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• Electronic Table Games Strategy
• Electronic Table Games Strategy

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(1) Introduction

Electronic games are interactive application software played for entertainment or educational purposes. Video games differ in design but can include vibrant color and sound, realistic movement, visual effects; some even employ human actors. There are two broad classes of electronic games: (1) video games, which are played on specially designed coin-operated arcade machine, handheld devices, or video-game systems that are plugged to television screens; and (2) computer games, which are played on personal computers.

Electronic games are a popular pastime for both children and adults. Categories include strategy games, sports games, adventure games, card and board games, puzzle games, fast-action arcade games, and flying simulations. Software programs that employ game-play elements to teach reading, writing, problem solving, and other basic skills combine fun with education and are sometimes called edutainment.

Video and computer games grew in popularity in the late 20th century, as the power of computers increased. Since their invention in the late 1950s and 1960s, electronic games have become a multibillion-dollar industry that uses the latest computer technology to produce ever-more realistic games. Electronic game sales were estimated at $9.4 billion in the United States in 2005. In the same year, several studies showed that the majority of video-game players were aged 18 or older.

(2) Early Efforts

In 1958, Willy Higginbotham, an engineer at the Brookhaven National Laboratory (the USA), used an oscilloscope (an instrument for visually representing electrical current) to create what is considered the first electronic game. In this game – which he called Tennis for Two – players used knobs to control rectangular paddles as they batted a ball back and forth over a vertical line representing a net. Higginbotham never attempted to market or patent his game.

Steven Russell, a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, created the first computer game – Spacewar! – in 1962. In Spacewar! two players dueled using tiny spaceships that flew around a screen representing accurate star maps. Like Higginbotham, Russell did not patent or market his game. He used it for testing computers during installations.

While attending the University of Utah in the mid-1960s, an engineering student named Nolan Bushnell got to know about Spacewar! In 1968, Bushnell moved to Silicon Valley and experimented with reproducing Russell’s game without using a computer, which at the time were too large and expensive for a commercial game. Eventually, he created a version of Spacewar! for using in arcade machine. He persuaded a company called Nutting Associates to manufacture the game, and in 1971, the company began marketing the first video arcade game: Computer Space.

(3) Video Games

In mid-1972, Nolan Bushnell founded Atari Corporation. His first product was a game called Ping-Pong. Pong became the first commercially successful¹ video game. But the Pong fad² only lasted a couple of years because people were tired of playing a game that was predictable and that they learned so easily. Then in 1979 came Space Invaders, an electronic game manufactured by the Taito Corporation in Japan. Space Invaders quickly became a hit.

Space Invaders was not alone in the arcades for very long. It was followed by another Japanese game: Pac Man. In this game, players guided a ravenous yellow circle through a maze, while it ate dots and avoided monsters. Namco, the Japanese company that created Pac-Man, sold more than 300,000 of the game machines worldwide, making it the most popular arcade game of all time. Then there appeared Defender, Centipede, Scramble, Donkey Kong, Star Castle, Asteroids, Missile Command, and an ever-increasing variety of electronic versions of sports and card games.

Many of the arcade games also became available for play at home. Some were played on home computers; others used the television screen as a monitor; some were self-contained, hand-held, battery-powered, or table-model games. Pong, manufactured by Atari, was available early as an arcade game and for home television.

The coin-operated video game business boomed. In 1981, Americans spent 75,000 person-years and $5 billion, playing video games at an estimated 4,300 arcades in the USA.

In 1982, Walt Disney studios released a movie entitled Tron. In it, a video game fanatic is taken into the microchip and circuitry world of the game itself. The film is symbolic of the millions of people who became addicted to³ playing electronic games. The fad with the games was so great that children skipped school and adult workers took long lunch hours in order to pass as much time as possible with Pac Man, Asteroids, and other games. This obsession, of course, led to a reaction. Schools demanded that arcades be moved away from their vicinity, or they refused to allow students outside during lunch hours. Some towns closed the arcades or limited their number. In the Philippines, the reaction was so strong that President Ferdinand Marcos decreed in 1981 that all machines be destroyed.

By the end of 1983, however, interest in video games had dried up⁴. About 2,000 game parlors in the USA had closed, and many had cut the cost of playing the machines.

Notes: ¹to be commercially successful – пользоваться большим спросом;

²fad – увлечение;

³become addicted to – стали заядлыми любителями;

⁴to dry up – проходить.

(4) Nintendo And Competitors

The industry continued to decline until the late 1980s. A Japanese company called Nintendo revived interest in¹ electronic games in 1985 when it introduced its Nintendo Entertainment System in the USA. A sophisticated machine able to run more interesting graphics; the availability of more than 100 games (such as Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda); and more powerful computer chips allowing for faster game play all make Nintendo popular. More than 30 million NES machines were sold in the USA and more than 90 million worldwide.

Realizing that game hardware soon becomes obsolete, Nintendo pioneered the practice of releasing new consoles every five to six years. The NES, for example, was followed by the Super NES and then by the Nintendo 64. Nintendo further expanded the video-game market in 1989 by launching its Game Boy handheld system. Nintendo sold 120 million Game Boys from 1989 to 2001.

Nintendo faced serious rivals for the home market, however. In the late 1980s, the Japanese company Sega introduced a popular system known as Genesis. In 1995, Japanese electronics giant Sony Corporation launched its PlayStation line of game consoles. Sony dominated the console market after 1995, selling more than 90 million PlayStations worldwide by 2002. In 2001, Nintendo released the GameCube platform and software giant Microsoft Corporation entered the market with Xbox. These systems featured a variety of advanced capabilities such as a hard drive for saving games and the ability to connect to the Internet or LANs. Such connections enabled players to download more advanced levels of play and additional characters, and to play with other users. Some systems even sell additional equipment so online players can speak to each other and verbally help other players during play. The three major console manufacturers used such technological advances to try to gain market share in this fast-paced, lucrative business.

