbotham realized that the events that transpired in the lab were of little interest to the people undertaking the tours. Wouldn?t it be interesting, he thought, if the tourists had some sort of

contraption to interact with during the tour? something like a game that could demonstrate to them what the hardware was capable of? To this end, Higinbotham worked away at a device that would change the way computers were viewed. Despite the fact that the first digital computers were produced around this time, Higinbotham?s device was entirely analog, utilizing variable voltages to represent information instead of the on/off (i.e. 1s and 0s) pulses that digital used. The device was set up using an oscilloscope for a screen that represented a tennis court and two controller boxes (forerunners to the ?paddles? of the Atari 2600 that would appear quite a few years later) that housed knobs with which the players could change the angle of their shots and buttons to be pressed when

the player wished to make a shot. It took three weeks of time to develop this game (compared with the 2-4 years that it takes modern development teams to create their games and the year and a half that it took the developers of Spacewar! to finish that game, but more on that later) and the assistance of Robert Dvorak, a coworker of Higinbotham?s, but in the end it all paid off. They revealed their finished product in the Brookhaven gymnasium during an open house of the lab in October of 1958 and it took off. People of high school age were especially interested in William Higinbotham?s new game, by now formally titled Tennis for Two, and people lined up from the day it was revealed to take part in the first computer game ever created. The Space Race Was Nothing Compared to the

American Spacewar! If Higinbotham?s Tennis for Two is known as the first video game, then Spacewar!, a game developed by a determined cadre of MIT geeks, Wayne Witanen, J. Martin Graetz, and Steve Russell, who called themselves ?The Tech Model Railroad Club,? is the first real computer game. The difference between the two is a subtle one on first glance, but a difference that, in later years, would cause a large crevasse to appear between the aficionados of computer gaming and those of video gaming. Console games (games played through a system hooked up to a TV set, on one hand) are more often than not a test of quick twitch reflexes, while computer games (games played on a computer system entirely separate from a TV) often require a bit more thinking to be appreciated. This

paper, for brevity?s sake, will not attempt to delve into this merry war between computers and consoles, however. A product of years of inspiration from the likes of science fiction author Edward E. ?Doc? Smith and Toho (a Japanese movie company responsible for Godzilla and countless other cheesy old sci-fi movies), the groundwork for Spacewar! was laid in the early 60s over a period of a year or so in the apartment of the three MIT fellows. They would sit for hours on end, presenting to each other their ideas for movie versions of ?Doc? Smith?s sci-fi novels. While these ideas never made their way onto the silver screen, they did provide an excellent basis for Spacewar!. Once MIT invested in a shiny new PDP-1 computer, eschewing its clumsy TK-0 mainframe in favor of something

more personal (and yet, a great deal more powerful), the Club had the medium on which it would make history. A committee was formed with the intent of creating a game to run on the new computer. Of course, this committee consisted of the troika of the Railroad Club, but also added Alan Kotok, Peter Samson and Dan Edwards to be responsible for different aspects of the game. Kotok created a sine-cosine routine, Samson created a program to render a star field for the background called ?Expensive Planetarium,? while Edwards programmed the code for the gravity of the large sun that served as a focal point for the battles. Thus was assembled the very first development team in the history of computer gaming. Unlike with Higinbotham?s Tennis for Two, Spacewar! had an entire crew of