Every August 29, computer game fans celebrate World Video Game Day, also known as Gamer’s Day. A commemoration that has been repeated every year since 2008, when the specialized magazines PC Manía, PlayManía and Hobby Consoles decided to dedicate this date to one of the most widespread hobbies among young and not so young today.
But reaching the current popularization of this form of entertainment has taken years of development, in which the evolution of computing has played an essential role. This is the only way to explain how we have gone from playing Pac Man (known in Spain as “comecocos”) and fitting pieces in the endearing and addictive, Tetris, to searching for Pokemon in real settings of our cities through augmented reality.
THE ORIGIN
Video games emerge as applications of a playful nature, developed from the fifties by computer programmers. As it might not be less in rational and mathematical minds, the first attempts give shape to chess programs, with which scientists, in addition to killing time, developed the syntax of the new computer languages.
A step forward was made in the late 1950s by a physicist named Willy Higinbotham. In an attempt to make a thematic exhibit in a US government laboratory more entertaining, he devised a simple game played on a black-and-white television that simulated a game of tennis.
These primitive attempts were limited to laboratories and scientists, and still did not comply with a fundamental rule of what we know today as a video game: its widespread use in any space and place. We would have to wait for the seventies to find its closest antecedents.
FROM LABORATORIES TO RECREATION HALLS
In 1972 Nolan Bushnell patented the first interactive game in history, Pong, and created the Atari company, which is still active today. The novelty is that for the first time video games leave the laboratories and are installed in recreational machines located in public places. In exchange for a few coins, anyone might have access to a playful experience that in those years was a novelty that left players amazed.
Since then, the evolution of video games has been unstoppable. If the first step was to leave the laboratories to be installed in recreational machines, they would soon reach personal computers and living rooms, and from there to mobile phones. An unstoppable path, whose only limits are technology and the imagination of programmers.
A MULTIMILLION DOLLAR BUSINESS
But in addition to technological development, the other mainstay of the success of video games is economics. According to the Newzoo agency, in 2021, the video game business generated almost 160,000 million dollars worldwide. The report records a total of 3 billion gamers, of which 55% originate from Asia and the Pacific area.
The study points to the reinforcement of games in the “cloud”, the rise of recreational applications on smartphones and the expansion into new markets as the engines of this growth. The report also indicates that the results of 2021 exceeded those of 2020, a year in which the consumption of video games multiplied, due to the confinement due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
THE VIDEO GAME AS A CULTURAL ELEMENT
Together with the technological and economic components, the video game has an important role as a cultural element. For the millions of people who consume them around the world, video games are not exclusively part of their leisure. They condition their social relations and their daily activities, creating communities that extend beyond geographical limits.
Far from judging whether this penetration of video games in the psychology of users has positive or negative effects, it must be recognized that their irruption has come in parallel with other social changes. Which means that more than a disruptive factor, video games are one more face in the unstoppable transformation of the world today.
For all these reasons, if you are an irreducible gamer and you move in the digital world like a fish in water, we wish you a happy Gamer’s Day and that you enjoy your favorite hobby. If, on the other hand, yours is the real world and your tastes are more traditional, it is best to wait for the day dedicated to your hobby, surely it exists and is written in red on the calendar.
