Video game

Most modern video games are audiovisual, with audio complement delivered through speakers or headphones, and sometimes also with other types of sensory feedback (e.g., haptic technology that provides tactile sensations).

In 1966, while working at Sanders Associates, Ralph H. Baer devised a system to play a basic table tennis game on a television screen.

[24] Per video game historian Keith Smith, the sudden appearance suggested that the term had been proposed and readily adopted by those in the field.

The personalities in those days were Bushnell, his sales manager Pat Karns, and a handful of other 'TV game' manufacturers like Henry Leyser and the McEwan brothers.

[15] Most video games tend to feature some type of victory or winning conditions, such as a scoring mechanism or a final boss fight.

Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, recognizing that there was yet an industry standard definition for a video game, established for her ruling that "At a bare minimum, video games appear to require some level of interactivity or involvement between the player and the medium" compared to passive entertainment like film, music, and television, and "videogames are also generally graphically rendered or animated, as opposed to being recorded live or via motion capture as in films or television".

[citation needed] Product flaws include software bugs which can manifest as glitches which may be exploited by the player; this is often the foundation of speedrunning a video game.

[34] Video games require a platform, a specific combination of electronic components or computer hardware and associated software, to operate.

[42] The list below is not exhaustive and excludes other electronic devices capable of playing video games such as PDAs and graphing calculators.

[59] The names may shift over time as players, developers and the media come up with new terms; for example, first-person shooters were originally called "Doom clones" based on the 1993 game.

Video game developers, as employees within this industry are commonly referred to, primarily include programmers and graphic designers.

As platforms have become more complex and powerful in the type of material they can present, larger teams have been needed to generate all of the art, programming, cinematography, and more.

Prior to the mid-1970s, arcade and home consoles were programmed by assembling discrete electro-mechanical components on circuit boards, which limited games to relatively simple logic.

[85] This image of video games received early widespread popular support, and forms the basis of films such as Tron, eXistenZ and The Last Starfighter.

"[86] Simply put, ludologists reject traditional theories of art because they claim that the artistic and socially relevant qualities of a video game are primarily determined by the underlying set of rules, demands, and expectations imposed on the player.

Today, the video game industry is predominantly led by major companies in North America (primarily the United States and Canada), Europe, and southeast Asia including Japan, South Korea, and China.

The COVID-19 pandemic during 2020–2021 gave further visibility to video games as a pastime to enjoy with friends and family online as a means of social distancing.

[107][108] Since the mid-2000s there has been debate whether video games qualify as art, primarily as the form's interactivity interfered with the artistic intent of the work and that they are designed for commercial appeal.

Numerous television shows (both animated and live-action), films, comics and novels have been created based on existing video game franchises.

For example, until 2019, no video game film had ever been received a "Fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but the releases of Detective Pikachu (2019) and Sonic the Hedgehog (2020), both receiving "Fresh" ratings, shows signs of the film industry having found an approach to adapt video games for the large screen.

[113][114] That said, some early video game-based films have been highly successful at the box office, such as 1995's Mortal Kombat and 2001's Lara Croft: Tomb Raider.

With the capability to render 3D actors and settings in real-time, a new type of work machinima (short for "machine cinema") grew out from using video game engines to craft narratives.

It has been shown that action video game players have better hand–eye coordination and visuo-motor skills, such as their resistance to distraction, their sensitivity to information in the peripheral vision and their ability to count briefly presented objects, than nonplayers.

The report of 3,274 gamers, all over the age of 18, focused on the games Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Plants vs Zombies: Battle for Neighborville and used actual play-time data.

The university's research studied all age groups – "from pre-literate children through to older adults living in long term care homes" – with a main focus on 18 to 55-year-olds.

[130] Parents and children's advocates regularly raise concerns that violent video games can influence young players into performing those violent acts in real life, and events such as the Columbine High School massacre in 1999 in which some claimed the perpetrators specifically alluded to using video games to plot out their attack, raised further fears.

Other health experts, including the American Psychiatric Association, have stated that there is insufficient evidence that video games can create violent tendencies or lead to addictive behavior,[131] though agree that video games typically use a compulsion loop in their core design that can create dopamine that can help reinforce the desire to continue to play through that compulsion loop and potentially lead into violent or addictive behavior.

Numerous other controversies around video games and its industry have arisen over the years, among the more notable incidents include the 1993 United States Congressional hearings on violent games like Mortal Kombat which lead to the formation of the ESRB ratings system, numerous legal actions taken by attorney Jack Thompson over violent games such as Grand Theft Auto III and Manhunt from 2003 to 2007, the outrage over the "No Russian" level from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 in 2009 which allowed the player to shoot a number of innocent non-player characters at an airport, and the Gamergate harassment campaign in 2014 that highlighted misogyny from a portion of the player demographic.

Games in retail packaging in good shape have become collectors items for the early days of the industry, with some rare publications having gone for over US$100,000 as of 2020[update].

[142][143][144] The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC has three video games on permanent display: Pac-Man, Dragon's Lair, and Pong.