Early Video Games

"Baby". It makes sense later.

Videogames, videogames videogames. If you're trying to find out what the first videogame ever invented was, you have to first define what a videogame is. If you looked at most videogames now-a-days, you'd probably find that they all share various things in common, regardless of genre or complexity. First and foremost, they are games. What is a game? Something done for amusement, surely, but then what more? Is putting smarties-tubes on cats legs a game? Because its certainly amusing! No, no probably not. Not unless you were trying to do it as fast as you can, or with as little injury to the cat as possible. As soon as you apply criteria for which you can be judged, then it becomes a game. To be a game, something must be competitive in a sense. That doesn't mean it must be a shared experience; even if you are competing against the clock or even just the difficult nature of the game itself, this is a form of competition. So, we know what a game is- but then what is a computer game? A game to be played using a mechanical device, most probably a computer. This can take the form of an incredibly basic, dedicated electronic device that can be put on a key-chain, or something as complex as a console with the ability to interface with the internet.

So who was the first person to have fun with computers? Well people have been building machines for amusement for a very, very long time. "Automatons" are mechanical constructs comparable to the world's first robots, self-operating machines. These things were clearly built for amusement's sake, but they lack a defining feature of computer-games: interaction. Once the automaton is set whirring away, there is no interface between a person and it. So, as amusing as a wind-up monkey is- it's not a game. "The Turk" was an automaton built in 1770, a machine capable of playing chess against a human opponent. Its mechanical, interactive, competitive- it was also a hoax, and was controlled by a poor sod in a box who worked out all the equations for it. So close, yet so far. Some would argue that had this not been a hoax, it would not have met the criteria of a "computer-game". Even the Analytical Engine (1837) designed by Charles Babbage wouldn't really fit the bill. If you want to get picky, electronic computers were invented in 1936 by Konrad Zuse. It was electronic, it was programmable, it was binary. Whilst I'm sure that much fun was had with the machine (titled Z1) I can't find any hard evidence that it was ever used for amusement's sake. We all know it was, though.

But we don't want switches and lights, little motors that make funny noises or computers that are amusing only in that they're really weird. We want programs! Software! That, surely, is where the very first computer-game was spawned. EDSAC was British computer generally accepted to be the first "stored program" computer. It completed its first calculation in 1949. Would you like to know what it was? THE FIRST GRAPHICAL COMPUTER GAME, nicknamed "Baby". A bit weird, but we have our man (thing) !

So, we got there in the end. EDSAC is short for Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator, and was developed by the University of Cambridge. It wasn't built to crack German code, it wasn't a test in mathematics or theoretical physics calculations. It was built as a general purpose computer to 'help out' around the university. Yet, the first thing it did was play a video-game. It was made of vacuum tubes and was rather large. Despite its size, it could only run 650 instructions per second- that's not very much. For comparison to modern hardware, take this: Given that modern games run at 60 frames per second, it would take the EDSAC 43 days, 19 hours and 16 minutes to run a single frame of a modern game. And you thought the N64 was laggy.

Its safe to say that the professors of Cambridge University probably didn't see the beginning of a new medium when they ran their game on their EDSAC. They probably weren't aware that their ugly, ugly creation would hark the dawn of an era of immersive worlds, networking on a global scale or ruthless competitive play. We live in a world where the gaming industry is making leaps every year, better AI, real-time reflections and maps larger than ever before. But you've got to start somewhere.
"Baby" steps.

References:
 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/317437.stm
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/conference/EDSAC99/history.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Delay_Storage_Automatic_Calculator
http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessplayer?pid=77026
http://www.computerhistory.org/babbage/
http://www.geocities.com/siliconvalley/lab/7378/automat.htm
http://www.fi.edu/learn/sci-tech/automaton/automaton.php?cts=instrumentation
http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/game

Images:
http://www.computerhope.com/jargon/e/edsac.htm