Gaming in Higher Education

by Jason Ford

Historical Background 

It is interesting to note that the history of video games begins over 55 years ago, in the university setting. As early as 1952, A. S. Douglas, a doctoral student at Cambridge University, invented Noughts and Crosses, a tic-tac-toe game that ran on the University's Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator. Six years later at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, William Higobotham would create Table Tennis, an interactive ping-pong game viewed on an oscilloscope. And of course, much credit is owed to Steven Russell of MIT for his ever popular game, Spacewar, that spread like wildfire to other universities across the United States. In fact, it was Russell's game of Spacewar that would inspire a University of Utah engineering student to later create a coin operated version of the game called Computer Space. The student's name was Nolan Bushnell, future creator of Atari (History of Gaming).

College students, adults, teenagers, and families embraced the new industry as consoles and games flooded the market. It was a market for all ages and from 1978 - 1981 video games enjoyed their time in the spotlight (Herman, L., Horwitz, J., Kent, S., & Miller, S., 2002).

However, in 1982-1983, controversy of $250,000 worth of sold Atari stock and over-saturated market of third party publishers producing less than exciting games leads to many game companies going out of business and an audience that is burned out. The spotlight enjoyed from 1978-1981 seemed to not only have burned out by the early to mid 80s (Herman, et al., 2002).

The late 1980s and early 90s saw a revival in video games with the release of Nintendo's NES system . Atari and other companies begin to develop games that will play on the NES. With the release of Nintendo's Game Boy in 1989 and the inclusion of the popular Russian puzzle game, Tetris, the Game Boy ushers in "historic sales" and opens the door for portable gaming devices (Herman, et al., 2002).

With much of the American video game market owned by Nintendo, Sega takes a bite out of it in 1989 with the release of it's Sega Genesis. It continues to be a major competitor for Nintendo until 1995 and 1996 when it loses much ground to Sony's Playstation. In 1996 Sony's Playstation will replace Nintendo as the "number-one next-generation gaming console" in America, leading to many years ahead of fierce marketing and competition between the two companies (Herman, et al., 2002).

1998 saw record sales for the home console video game industry leading the Interactive Digital Software Association to claim 1998 as the "banner year for the electronic entertainment industry." The rise of video games for the home, however, leads to a decline in the arcade industry (Herman, et al., 2002).

Continuing with its domination of the video game industry, Sony releases the Playstation 2 in 2000, capable of playing both CDs and DVDs. Over the next year it would sell 10 million consoles. To counter the Playstation 2, Nintendo simultaneously release the hand-held 32 bit color Game Boy Advance capable of wireless connectivity and its GameCube in 2001 (Herman, et al., 2002).

Having watched the success of the Sony Playstation and Nintendo's gaming consoles, Microsoft enters the playing field in 2001 with its own gaming console, the XBox. It was the first to support an internal hard disk and support HDTV (Herman, et al., 2002).

2001 also saw a shift in the American family's past time as the Interactive Digital Software Association releases a survey indicating "the average family spends 10 to 11 hours per week playing console or computer games, with 34 percent of respondents calling games, 'the most fun entertainment activity,' as compared with 16 percent for television" (Herman, et al., 2002).

The next five years would see unprecedented growth in both the console and pc gaming market. According to the ESA, sales reached 7.6 billion dollars in 2006. Gaming is proving to be a big contender for both Hollywood and TV for the attention of the American public. With the new interactivity promised by both the Nintendo Wii and Playstation 3, more and more of the population are opting out of just being viewers of stories to becoming participators in games with the chance to create their own experiences, their own stories.  

Relevance to education

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Glossary of Terms

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Start-up Costs

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Key-players, gurus, experts

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Sample Lesson Plans

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Tutorial

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Sources 

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