ABSTRACT
Two things might already surprise even videogame aficionados. The first is that videogames are over 40 years old. In fact, their birth date is debated and, while Spacewar is the most oft-cited ‘modern’ computer game, there remains no absolute consensus, with some commentators citing the 1958 Tennis for Two as the true original. This uncertainty, as we shall learn in Chapter 2, is revealing, as the argument as to what constitutes ‘a videogame’ consumes much of the effort of scholars in the field. The second surprise is the suggestion that something as apparently trivial as videogames should be taken so seriously. While there can be few who would suggest that they are as significant as manned spaceflight or possible world war, a growing number of scholars and cultural critics
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who, in the 1920s, championed Hollywood movies, jazz, comic strips and Broadway musicals, Jenkins suggests that videogames must be considered to be one of the most important artforms of the twentieth century. Ralph Koster similarly implores us to consider computer games as art:
Shuker (1995) is even more enthusiastic, ‘Video games are now a major cultural form, and may well soon replace cinema, cable and broadcast television as the dominant popular medium’. We might still be some way from seeing Shuker’s prediction come true, but even if, as Jesper Juul (2000) has more pragmatically suggested, we have not seen the first videogame Shakespeare or Bach, the speed with which videogames have developed aesthetically, formally and functionally, is remarkable. The level of audio-visual and interactional sophistication of today’s PlayStation 2, Xbox, GameBoy Advance and GameCube games seems light years away from 1970s’ offerings like Space Invaders, Pac-Man and Asteroids, though, as we will learn throughout this book, there remain considerable areas of constancy and clearly identifiable lineages.
