the Internet Electronics and Entertainment Media - Gaming
games video game computer
Once considered the pastime of children and socially challenged adults, video and computer games now represent a major form of entertainment in America. Video games are played using a computer that is designed specifically to play a game or games. Consoles are video game machines designed to be hooked up to a television for display purposes and played at home. Arcade cabinet games are stand-alone machines dedicated to playing a particular video game or games. Computer games, by contrast, are just one type of program that can be run on standard personal computers. The difference between the two types of games is in how they are accessed, not necessarily in their contents. Many games can be played using either a video game system or a computer. Thus the terms video game and computer game are sometimes used interchangeably. As Table 5.1 shows, the amount of time American adults played video (and computer) games nearly doubled from forty-three hours in 1998 to seventy-eight hours in 2001. The table also reveals that the average adult in 2001 spent nearly $30 on these games—an increase of roughly $9 over the amount spent in 1998. The marketing research firm NPD Group reported that the video and computer gaming industry sold $11.7 billion in merchandise in 2002 and $11.2 billion in 2003. Of this, computer games accounted for $1.2 billion in 2003 and $1.4 billion in 2004.
Video games were becoming one of the more lucrative entertainment markets in America in 2004. According to Jose Antonio Vargas in "Halo 2 Ready to Run Rings around Video Game Industry" (Washington Post, November 9, 2004), the biggest retail launch in the history of the entertainment industry did not center around a movie, album release, or a television series. It took place November 9, 2004, and belonged to the video game Halo 2, developed by Bungie Studios for the Microsoft Xbox console. The game was expected to bring in more than $80 million on the day
|Media usage and consumer spending, 1998–2002|
|[Estimates of time spent were derived using rating data for television, cable and satellite television, and radio; survey research and consumer purchase data (units, admissions, access) for books, home video, Internet, interactive TV, magazines, movies in theaters, newspapers, recorded music, and video games. Adults 18 and older were the basis for estimates for television, cable & satellite television, daily newspapers, consumer books, consumer magazines, home video, and interactive TV. Persons 12 and older were the basis for estimates for radio, recorded music, movies in theaters, video games, and consumer Internet]|
|Item||1998||1999||2000||2001||2002, proj.||2003, proj.||2004, proj.||2005, proj.||2006, proj.|
|— Represents zero.|
|1UPN, WB, and PAX affiliates included in independent stations and pay-per-view included basic cable from 1998 to 1999. UPN, WB, and PAX affiliates moved to network-affiliated stations and pay-per-view moved to premium services in 2000.|
|2Playback of prerecorded tapes only.|
|3Video-on-demand (VOD) only. Personal video recorders (PVRs) included in total TV.|
|SOURCE: "No. 1125. Media Usage and Consumer Spending: 1998 to 2006," in Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2003, U.S. Census Bureau, Economics and Statistics Administration, U.S. Department of Commerce, 2003, http://www.census.gov/prod/2004pubs/03statab/inforcomm.pdf (accessed November 22, 2004)|
|Hours per person per year|
|Cable & satellite TV||667||720||774||846||851||858||873||881||892|
|Basic cable and satellite TV1||565||617||638||692||698||706||720||729||726|
|Premium cable and satellite TV1||101||103||137||154||153||152||153||152||166|
|Consumer spending per person per year (dol.)|
|Cable and satellite TV||167.38||181.71||194.63||210.58||225.34||241.30||255.18||269.18||282.17|
|Basic cable & satellite networks||125.77||135.61||146.73||158.94||168.75||178.64||187.65||195.62||202.64|
|Premium cable & satellite services||41.61||46.10||47.90||51.64||56.58||62.66||67.54||73.56||79.53|
of its release, far exceeding the leading one-day box office sales record of $44.8 million set by the movie Shrek 2 on May 22, 2004. Instead, the game sold high above expectations, moving 2.4 million copies and grossing $125 million, according to Chris Morris in "Halo 2 Sales Top Grand Theft Auto" (CNN/Money.com, November 11, 2004).