Notes: ¹to revive interest (in) – возрождать интерес (к).

(5) Computer Games

While video-game systems are used only for games, gaming is only one of the many uses for computers. In computer games, players can use a keyboard to type in commands, a mouse to move a cursor around the screen, or both. Many computer games also allow the use of a joystick or game controller.

In 1972, Gregory Yob of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst created the first text-based computer game, called Hunt the Wumpus. In this game, players followed a narrative containing clues about the location of a creature in a series of caverns. Using clues in the text, the players’ purpose was to locate the beast and shoot it.

In 1975, a programmer named Will Crowther created Adventure (also known as Advent and Colossal Cave). In this game, players used one- and two-word commands to respond to situations in a story. For example, in a room with a treasure chest and a staircase, a player might type “open chest”, then “down stairs”. Wrong answers often resulted in an interactive death.

During the 1970s and into the early 1980s, text-based adventure games such as this – another popular one was called Zork – dominated the field of computer games.

After playing Adventure on her husband’s computer, Roberta Williams persuaded her husband, Ken, to help her make games. Wanting to go beyond text-based technology, Roberta created simple illustrations that Ken encoded into the game. Their game, Mystery House, released in 1980, was the first computer adventure game to combine text and graphics.

(6) Advantages of Computer Games

Computers brought new capabilities to electronic games. Because computers could store data, they were a good platform for lengthy adventure and role-playing games. Players could store their progress and continue the games later. With consoles such as the Atari 2600, players could only start games from the beginning. This situation changed slightly in the mid-1980s, when Nintendo built a battery-backed chip into The Legend of Zelda that allowed players to record their progress.

Computer systems such as the Commodore Amiga and Apple Macintosh brought other advantages to gaming. These machines used mouse controllers, devices that gave players fast and highly precise control. As technology progressed, computer monitors offered higher resolution than television screens, giving computer games a crisper image¹. This improved resolution made computers ideal for running strategy games such as SimCity and Civilization, which featured highly detailed graphics.

Although some computer-game publishers dropped out of the business, others – such as Broderbund and Sierra On-Line – gained reputation. Electronic Arts, which was founded in 1982, became one of the biggest names in the computer industry. The company’s success was fueled by aggressively recruiting² top game designers away from competitors and by packaging its games in attractive boxes.

In 1984, Electronic Arts paid professional basketball stars Julius Erving and Larry Bird $25,000 each to use their names and likenesses in a game called Dr. J and Larry Bird Go One-on-One. The game was an instant success, leading Electronic Arts to conclude a similar contract with National Football League announcer and former coach John Madden to create a football simulation game for the Apple II computer in 1989.

For many years, the progress of electronic games was hampered by computer compatibility problems. IBM, Compaq, Packard Bell, and several other companies all manufactured different PC machines, seldom using standardized components. As a result, games that ran on one type of PC might not run on PCs made by other manufacturers.

Singaporean entrepreneur Sim Wong Hoo began to solve this problem in 1989 when he introduced a PC sound card called the Sound Blaster³. This device became the standard for PC sound. Future sound cards needed to be “Sound Blaster-compatible”, meaning they needed to use the same software (often called drivers). A standardized sound device enabled PCs to run games with music and voice files that sounded as good or better than the audio in console games.

Notes: ¹crisp image – чёткое изображение;

²The company's success was fueled by aggressively recruiting… – Успеху компании в немалой степени способствовало активное переманивание…;

³sound blaster – звукогенератор, проф. саунд-бластер.

(7) Popular Computer Games

In 1993, Id Software created Doom, one of the most significant computer games of all time. Doom allowed players to see the game through the eyes of the character¹ they controlled. The game popularized online multiplayer gaming (playing with or against other people through LANs or the Internet).

In the early 1990s, a drop in the price of CD-ROM technology led to a wave of multimedia games (games that combine audio, video, animation, photographs, or other media). Compact discs (CDs) can store from 650 to 700 megabytes of data, more than 400 times than standard floppy disks can. With this storage capacity, designers could add voice files, digitized video of live actors, and other assets²to their games. Companies such as Digital Pictures, Access Software, and Viacom published interactive movies, or games that combined digitized footage³ of real actors and virtual characters.

In 1993, Broderbund published a game called Myst for Macintosh computers, and Virgin Interactive Entertainment published a game called The 7th Guest for the IBM PC. In both games, the player explores a rich virtual world, trying to solve puzzles. Millions of copies of these games were sold, popularizing multimedia technology and attracting large new audiences to computer gaming.

In 1995, Microsoft launched Windows 95. This operating system (with built-in driver software for sound cards, graphics cards, joysticks, and other controllers) greatly simplified the use of PCs as a gaming platform.

Notes: ¹character – зд: герой, действующее лицо;

²asset – ресурс, цифровой объект (изображение, текст, аудио- или видеоклип);

³footage – отснятый [фото/видео] материал.

UNIT SIX HISTORY OF COMPUTERS

Ex. 1. Practice the reading of the following words and phrases:

Electronic Table Games Strategy

idea, conception, mathematician, special, photograph, original, automatically, programmable, conception, navigation, to automate, energy, project, grandiose, analogous, to invest, potentiality;

business machine, Industrial Revolution, mechanical technology, mathematical table, logarithm table, locomotive-sized machine.

Ex. 2. Revise the following words from your school active vocabulary:

Electronic Table Games Strategy

to repeat, to return, to believe; answer, government, difficulty, century; important, easy, famous, possible, during, actually, however, among, since.