Computer and Video Game Design

The computer and video game industry has grown more rapidly than cinema, television, or any other entertainment industry that has preceded it.

Many text-based games were developed in the early days of computers, but video games, by definition, are based on graphics. In 1961, almost as soon as a graphic display had become available for a widely used minicomputer, the PDP-1, a team of students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology developed a game for it, Spacewar, which became the first widely distributed video game. Ten years later Computer Space, a Spacewar imitation, was the first game to be offered in arcades. The public was not yet accustomed to the kind of interaction that this game demanded, however, so the game that was a breakthrough commercial success in arcades was the simpler Pong.

One of the creators of Pong co-founded Atari Computers, releasing the 1972 arcade game as a home game in 1975. Magnavox had already pioneered the sale of home game consoles in 1972, and its Odyssey system also included the first hardware peripheral for a game, a "light gun." The first consoles offered preprogrammed games, but only a few years later cartridges became available as a means of distribution, and soon a third-party vendor, Activision, started marketing games for Atari consoles.

The 1980s saw the debut of 3-D games (previously, objects such as the aliens in Space Invaders had moved in only two dimensions); use of a virtual world extending beyond what a single screen shows; and distribution on laser discs. Popular games also appeared on new platforms: Tetris on PCs, which previously had been considered incapable of offering engaging video effects, and Nintendo's games on the hand-held Game Boy. At the end of this decade, Sega launched Genesis, with a 16-bit processor that brought arcade-quality graphics to the home.

A Senate investigation of violence in video games prompted the industry to create the Entertainment Software Rating Board in 1994 for labeling each game package with the suggested age of players. Also in this decade, computer desktop software shifted to graphic interfaces such as the Macintosh and Windows, borrowing much of the necessary expertise from work that had been done for video games. Internet technology migrated in the opposite direction, from PCs to games, removing distance as a barrier to cooperative and competitive play. Late in the decade, revenue from video and computer games exceeded revenue from the movies for the first time.

The new century saw the rise of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), in which large numbers of players interact with each other in virtual worlds that persist and evolve even while players are offline. The global market for MMORPGs was estimated at $14.1 billion in 2023, according to RESEARCH & MARKETS, which projects that it will reach $23.8 billion by 2030, expanding at a compound annual growth rate of 7.7 percent from 2023 to 2030.

Two important advances that let users interact in new ways were Nintendo's Wii, 2006, which allowed players to use the controller for gestures such as swinging a tennis racket, and Microsoft's Kinect, 2010, which used a camera and microphone to react to players' bodily motions and spoken commands and to recognize players' faces and voices.

The effects of the coronavirus pandemic on the computer and video game design industry were mixed. The industry saw an increase in the number of players and the frequency of video game play due to quarantining and social-distancing measures. While isolation and lack of other activities led to increased interest in video-gaming, supply chain shortages led to difficulty in meeting demand for gaming consoles, especially Sony's PS4, and gaming PCs, which relied on components produced in China, where the COVID-19 outbreak began. Other forms of gaming, such as mobile and tablet gaming, saw increased demand as well and no product shortages because the games were delivered as downloads. Areas of the industry that were negatively affected by the pandemic have recovered in recent years.