Change comes rapidly now. When looking deep into the past, we can speak in terms of millenniums or centuries. As we near the present, we work in decades. Now, we talk in years, months, weeks, days and hours. We distinguish between individual minutes and seconds and beyond to a degree that no one ever has before.
If the world is growing smaller, perhaps the day is growing longer.
New ideas are being born and made real more rapidly than at any other point during history. Technology is progressing at such a speed that it can look something like a blur. The advent of computers and the internet were both a consequence of and a catalyst for this quickening of the pace.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. We seem to be finding myriads of new and better ways to satisfy our age-old needs. How will dinner get to my table? Will water flow where it ought to? Will I be getting laid? If all of the above go well for you tonight, chances are that modern technology had a part to play somewhere. Then perhaps it should be of no surprise that we also use our new arsenal of ideas to satisfy another long-held disposition of ours: we are bent to compete.
Computers, increasingly powerful and dynamic, are but the latest theater of war for the human mind. Video games seem like the perfect arena in which to compete and the speed with which we began competing on the medium reflects that.
At the very least, competitive gaming can trace its near progenitors back to pinball, slot machines and novelty games in the arcades. Think of a pistol game which you might now see at an old amusement park. Coin operated games predate video games and were big business long before pixels and power ups were involved.
With a bit more ambition, we can also bring games such as chess into the conversation about competitive gaming’s roots. After all, in the early 1950s, chess became one of the first interactive games programmed onto a "regular" computer of the time as opposed to a machine dedicated entirely to playing chess which dates back to the early 1920s. Major computer scientists of the time such as Alan Turing and Claude Shannon believed that having a computer beat a human at chess would signal a milestone in computing, the ultimate goal being artificial intelligence.
Following were games such as Nim (a math-heavy parlor game developed in Britain on the aptly named NIMROD computer in 1951) and OXO (that’s Tic-Tac-Toe or Noughts and Crosses, written in Cambridge in 1952).
They impressed. Nim was called "the electric brain". Although the games were functional (albeit the player only competes against the computer, i.e. the designers) and fun, their popularity was limited by the fact that they could not be played except on their enormous, unwieldy machines of origin. These games were to be found in no homes, only universities, labs and select technical work spaces.
Nim and OXO were created as a means to an end. Nim, because of its math-heavy play, was used to illustrate the NIMROD’s mathematical prowess and practical applications. OXO conveyed the power of the first computer (EDSAC) to use RAM ("memory which users could read, add or remove information from," wrote Tristan Donovan in Replay).
Both games were viewed at the time as mostly unimportant in and of themselves, only tools of research and then conveyance of their machine’s power.
In 1958, American physicist William Higinbotham developed Tennis for Two, a simple two-player tennis game. Unlike its predecessors, Tennis for Two was created specifically to entertain, to cure the boredom of visitors to the Brookhaven National Laboratory, a nuclear research facility in Long Island, New York where Higinbotham worked. Higinbotham died regretting that he’d be remembered for his invention of a game rather than for his work in the nuclear nonproliferation movement.
Unlike the much later Pong, Tennis for Two used a side perspective instead of a top-down one. It had a net and was able to recognize the velocity-decreasing effect that net had when the ball hit it. The lights of the ball, net and court pulsed an eerie bright white, characteristic of the game’s display monitor dubbed the oscilloscope, a tool which observes signal voltages and was normally used to maintain electronics and assist in laboratory work.
Tennis for Two, a milestone in that it allowed direct competition between two players, faded forgotten into the background for decades. The game was played only twice in its original run, on two consecutive Visitor’s Days at the lab to cure the lucky tourist’s boredom. On those days, it was reported that hundreds of curious would-be gamers lined up for a chance to hit the ball back and forth, back and forth.
In 1960, computers began to speed forward. Simultaneously, they became more powerful, smaller, able to store more data, do it more efficiently and display it all more clearly than ever before.
The world spun into the 1960s unaware that in the early years of the decade, the computing universe would be caught in the considerable gravity of a particularly dense star in the middle of the screen on their PDP-1 computers.
Caught in the gravity with them were two spaceships at war, fighting to the death along with the enthralled players who controlled them.