The first computer games

Since the earliest days, computers have been used for serious purposes and for fun. When computing resources were scarce and expensive, using computers for games was frowned upon and was typically an illicit occupation of graduate students late at night. Yet from these first clandestine experiments, computer video games are now big business. In 2012, global video game sales grew by more than 10 percent to more than $65 billion. In the United States, a 2011 survey found that more than 90 percent of children aged between two and seventeen played video games. In addition, the Entertainment Software Association in the United States estimated that 40 percent of all game players are now women and that women over the age of eighteen make up a third of the total game-playing population. In this chapter we take a look at how this multibillion-dollar industry began and how video games have evolved from male-dominated “shoot ’em up” arcade games to more family-friendly casual games on smart phones and tablets.

One of the first computer games was written for the EDSAC computer at Cambridge University in 1952. Graduate student Alexander Douglas used a computer game as an illustration for his PhD dissertation on human-computer interaction. The game was based on the game called tic-tac-toe in the United States and noughts and crosses in the United Kingdom. Although Douglas did not name his game, computer historian Martin Campbell-Kelly saved the game in a file called OXO for his simulator program, and this name now seems to have escaped into the wild. The player competed against the computer, and output was programmed to appear on the computer’s cathode ray tube (CRT) as a display screen. The source code was short and, predictably, the computer could play a perfect game of tic-tac-toe (Fig. 9.1).