A commentary on the past, present, and future of gaming platforms
Nowadays, more often than not, while scrolling through the arbitrary status updates and pictures of cats or dogs that litter my Facebook newsfeed, I will see at least one or two posts or advertisements about the latest “it-thing” on the gaming market. These posts are almost always courtesy of someone I forgot I even had on Facebook, and the other night, one of these posts appeared in the form of a video of a grainy 2-bit type game that featured stars, lasers, and space ships. Often credited as being the second computer game ever created—OXO, a tic-tac-toe adaption game, was the first—Spacewar! (1961) is barely comparable to the sort of graphic complexities that currently reign in the gaming market. Seeing the humble beginnings of video games, however, got me thinking about how the current and future state of the realm of video games.
[pullquote align=”left” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]…high definition graphics that literally allow us to immerse ourselves in a virtual reality.[/pullquote]
When I was younger, the only video games I had knowledge of were limited to whatever games my older cousins owned for their N64. Cartridge classics like
This key smashing behaviour—a ridiculously chaotic, yet surprisingly effective method of winning—has followed a lot of gamers out of their childhoods, although, the actual devices that are used and abused has markedly changed over time as the technology available for gaming platform use has improved. Comparing game play with the big clunky Sega Genesis to the sleek streamlined Xbox One, we go from speeding through the Green Hill Zone as a blue super-pixelated hedgehog to high definition graphics that literally allow us to immerse ourselves in a virtual reality.
Whether you identify as a casual gamer or a hardcore gamer, we no longer have to stay at home to access the creative content. While PCs are arguably the largest gaming platform in use today, with hand held devices like the Nintendo 3DS XL, as well as game developers like Blizzard creating content for Smartphones, it feels as though the future of gaming is shifting away from being something that gamers need to go sit down in front of a console to play.
However, I think that there will always be a certain percentage of people who will always be up to revisit the realm of childhood nostalgia and play video games the good old fashion way: controller in hand and bums firmly planted in front of a TV screen.