The Rise of Video and Computer Games
Computer and video games are almost as old as computers. Many credit A. S. Douglas with creating the first graphics-based computer game at Cambridge University in England in 1952 as part of his doctoral research on human-computer interaction. The game was played on an enormous Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC) computer, which was one of the first computers in existence and was made primarily from rows and rows of vacuum tubes. The EDSAC display screen was a 35 × 16 array of monochromatic dots. The name of Douglas's game was Noughts and Crosses, a human vs. machine version of tic-tac-toe in which the human player chose the first square. Ten years later, computer games were developed on main-frame computers and eventually on the ARPANET.
One of the more popular games that spread to computer mainframes across the United States during the 1960s was Spacewar. Spacewar was created in 1961 by Steve Russell and other researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to test the capabilities of the $120,000 Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-1 computer. The game consisted of two low-resolution ships, one shaped like a needle and the other like a wedge, flying around a dot that represented a sun in the middle of the screen. The object was to destroy the other player's ship while maneuvering through the sun's gravitational pull.
In 1971 Nutting Associates released Computer Space, the first video game for the general public. Computer Space was a direct imitator of Spacewar set in a futuristic arcade-style cabinet. Most people considered the game too complicated at the time, so Nutting only made fifteen hundred copies and then stopped production. The next year, however, Atari released Pong. In this monochromatic game, a small cube was bounced back and forth between two slightly larger rods controlled by the player(s). The video game was a smash hit, and Atari sold over eight thousand arcade cabinets. A month earlier, Magnavox released the Odyssey, which was the first home console video game system that ran on a television set. The Odyssey, which sold for $100, had several different games installed on it, all of which involved hitting a pixilated square(s) on the screen with rectangles. The home version of Pong was released in 1975 and sold more than 150,000 units during the holiday season alone, according to the Atari Historical Society (www.atarimuseum.com).
The Golden Age of Video Games
Within a year after these initial offerings, video games quickly gained a foothold in the United States. A steady stream of fairly unremarkable cabinet games was released throughout the 1970s. For most of the decade, video games were novelties that sat next to pinball machines in bowling alleys, bars, and roller-skating rinks. With the arrival of Asteroids and Space Invaders in 1978, arcade video games came into their own. Space Invaders, a game in which the player shot row after row of advancing aliens, caused a nationwide coin shortage in Japan so severe the Japanese government had to more than double yen production. Namco introduced the first color game in 1979 with the arrival of Galaxian, and then in 1980 the company released Pac-Man. The original name of the game was Puckman, derived from the Japanese pakupaku, which means "flapping open and closed" (e.g., the character's mouth). Despite the game's simple concept of guiding a yellow, dot-eating ball around a maze, 100,000 arcade units sold in the United States. The game inspired an entire line of merchandise from lunch boxes to stuffed toys. Between 1980 and 1983 numerous colorful, engaging video games were released, including Defender, Donkey Kong, Centipede, Frogger, and Ms. Pac-Man, which still holds the record for the most arcade games sold at 115,000. Video arcades sprang up in every mall and town in the United States. On January 18, 1982, the cover of Time magazine read "Gonk! Zap! Flash! Video Games Are Blitzing Our World." The cover story, "Games That Play People" by John Skow, revealed that in 1981 nearly $5 billion in quarters were spent playing arcade games. By comparison, the U.S. film industry took in $2.8 million that year.
At the same time, game consoles were gaining popularity in living rooms across America. In 1977 Atari launched the Atari VCS (later named the Atari 2600) for $200. By Christmas 1979, sales were brisk as people realized that the system could support more than just Pong. With the release of Space Invaders on the system the following year, units flew off the shelves at $150 a piece. According to a design case history on Atari by Tekla E. Perry and Paul Wallich published in the March 1983 issue of IEEE Spectrum, Atari sold over twelve million consoles between 1977 and 1983. More than two hundred games were made for the system. Other video systems such as Intellivision and Colecovision gained huge followings as well. The Time article stated that 600,000 Intellivision units were sold in 1981. Overall, in 1981 sales for home video games exceeded $1 billion dollars.
