It was discussed in class that people are typically more attracted by things familiar to them and pretty much everyone (including myself) agreed. However, if people really lean towards familiarity, how has the video game industry come this far? Most of today’s top games contain not only unfamiliar (to most) ideas, but also unrealistic ones. Casting spells, collecting magical artifacts, and killing monsters are just a few examples. One might say that the gaming industry has been incorporating these concepts into video games for a very long time, and that would be correct. But it had to start somewhere! The very first video game, Pong, had absolutely no violence or mystical creatures. Assuming that people prefer familiarity over exploration it would be very difficult to explain how video games have changed so drastically.
There is another reason it is hard for me to believe that people enjoy familiarity. Sure, spaceships may have been well known to the creators of the old-school space games, but not many of the American citizens were astronauts or had any knowledge about spaceships. Yet somehow, not long after its release, Computer Space became one of the most played arcade games. As BBAKER8 mentions in his post, the arcade game business was about eight billion dollars in 1982! Clearly, people were interested in something completely new, as opposed to sticking to their familiar ways of entertaining.
If we take one more step backwards in time, we can see that the discovering/invention of video games was itself an act of breaking away from what was familiar. Pong was first created on an oscilloscope, which was (and still is) only meant to display electronic signals. It took creativity and curiosity to turn this boring piece of equipment (as it’s usually thought of) into something fun. It took desire to find something unfamiliar.
To think about:
Was “Pong” invented or discovered?