To point 5: Many games rely on external knowledge or input beyond the bounds of its visual display. This is a fair point, but I don't think the underlying technicalities of construction makes a lot of difference to the end experience. "Computer games" or "digital games" would probably be more accurate, although one objection to CRT Amusement Device not covered in this list is that it's not running on a digital computer but an electronic series of wave generators and variable resistors, without even so much as a transistor, semiconductor, or memory. The presence of the word video in "video game" is historical accident, not a determinant. To point 2: Games like The Oregon Trail were originally developed for teletype machines with a printed display, did not change their very nature by transferring to monitor display, and there have been experimental audio-only games as well. ![]() ![]() CRT Amusement Device, in my book, is definitely conceptually in-line with Pong: not only does it look and play a bit like Tennis For Two (also from DuMont's lab,) it manages with its "overlay" technology to bear an even stronger resemblance to the Magnavox Odyssey that inspired Pong, enough to eventually surface as a trump card against the legal claim on originating and rent-gathering on the Television Game concept. That's exactly what's interesting about these early, pre-commercial years: people are working out what video games are and what they're for for the first time with no preconceptions, and little-to-no knowledge of any predecessors in the field whatsoever. Roughly speaking, the world saw Pong, came up with a phrase for "things like Pong", and then that phrase gradually stretched to include everything on this blog and much more. It's a bit strong to say that video games were conversely invented by accident, but it was a slow process of conceptual evolution that never really stopped. The progenitors of television knew their goal exactly and set out to make it happen. That's a tricky question, because here in 2022, we're still not totally sure what video games are. Both have murky, obscure, protracted technical origins in laboratories decades before being ready for consumers, and then they ascend to being a dominant - arguably the dominant - mass medium of their time. So even as it tries to excite the audience about the next thing, it's constantly repeating itself in ways both small and large. Both mediums are restlessly oriented towards the future, perhaps owing to their history of technological advance, and thus have a largely tenuous, fraught relationship with its own past, where nostalgia has had to balance against shame over how primitive, corny earlier works. This is in obvious compensation to the stench of disposable disrepute that dogs them. ![]() Artworks in both mediums often pointedly aspire to cinema, a tendency long-present but especially pronounced in the 21st century. A console is functionally an extra TV channel. They were born in the same wave of technological innovation. They're cursed and compromised mediums, and art within it has to come to terms with the attendant formal inertia. Television and video games are, to my mind, siblings.
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