The Video Game Industry Stumbles
By 1984 the Commodore 64 home computer had debuted at $1,000, and the Apple IIc was introduced at the comparatively affordable price of $1,300. Such computers not only offered better graphics than the contemporary video game consoles, but they were also useful for such practical applications as spreadsheets and word processors. Consequently, people simply lost interest in video games and began buying home computers. In 1983, faced with a collapsing video game market, losses of the hundreds of millions of dollars, and far too much inventory, Atari loaded fourteen tractor-trailer trucks with thousands of unsold cartridges and pieces of hardware. They drove the surplus out to a landfill site in Alamogordo, New Mexico, and buried the inventory in a concrete bunker under the desert. The following year Warner Communications, the owner of Atari, sold the game and computer divisions of Atari to Jack Tramiel, the founder of Commodore. Mattel, the maker of Intellivision, also shed its electronics division, and in 1985 Coleco stopped producing its Colecovision products, eventually declaring bankruptcy in 1988. Hundreds of arcades closed as well.
For several years gaming was relegated to the computer. Prior to 1983, computer games were low on graphics and heavy on text, but by 1984 a number of colorful and entertaining games became available for home computers, including Ultima IV, Archon II: Adept, Impossible Mission, and the King's Quest series. However, toy and electronics manufacturers in the United States were wary of investing in video game consoles after the Atari disaster.
Japanese companies were not nearly as pessimistic and continued to pour money into video console development. Nintendo, a company that originally manufactured Japanese playing cards, surprised the entire gaming market in 1986 when it released the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). The games looked better than most arcade games from the early 1980s and lasted as long as computer games. After two years on the market, the NES found its way into almost as many homes as the Atari 2600. According to Nintendo America, the sales of video games in 1988 once again reached $1 billion. Arcades at the time also enjoyed a brief revival with the advent of complex fighting games such as Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter II. Mortal Kombat, which eventually made it onto the NES, inspired a Congressional investigation into violence in video games and led to the establishment of the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB), an industry self-regulatory organization that monitors the content of video games for depictions of violence, nudity, profanity, and other material that parents might find objectionable for young children.
The Present and Future of Gaming
Since the late 1980s, the electronic gaming market in the United States has continued a steady rise, with the lion's share of the gaming industry's sales coming from console systems and games. After the NES ran its course, the Sega Genesis became the hot video game system. This was followed by the Sony PlayStation, the Nintendo 64, the PlayStation 2, and finally the Microsoft Xbox. In the 1990s the computer game market split in two. Solitaire and countless other card and puzzle games found their way onto Windows desktops. Such games provided a brief escape from schoolwork or a job. At the same time, computers also became the platform for cutting edge strategy and shooting games. Such graphics-intensive games as Quake, Half Life, and Doom 3 often led to increased sales in computer components as gamers bought extra memory and bigger hard drives to boost computer performance in order to handle advanced graphic engines.
In the mid-1990s computer games began to go online. Hardcore fans of battle and quest adventures as well as card game fanatics could find competitors on the Web. As of 2001 the latest console systems also enabled gamers to go online and play against one another. According to Cade Metz in "The Future of Online Gaming" (PC Magazine March 27, 2003), online gaming traffic made up nearly 9% of the overall traffic along the Internet backbone in the United States in 2002. The fastest growing segment of online gaming appeared to be in the console game market. Xbox Live, an online service for the Xbox, gained 350,000 subscriptions at the beginning of 2003. By the end of 2004 the number of subscribers had more than quadrupled to 1.5 million. Metz reported that nearly 9% of all console gamers could be online by 2007, bringing in $650 million annually for the big console makers. As of 2004, console makers had sold nearly one hundred million units worldwide, with Sony PlayStation 2 making up three-quarters of those units.
