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... ty. Since he was a mere boy, he had played with blocks and immensely enjoyed the act of creating entire cities. And not simply for the purpose of destroying them later; he sincerely loved the act of constructing elaborate infrastructures from blocks and other household toys.
So he reckoned that it would be a good idea to make a game that allowed players to do just this, but on a computer. Not even he was prepared for what came after. Released four years later, in 1989, SimCity became one of the most innovative and popular games ever. Selling over 5 million in the years since it has been released, SimCity was a game that just about everyone could enjoy. It was not overly violent, so parents did not lash out at it, and the concept of building whole cities appealed to a wide range of people, not matter the age, shape, color, gender, sexual orientation, etc of the player. It was just pure, city building fun.
And the game did not have a goal that would allow the players to beat the game, either. Of course, there were the scenarios that shipped with the game and allowed players who had gotten their fill of building a chance to take on the role of a city mayor in times of great crisis, but the main purpose of the game was to build. Or destroy, to some players. Will Wright, in creating SimCity, had insight enough to add a Disasters menu to the games interface, thus allowing the players to explore and vent their darker natures by throwing horrible disasters at their hapless citizens.
The building that SimCity so emphasized was an inspiration to Maxis, the company that Will Wright had founded in creating the game. Maxis released prodigious amounts of add-ons to the original SimCity in the form of new cities that the players could lord over, new scenarios for them to solve, and eventually (when the technology became commonplace for the personal computer) a CD-ROM version of the game that added new sounds and videos to breathe life into the disasters that players could rain down upon their cities. Maxis applied the sim motif to many other games, filling the early 90 s with countless titles bearing the company insignia of Sim, including (but certainly not limited to) such flops as Sim Farm, Sim Ant, Sim Earth, Sim Copter, and Sim Tower. In the winter of 1993, though, Maxis returned to its roots with SimCity 2000.
SimCity 2000 was nearly identical to the original SimCity, but a lot more detailed. It added the ability to provide piping to the Sims (Will Wrights term used to denote the citizens of SimCity) as well as a more detailed perspective and dozens of new buildings. SimCity 2000, like its predecessor, also inspired expansion packs, including the Urban Renewal Kit which allowed Sim-heads to create new graphics for the buildings. A sequel to SimCity 2000, SimCity 3000, was released in 1998, adding yet more features to the SimCity paradigm. A major expansion pack was released for SimCity 3000, entitled SimCity 3000: Unlimited, which added a terrain editor and more scenarios. In early 2000, the first successful transition of the Sim name to a game that was not a derivative of SimCity was created, entitled The Sims.
In The Sims, the simulation took a smaller scale. Instead of ruling large metropolis, players could take control of a family (or an entire neighborhood, even). Each of the family members would have their different wants that the player would have to take care of, and would interact amongst the family (and the world) in a semi-realistic fashion, forming both friendships and enmities with their fellow Sims. The Sims was a huge success, being named the best game of 2000 by a huge number of publications (and fans, who made it the best-selling game of the entire year). Naturally, as is the way of things with Maxis, an expansion pack, Livin Large, followed that allowed the players to explore more alternative career options with their Sims. Another expansion pack followed, House Party, which enabled a players Sims to host expansive parties.
The Sims and its two expansion packs currently dominate the April 2001 incarnation of The New York Times best sellers list for Windows/DOS games, coming in at # 1 (House Party), # 3 (The Sims), and # 5 (Livin Large). Flagging for Goodness History was made in 1992 when a then-unknown company by the name of id Software (id, as in Freud's ego, super-ego, and id) based in Austin, TX, released a game by the name of Wolfenstein 3 d by way of Apogee Software, a publisher that had, up until then, been known for its console-like side scrolling shooting games. The creators of the game, John Carmack and John Romero (who had not attended MIT), were inspired to make the game by a game engine that they had programmed. The engine itself was a pseudo- 3 d, texture mapped piece of coding that would allow for 360 rotation and free movement throughout the levels of the game. The 3 d surfaces in the game had images over them, unlike the textures of the arcade classic, Battle zone, which were simple transparent geometric shapes. While the game was a far cry from true 3 d (later games would enter the realm of 3 d), it was definitely a more three dimensional representation of reality than other games of its time, making it in a sense 2 d.
All they needed to make the idea a reality was a story for the player to follow and a world to roam about in. Their inspiration for the story and world was an old Apple II game by the name of Castle Wolfenstein. The game in question was a little-known side scrolling adventure game, so the rights to the name Wolfenstein were easily (and relatively cheaply) procured by Wolfenstein 3 ds creators and appropriated to the title of Wolfenstein 3 d to avoid confusion with the elder game, despite the fact that the game was not 3 d at all. The result of this was a horrifically addictive game of shoot the Nazi that begat an entire genre of computer games, First Person Shooters (Fpss), one of the most popular genres of game to this day.
