Book Review: A Brief History of Video Games, by Richard Stanton

April 17, 2017 10:45 PM
  • David G. Schwartz
April 17, 2017 10:45 PM
  • David G. Schwartz

Video games are all the range at casino conferences these days, because of the pressing need to attract millennials. But video games are more than an answer to a current casino crisis: they are an art form of their own, with decades of history. For both aspects, Richard Stanton’s A Brief History of Video Games is a book that casino professionals should check out.

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Video games are impacting casino floors in two ways: as “skill games” that are being approved in an increasing number of jurisdictions, and as eSports, which are competitions among those playing video games. Those two are very different, yet share common links to classic video games.

It’s important to note, as Stanton catalogs, that people began exploring how to play games on computers almost as soon as computers were developed. Computing pioneer Alan Turing worked on a chess-playing computer program as early as 1947, but was thwarted by lack of computing power in the computers of his time. Another early computer scientist, Christopher Strachey, created a computer program that could play checkers, a much simpler game, in 1951. The first game that didn’t simulate a board game, but instead created something new, was William Hinginbotham’s Tennis for Two, designed in 1958.

In 1971, video games took a major step forward with the debut of the Magnavox Odyssey, the first home video game console. Priced at a relatively high $100, with the purchase of many accessories required to get full functionality, the Odyssey sold reasonably well, though its pricing kept home consoles from catching on more broadly. Around the same time, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney developed Computer Space, a standalone video game housed in a fiberglass cabinet. That game could be placed in bars, pizza joints, and other locations which had pinball machines and similar amusements. Then Bushnell, Dabney, and Al Alcorn, working as the startup Atari, developed Pong, a game that revolutionized the entertainment business. Stanton chronicles how, by the 1980s, Atari and other manufacturers had developed enough games to fill entire video arcades.

Casino people will find the sections of Stanton’s book dealing with arcade-style games of interest because these games developed alongside slot machines. Indeed, it isn’t an accident that slot machines achieved ascendancy in the casino world in the same years that video games started muscling aside pinball machines—the same technological breakthroughs helped both. It may also be true that the larger social trends that helped slot machines achieve dominance helped video games as well. In any case, knowing more about the development of this parallel entertainment can benefit casino professionals as they make hard decisions about what is placed on their slot floors.

Americans who grew up in video game arcades are now well into the years when casino-visiting becomes common. As older players “age out”, this group will come to dominate the casino-visiting demographic. Slot machines will by necessity borrow more from video games, whether by now-retro styling or actual game play. Manufacturers have already rolled out games drawing on arcade classics for their themes; expect to see this continue as the arcade exerts a stronger influence on the slot floor. Much like TV-themed games like Wheel of Fortune changed the nature of slots in the 1990s, video games may be an overriding influence on slot machines in the coming years.

Skill games, which have debuted in Atlantic City and Las Vegas casinos, are another version of video games as gambling. They draw less on arcade classics than on social games of a more recent vintage. While Stanton doesn’t focus on these games, his book does give perspective on them in a brief chapter on “mobile gaming.”

And then there are eSports, which have their roots not so much in the arcade as in home gaming, which made great strides in the 1980s thanks to Atari and other companies. Casino people will find Stanton’s consideration of the “console wars” between companies like Sega, Nintendo, and Microsoft of particular interest because it shows how smart people made decisions that worked in some cases but didn’t in others. It is also a good reminder of how amenable to disruption video games are: companies that were pioneers in the 1980s struggled to keep up in the 1990s, and any dominance —whether in the home or arcade markets—was often fleeting. Despite the higher barriers to entry, the casino market is no different. That games played on consoles (or, much more commonly, high-end personal computers) are now the subject of major tournaments throughout the world is no surprise, if one understands the games’ history.

Stanton is at his best not when talking about the business of video games (which I have focused on here), but about the games themselves. He does a good job of capturing just what makes very successful games special, identifying not just the plot but also the poetry, as it is, of the best titles. His writing gives a hint as to why games can be so immersive and so entertaining; that, if nothing else, shows how difficult it will be for casinos themselves to develop a competing product in the coming years.

Overall, this is a recommended read for those wondering about both the past and future of video games and casinos.

 

A Brief History of Video Games: The Evolution of a Global Industry. London: Robinson, 2015. 368 pages with index, photos.