Over the years games have grown exceedingly more complex and engaging. The Sims (2000) and the Sims 2 (2004) provided gamers with a real-life fantasy world where they could simulate alternate lives. Massive multiplayer online games, such as EverQuest, allowed players to freely roam and embark on quests in a virtual fantasy planet inhabited by other gamers.
As the complexity of games has grown, so too has the temptation for many to play video games in excess to escape their problems. Though still largely an unstudied phenomenon, gaming addiction appears to be more and more commonplace. Chris Richards reported in "Addicted Gamers Losing Their Way" (Washington Post, October 5, 2004) that the Web site of Online Gamers Anonymous (www.olganon.org) was receiving nearly three hundred visits per week at that time. The organization, one of the more prominent of its kind, was founded by Elizabeth Woolley after her son, a gaming addict, committed suicide in 2002. Many psychologists believe that games provide a means of escape for people with stressful lives or mental problems in much the same way as drugs and alcohol. Richards listed a number of symptoms that accompany gaming addition. These included failed attempts to stem gaming behavior, having a sense of well-being while playing games, craving more game time as well as feeling irritable when not playing, neglecting family and friends, and denying the adverse affects of too much gaming.
In "Evidence for Striatal Dopamine Release during a Video Game" (Nature, May 21, 1998), researchers at the Imperial College School in England reported that video games can cause secretions of the neurotransmitter dopamine in the brain. Neurotransmitters are chemicals that relay signals between brain cells. Dopamine is one of dozens of these chemicals and has been known to induce pleasure in the brain to reinforce behavior. Previous studies have shown that dopamine levels in hungry rats increased when they received food. In this case, the chemical reinforced the pleasure the hungry rat felt upon eating, so the next time the rat was hungry, it would be doubly motivated to eat and keep itself alive. Dopamine levels have also been associated with pleasure-producing drugs. In the Nature report, M. J. Koepp, R. N. Gunn, and others reported injecting human volunteers with a chemical that reacted to the brain's secretion of dopamine. The scientists then used an X-ray-like technique known as PET (positron emission tomography) to monitor the levels of dopamine in the brain as the volunteers steered a computer game tank through enemy territory picking up flags. The participants were awarded $10 for each level completed. The PET showed that dopamine levels shot up in the volunteers each time they finished blasting through a level. While the scientists said they were simply testing this technique of tracking dopamine and not gaming addiction, the possibility still existed that goal-oriented games elicit a pleasurable chemical response in the brain. Memory of such pleasure could cause addicted gamers to come back for more.
There is no doubt inside or outside the scientific community that gambling can be addictive. One troubling development on the Internet in 2004 was the continued rise in online gambling. According to a Congressional statement by Deputy Assistant Attorney General John G. Malcolm dated April 29, 2003, seven hundred Internet gambling sites existed in 1999. By 2003, the U.S. Justice Department estimated that eighteen hundred gambling sites were in place, bringing in roughly $4.2 billion. Many of these sites, such as Party Poker, allowed gamblers to wire money from their checking accounts into a gambling account run by the casino. When the player wished to gamble, he or she simply went online and began a session. Since most of these big online gambling operations were based in foreign nations in the Caribbean or South America, the U.S. government could not regulate them. Malcolm pointed to instances where the online houses manipulated the software so that the odds of games such as blackjack were skewed heavily in the house's favor. Other fly-by-night gambling operations had simply run off with people's money. Even if the all these gambling houses were honest, Malcolm claimed they still pose a threat to society. Those with serious gambling addiction can log in and gamble unfettered for hours at a time from work or home. There is simply no one to monitor them as they lose hundreds or thousands of dollars.
Malcolm also addressed the issue of money laundering through online casinos. Criminals who made their money from such illegal activities as drugs have used online casino accounts to stash their profits. Once the money was in the casino, the crooks used the games themselves to transfer money to their associates. Some criminals have been known to set up private tables at online casino sites and then intentionally lose their money to business associates at the table. In other instances, the casino was part of the crime organization. All the criminal had to do in these cases was to lose money to the casino.