Wolfenstein 3 d (also known by the affectionate title of Wolf 3 d to its ever-rabid group of fans) was released in shareware format (an incredibly popular way of distributing games at the time reliant on teasing the consumer with one episode of a game and requesting money for the other episodes) and spread across the country, both on Bulletin Board Systems (which replaced ARPAnet in the mid- 80 s with the advent of modems as the pre-eminent way of disseminating information) and through its players giving one another copies of the shareware. With Wolf 3 d, as with Zork a decade earlier, a large fan community sprang up and, for the first time in gaming history, the fans began adding on to the games. Of course, the first few downloadable modifications (called mods for short) to the game that fans created were rather simple and / or crude ones, such as replacing some of the images in the game with images of porn stars or changing the enemies to happy faces, but over time the mods became almost as complex as the game itself. The success of Wolf 3 d spurred id Software to create a sequel to the game the following year, entitled Spear of Destiny, which served as more of an extended expansion pack to the game than a sequel of any real sort.
Also released in 1993 by the very same team was a game in the tradition of Wolf 3 d by the name of Doom. Unlike Wolf 3 d, however, Doom had a multiplayer (or deathmatch as it was christened by the developers) element to it enabling players to hook up over modem or serial connection and either blow each other away (frag was the term used for that action, and used to this day in current Fpss) or team up to mop up the corridors of Dooms base on the moon with excessive firepower. Computer Games Meet the Parents A game like Doom, which involved viscerally satisfying romps through abandoned bases while mowing down row after row of enemies, could not go unnoticed by parent groups for long. For the first few years, Fpss remained relatively unmolested by parental intervention.
Indeed, many of the people who played the original Doom and some of its early successors were adults no longer under the jurisdiction of their parents, while many of the younger crowd cut their teeth on the less complex offerings from Nintendo and Sega to be played on consoles manufactured by said companies. With the computer game industry becoming a more and more popular (not to mention profitable) industry, the audiences that played computer games were getting younger and younger. 1993 saw the attack by U. S. Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn) on video games.
In particular, he targeted games such as Mortal Kombat, a console fighting game in which a hardly-realistic amount of pixilated blood spilled forth from the onscreen characters, and the aforementioned Doom. Lieberman lobbied long and hard against the computer game industry and convinced the government to adapt a ratings system like that which governed motion pictures, the Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB), in 1994. As if a ratings board for computer games were not enough, Lieberman continued to rail against games and the digital poison that they provided to children throughout the country and published numerous articles and press releases detailing his continued pursuit of a most un-constitutional ban on computer games (many of which can be found on his website at web). For years after the lobbying by Lieberman, various parents groups had joined the witch hunt against computer games, ever-desiring a scapegoat to blame their parenting on, in my opinion. However, the first large-scale attack on the FPS genre, and on the computer game industry as a whole, was spurred on by the April 20, 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, CO. According to many sources, the two killers had been avid fans of Doom and had played it extensively in their small group of friends.
While this shooting was most definitely a tragedy by any standard, it was not necessarily the fault of the computer game industry alone. The two killers, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, had easy access to firearms and were raised in family situations that left them to fend for themselves most of the time and learn from TV and computer games. Nevertheless, a lawsuit was filed by the parents of the murdered students against 25 different companies (most of them responsible for the creation of violent games, but a surprising number had nothing to do with the computer game industry) two years after the shootings, in 2001, for $ 5 billion dollars in punitive damages. At the time of this writing, the legal business of the lawsuit still remains to be sorted out, but it looks as if the families have little to no case against the companies, claiming that games published by the companies had a direct effect on the gunmen to shoot up their school.
Another indication of the lack of a case against the game companies is the fact that this lawsuit strongly resembles a lawsuit filed by the same lawyer over another school shooting in Paducah, KY, also blaming computer games for violence amongst students. That lawsuit was dismissed by the court on account of the lack of evidence that the lawyer had, foreshadowing what will (one would hope) happen with the current suit. An interesting footnote to that story, and a large indication of the kinds of communities games like Doom build, is the fact that after Stomped. com announced the intention of the families to sue, their message board for the news article was flooded with postings from literally hundreds of fans all decrying the actions of the parents and professing support for the game companies in their upcoming battle (web archived comment. php? news id = 17575 &location = 1 has the story and the subsequent messages).
