Introductions

The long wait is finally over! Today is the official grand opening of A Curious Tale! From here on out expect a wide variety of content filled posts, primarily related to video games. For those who are not interested in video games, or have no previous knowledge of the subject, worry not! My goal is to make my content accessible and interesting to all parties. To prove my point, I'm going to start with the beginning of beginnings: what is a video game?

Merriam-Webster defines a video game as: "an electronic game played by means of images on a video screen and often emphasizing fast action". This is a perfectly accurate definition, but it doesn't help a parent looking at the latest XBox360 titles for their eleven year-old son. And what exactly counts as a game? Do the "find the animal" games in Dora the Explorer count as video games. They are games and are played "by means of images on a video screen", and yet they aren't video games.

To me, a better definition for a video game would be: "an electronic game played by means of a controller device and images on a video screen." While this is technically untrue (there are video games that can be played by voice commands alone), it is, for the moment, a correct definition for more than 99% of all video games ever made.

A controller device, or more commonly, a controller, is essentially a simplified T.V. remote. You have a number of buttons, that when pressed cause an action on the screen (much like pausing a movie with a remote). Recent advances have even made wireless controllers (do I really need to explain?) commonplace, further cementing the similarities to a remote control. There a many different types of controllers; different video game systems (referred to as consoles) use different controllers, different games on the same system will use different controllers (Guitar Hero titles use a controller shaped like a guitar), and computer games will use a standard mouse and keyboard (most of the time).

However these controllers look, they are all used for the same purpose, controlling the action shown on the screen (or more commonly reffered to as "in the game"). We'll start with the very first game (generally regarded), Tennis For Two. Actually, I lied the original Tennis For Two (pictured above) was played on an oscilloscope display and was significantly more advanced than the game it inspired, Pong, which will actually be my example.

Pong (for the Atari, I'll explain in another post) is played using a controller that has as it's primary inputs (the buttons you press to make things happen) a single button and an analog stick (a stick you move in a 360 degree radius, the Atari controller is pictured below to help you). The button does very little in the game, but the stick can be pushed up or down to move your "paddle", a white bar displayed on the screen. The game consists of two white bars and a small white square which bounces back and forth across the screen. If the square reaches either the left or right side of the screen the person controlling the paddle (the player) opposite of that side gains one point. The side that has more points when you stop playing is the winner. To see Pong being played, click this link.

As the years have progressed, video games have gotten more and more advanced, but this simple facet of using a controller (of some sort) to manipulate what appears on the screen has remained the central tenet of video games.

If you have any comments, concerns, or suggestions for things you would like me to discuss, feel free to leave a comment or send me an email at corynragsdale@gmail.com.

P.S. Sorry Oxford English Dictionary, but your site costs money to get a definition.