CHAPTER ESSENTIALS

• In the 1880s, the seeds of the modern entertainment industry were planted in coin-operated contraptions. First appearing in train depots, hotel lobbies, bars, and restaurants, these leisure machines would find a permanent home in the penny arcade (pp. 293–294).
• The most prominent of mechanical machines, pinball, gained mainstream acceptance and popularity after World War II with the addition of the flipper bumper, an innovation that transformed it into a challenging game of skill, touch, and timing (p. 294).
• CRT screens provided the images for analog television as well as the displays for early computers, where the earliest video games first appeared. These games were developed as novelties by computer science students in the 1950s and 1960s. However, because computers were massive mainframes at the time, distributing the games was difficult (pp. 294–295).
• Magnavox released the Odyssey, the first home gaming system, in 1972. The same year, Noah Bushnell formed a video game development company called Atari. Atari's first creation was Pong, a simple two-dimensional tennis-style game with two vertical paddles bouncing a white dot back and forth. Pong quickly became the first big arcade video game (p. 295). In 1975, Atari began successfully marketing a home version of Pong through an exclusive deal with Sears, thus establishing the home video game market (pp. 295–296).

• By the late 1970s and early 1980s, games like Asteroids, Pac-Man, and Donkey Kong filled arcades and bars, competing with traditional pinball machines. After Pac-Man, the avatar became the most popular figure of player control in a video game. Though arcade gaming has been superseded by the console and computer, the industry still attracts fun-seekers to chains, malls, and casinos (pp. 296–297).
• Through decades of ups and downs in the electronic gaming industry, three major console makers emerged: Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft. Nintendo's Wii is now the best-selling of the three major console systems (pp. 299–300).
• With multiple players joining in electronic gaming through the Internet, gaming has become a contemporary social medium (pp. 301–304). The social dimension of gaming is especially apparent in online fantasy sports and massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). In fantasy sports leagues, real-life friends, virtual acquaintances, or a mixture of both, draft teams and use actual sports results to determine team standings. World of Warcraft, the most popular MMORPG, counts more than 11 million players around the globe (pp. 301, 304).
• Many players get to know one another without ever meeting in person. Most online games facilitate player interaction by enabling two types of groups: PUGs (short for "Pick-Up Groups") and guilds or clans (pp. 306–307).

• Sites that cater to communities of play fit into three categories. Some collect and share user-generated collective intelligence on gameplay. Others are independent and operate as community organizers for gamers. Still others are maintained by the industry and are primarily devoted to distributing promotional material provided by hardware manufacturers and game publishers (pp. 307–308).
• As gaming technology continues to develop, future experiences will likely be more immersive, portable, and inclusive. Games are still largely considered entertainment, but they are also being used in workforce training, military recruiting, classrooms, and as part of multimedia journalism (p. 308).
• In a 2007 poll, 8.5 percent of respondents between the ages of eight and eighteen could be classified as video game addicts. These findings are not entirely surprising, given that many electronic games are addictive by design. Just as habit formation is a primary goal of virtually every commercial form of electronic media, cultivating obsessive play is the aim of most game designs (p. 309).

• The primary source of revenue in the electronic gaming industry is the sale of games and the consoles on which they can be played. Although a higher percentage of households have computers, console games (which play on the usually larger screens of a television) and portable handheld games constitute 95 percent of the $10.5 billion video game market, while computer games are just about 5 percent of the market. The entire video game market, including portable and console hardware and accessories, adds up to $20.2 billion a year (pp. 309–310).
• Development, licensing, and marketing constitute the major expenditures in game publishing. The largest part of the development budget (the money spent designing, coding, scoring, and testing a game) goes to paying talent, digital artists, and game testers (pp. 311, 314).
• Independent gamemakers deal with two types of licensing. First, they must pay royalties to console manufacturers (Nintendo, Sony, or Microsoft) for the right to distribute a game that uses the manufacturers' systems. They also pay licenses for intellectual properties-stories, characters, personalities, and music used in their games (pp. 311, 314).
• The marketing costs of launching an electronic game often equal or exceed the development costs. The successful launch of a game involves online promotions, banner ads, magazine print ads, in-store displays, and the most expensive of all: television advertising (p. 314).

• In 1993, Senator Joe Lieberman conducted a hearing that proposed federal regulation of the gaming industry. In response to this threat, the industry founded the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) to institute a labeling system designed to inform parents of sexual and violent content that might not be suitable for younger players (pp. 314–315).
• Though most retail outlets voluntarily chose to observe the ESRB guidelines, the ratings did not have force of law until 2005, when California tried to make renting or selling an M-rated game to a minor an offense enforced by fines. The law was immediately challenged by the industry and struck down by a lower court as unconstitutional.California petitioned the Supreme Court to hear the case. In a landmark decision handed down in 2011, the Supreme Court granted electronic games First Amendment freedom of speech protections (p. 315).