Bigger than film and music put together
Games now take more money worldwide than the film and music industries combined, and the audience is not the one people picture. The average PLAYER is somewhere in their thirties, and getting on for half of all players are women.
Something like three billion people play something, most of them on a phone during a commute or a lunch break. The teenage boy in a darkened bedroom is a small minority of the people currently holding a CONTROLLER.
The first ones were built by bored scientists
Before any of this was an industry, it was a way of showing off laboratory equipment. In 1958 a physicist at an American nuclear research site wired up an oscilloscope so that visitors on open day could play tennis against each other with two dials and a small green dot. Queues formed around it, and nobody thought to patent anything.
Four years later, students at an American university built Spacewar on a computer the size of a wardrobe: two ships, a star with real gravity in the middle, and a great deal of time that should have been spent on coursework. It spread to every machine of its type in the country, becoming the first game lots of people played without ever paying for it.
The language escaped the arcade
Gaming vocabulary has leaked steadily into ordinary speech. People talk about reaching a CHECKPOINT in a project, needing a POWERUP, levelling up at work, or a task that turns out to have a final BOSS.
Some of it came from the ARCADE, where a HIGHSCORE was public and your initials stayed on the machine for strangers to beat. Other words are newer — to RESPAWN, to grind, to collect LOOT — and all of them now describe things people do daily in software that is not a game at all.
Real science, solved by gamers
In 2011 researchers who had spent years failing to work out the shape of a protein from a monkey virus that had defeated them for years handed the problem to the public. They wrapped it in a game called Foldit, where players twist and fold shapes and score points for elegance, and the players cracked it in about ten days.
Behind it is a neat division of labour. People are excellent at spatial puzzles and hopeless at patience; computers are precisely the other way round. Several research projects have since been built as games, and MULTIPLAYER puzzle-solving has turned into a genuine scientific tool.
Made by a thousand people, or by one
A large game today takes hundreds of people five years and a budget to rival a blockbuster film. Yet several of the best-loved games of the past decade were built by one or two people in a spare room — a farming game made alone over four and a half years, a puzzle game written by a pair of friends.
The sub-topics here cover both ends of that range, from franchises with forty years of history to games that appeared from nowhere. What all of them share is the thing that separates the medium from books and films: nothing happens at all until the PLAYER decides to do something.