ABSTRACT
THE GREAT DEBATE Video games are the granddaddy of all forms of interactive digital entertainment. Pong, the world’s fi rst successful video game, debuted in 1972, almost two full decades before the World Wide Web was even born and long before other types of digital media were introduced. In the intervening years, video games have not only evolved enormously but have also had a profound infl uence on a great many other forms of interactive digital entertainment. In addition, as we saw in Chapters 11, 12, and 13, games are not just a signifi cant form of entertainment, but they are also being used to teach, promote, and inform. Thus, it would be impossible to write a book about digital storytelling without a deep bow of acknowledgment to this pioneering form of entertainment. Unfortunately, however, to try to cover the vast fi eld of video games in a single chapter and to do it justice is an impossible task. Thus, we will concentrate here on a handful of particularly important game-related topics and keep the focus as close as possible to discussions relating specifi cally to digital storytelling.
