videogame definitions?
21 April 2010I was recently having an interesting OT discussion on AtariAge.com (in a very heated topic, BTW) with a well respected member of the forum that made me finally understand why there are still many heated debates on which is the “first video game ever”. Simply put, people can’t even agree on what a video game is and how it should be defined so, of course, there can’t be any agreement on which was the first video game at all! Quite interesting indeed.
My very general view is that a game that is played by electronic means looking at a screen where we can interactively control the behavior and on/off switching of pixels is a “video game” regardless of the specific technique used to do so. Henceforth, I’d go back to the first experiment made in 1947 by Thomas Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Man with the “CRT amusement device”.
Others instead have a much stricter definition:
“Video is the technology of electronically capturing, recording, processing, storing, transmitting, and reconstructing a sequence of still images representing scenes in motion. It uses a raster display method, and takes a literal video signal which is then decoded and displayed on the CRT. Vector, of course, has no transmitted signal, no stored or captured image, and nothing being reconstructed. It is simply a mechanical line image drawn manually, on the spot.”
Under which the first proper video game is clearly Ralph Baer’s basic game released on the Odyssey console and the 1947 one “was not a videogame by any stretch of the imagination” according to the forum friend I was chatting with.
Actually, while such a definition is clearly respectable and correct, I tend to find it really too strict as it also excludes all those vector based games like SpaceWar!, Asteroids and so on. Now, if we go around telling people that Asteroids wasn’t a “video game”, I guess we’ll get many puzzled looks…
Well, I think both views are correct based on their starting assumptions and I have to conclude that:
1. there will never be a general agreement regarding which was the first videogame
2. I guess I have a very flexible imagination that can stretch very far! 
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