How technology advances have made digital gaming accessible to all
Back in the 1970s, Atari released a home version of their original arcade game Pong.
10:49 26 February 2016
Those of us old enough to remember Pong, which helped to establish the entire video game industry, will recall an extremely simple yet highly addictive game. In some ways, things have gone full circle, with ‘casual’ browser and mobile games bringing in a completely new gaming audience. In others though, the technology is almost unrecognisable from those early beginnings. From a simple moving line representing a table tennis racket we now have 3D graphics, go-anywhere ‘sandbox’ gameplay, massively multiplayer online games that can be played simultaneously by thousands of people around the world and even augmented reality that can allow you to bring the gaming experience into your own real environment.
The gaming market is also now more diverse than ever before. Today’s kids are growing up with parents who play digital games themselves and the clichéd view of the adolescent male teen as the typical gamer is becoming increasingly outdated. A Pew Research Center study looking at gamers in the US found that almost half (49%) of all American adults played games on a computer, TV, game console, or on a portable device like a mobile phone. 60% of American adults believed that the majority of gamers were male but the data suggests they are only partly correct. Almost the same proportion of males and females played games (50% of men versus 48% of women) but men were more likely to describe themselves as ‘gamers’.
There are some aspects of gaming technology that have helped make digital more accessible to all. The introduction of motion sensing capabilities, as popularised by the Nintendo Wii and the later Kinect system for Xbox 360 and Xbox One, led to a range of fun family-friendly games, from bowling to dance-offs. The rise of online casinos has brought another type of gamer into the mix while mobile technology has brought a wide range of games to the devices that are now commonplace in most households. It’s an oft-quoted fact that the smartphone in your pocket has far more computational power than the NASA computers that helped take man to the moon. They’re also far more sophisticated than early dedicated gaming consoles and platforms like Pong. Whether sticking to simple classics like Tetris or plunging into a vast online MMORPG, smartphones and tablets make gaming more accessible than ever.
Other advances in technology tend to be more of interest to those people who do identify themselves as gamers. Virtual reality has fallen in and out of favour as the reality of VR failed to live up the promised vision but the Oculus Rift system looks like bringing the concept back into the crosshairs. Sony, meanwhile, is developing a cross-play feature that will allow gamers to move from a device like the handheld Sony PSP and continue where they left off on another device like the PS4.
Other innovations will also no doubt continue to come to the fore, helping to blur the lines between hard-core and casual gamers and making the digital gaming world more accessible than ever before.