Video Game Invasion, the history of a global obsession (DVD) This DVD not only talks in depth about video game history but also talks about how video games have changed the world and our views on gaming and how to react to it. In October 1958, Physicist William Higinbotham created what is thought to be the first video game. It was a very simple tennis game that consisted of a line and a moving dot; the game was similar to the classic 1970s video game Pong. In the age of arcade video in the 1980s, came many technically innovative and genre-‐defining games developed and released in the decade. The genres for video games are listed below. • Action • Action-‐adventure games • Adventure games • Beat-‐em up • Cinematic platformer • Role-‐play games • Fighting games • Hack and slash • Interactive movies • Platform games • Scrolling platformers • Scrolling shooters • Isometric platformers • Isometric shooter • Light gun shooter • Platform-‐adventure games • Racing games • Rail shooter • Real-‐time strategy • Run and gun shooters • Rhythm games • Stealth games • Survival horror • Vehicle simulation games • Visual novels In May 1992, a game called Wolfenstein 3D was released, a shooter action game filled with a lot of blood and gore content and was awarded with the first ever genre of being a first person shooter. A first person shooter is a video game genre centred on gun and projectile weapon-‐based combat through a first-‐ person perspective.
18 months after the release of Wolfenstein, Doom was released and was even more successful thanks to it having more intensity and blood. Another trick that made the Doom game extremely popular was the fact that the game had a multi player mode and was refereed to by gamers as “death match”. Soon after the release of first person shooter games, violent video games become headline news and had parents and lawmakers blaming violent video games for everything, from unfinished home work to anti-‐social behaviour and street crime. Video games are also being developed to help train troops in the army and also to pick out any potential member of the gaming public that might be good candidates for the army. The government that once blamed violent video games for crime are now using them to help train their troops. Also believed to be caused by the violence in games, in 1999, two students went on a shooting spree in their school. The blame was placed on the violence of video games when a video of the boys talking about shooting people in the school would be just like the doom game. From watching this DVD on video game history I can now see how violent games have changed the views and reactions from gamers and the public. As a gamer my self I think that it is not the violence in the games that is to blame but the way that we react to them. I find my self getting enraged with games that are not design to do so, so why do they make me feel this way? From here I am now going to look into more game violence and also games that are not designed to be violent but still get a negative response.