Computer games - The Computing Universe: A Journey through a Revolution - page 174

9 Computer games

Video games are bad for you? That's what they said
about rock and roll.
Shigeru Miyamoto 1

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 com-
puters 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 dis-
play screen. The source code was short and, predictably, the computer could
play a perfect game of tic-tac-toe ( Fig. 9.1 ).
Like OXO on the EDSAC, most of the early computer games ran on uni-
versity mainframe computers and were developed by individuals in their
spare time. The game Spacewar! ( Figs. 9.2a and 9.2b ) was one of the earliest

Fig. 9.1. Alexander (Sandy) Douglas
created a version of tic-tac-toe or
noughts and crosses for the Cambridge
EDSAC computer in 1952. The output
was displayed on a CRT screen.

174