Such support, posted so quickly, is an indication of the dedication that drives many gamers to prop up their favorite game company in times of need and the kinds of communities that exist on the internet (and beyond) based around the concept of computer gaming. Something to think about. Wanting to experience firsthand the effects of violent computer gaming for myself, I decided to make a sojourn to the Nova Tech Committees overnight in April of this year. An avid gamer myself, I had yet to see how others react to violent gaming, especially when pitted against their peers in small spaces, spurred on by the intense rush of caffeine and adrenaline. The results were pretty much what I had thought they would be in the first place: they had almost no effect on the violence levels of the individuals in the long term, though the short term violence of the subjects increased by quite a bit.
For periods of 10 minutes to 2 hours after the game was played (the lesser amounts of time for the less intense sessions and the greater amounts for the more intense sessions), the subjects acted quite aggressively towards their peers. They would shout and swear and one subject began to practice pretend acts of violence on several of the other subjects in the form of martial arts attacks. This aggression was mainly directed towards the members of the opposing team (as the subjects mostly played team games of various Fpss), but occasionally the subjects on the same team would begin shouting at one and other, usually happening when that team had lost. The conclusion of my case study was a rather simple one: in healthy adolescents between the ages of 15 and 17, computer gaming does not cause significant long-term increases in violence, though it does certainly influence short-term aggressive behavior.
However, this is no indication of what gaming can cause in individuals either under the age of 15, or individuals who are not sound of mind. The subjects that I studied had been involved with computer gaming for years prior to my studying of them and showed no ill effects at the hands of gaming aside from less-than-perfect posture, poor eating habits, and a lack of physical fitness in some subjects. An End of Sorts All this information, and history, about computer games is all well and good, but how does it relate to and effect the history of America? As the history of computer games is a rather short one, it is a wonder that they have had an effect at all on American history. But they had several effects, with more on the way.
The first effect that they had was the effect of the simulator. As evidenced by the accuracy (and popularity) of the Sim family of games, computer games provide an efficient way for groups to simulate activities that would prove either too risky or too costly to perform in real life. Examples of activities that may not be feasibly tested in real life are activities such as flying a plane, performing a complex medical operation, staging a large military campaign, and maneuvering a space craft. Until the advent of the computer game, simulating events such as these was either not an option, or a feat that would require costly equipment and an amount of time that the testers, more often than not, didnt have. The 1984 movie WarGames provided a good look at one way the United States government could conceivably utilize gaming to simulate real world events. While a machine as advanced as the WOPR (an acronym for War Operations Plan and Response, the computer that Matthew Brodericks character hacks to play a game of global thermonuclear war) probably did not exist in the 1980 s, the US government did indeed have computers capable of simulating an actual global nuclear conflict, though these machines were not linked to the actual warheads as WOPR was in the movie.
Another effect on history that computer games have had is the effect of causing the government and other groups to re-examine where they stand in relation to the Constitutional right to freedom of speech and expression. Many computer games, like movies or music, have tested the devotion of politicians to the First Amendment by pushing the envelope. Games such as Postal, a game in which the player plays the part of a psychotic postal clerk and contains an excessive amount of pointless violence, and Carmageddon, a game that involves the running over of pedestrians by the players car-bound onscreen avatar, push the envelope of violence in games far enough to make even the most liberal of First Amendment supporters call for censorship. The excess of violence in these computer games has, much like Socrates in ancient Greece, created a sort of gadfly effect on politicians and others who would feign Constitutionality to test how far they would stretch to defend of one of Americas most hallowed doctrines. The third and final effect of computer gaming is the community that it builds.
This effect is one of the more recent effects in the history of computer gaming, but it is shaping up to be one of the more important effects of computer gaming. Already, people are creating entire organizations around their favorite computer games, whether they are clans for First Person Shooters, guilds for MMORPGs, or even just groups of friends that get together on a semi-regular basis to game (such as the Nova Tech Committee). Since the first MUD was created in 1979, computer games have been changing the ways that people relate to one and other and interact, in America and in the rest of the world. If the current trends in the popularity of online games are any indication, the interaction provided by these games will only continue to grow and improve in quality, making it both easier and more gratifying to link up with friends and play online. Soon, we may even have whole virtual worlds like the one proposed in Neal Stephenson's novel, Snow Crash, accommodating billions of people in the same world all living out their virtual lives as if they were their real lives. The possibilities are endless Resources web web history.
htm web web web doom 376542. html web web stone. html web web web web web web web web archived comment. php? news id = 17575 &location = 1 PC Gamer Magazine, July 1997 -June 1999 Computer Gaming World Magazine, November 1997, May 2001 New York Times, Monday, May 28, 2001 Zork (Computer Game) Doom (Computer Game) Wolfenstein 3 d (Computer Game) SimCity (Computer Game) Lady's Cage MUSH (online roleplaying world) WarGames (Movie)
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Research essay sample on Computer Games Short Term
