Topic > Media Interaction: How Video Games Influenced Storytelling

From the early days of Pong on the Atari 2600 to today, playing games like Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice has come a long way. In the beginning, video games had a few simple dots and lines and the basic objective was to try to get the most points. Games these days are a little more complex, with full 3D renderings of complete worlds, deeply immersive storylines, and complex puzzles and objectives. As video game technology has evolved, the way we interact with media has also changed and grown. With the advent of the ability to interact and become part of the stories we consume, video games have changed the way stories are told. The first video game was invented by physicist William Higinbotham in October 1958. He wanted a way to capture the interest of guests during a day of visits to the laboratory where he worked during an open house. Using an oscilloscope with a small display and simple wiring, he created a very simple tennis game called Tennis for Two that featured two lines one for the ground and one for the side view of a tennis net with simple timing commands for hitting the tennis ball back. on the other side (Tretkoff). Not knowing what he had started, a few years later, he abandoned the project and moved on to other things. In the early 1970s, Pong was released on Atari and is generally recognized as the first commercially successful video game and started the home video game craze. From there the gaming industry slowly grew over the next few decades before exploding into one of the largest technology industries in the world. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay One of the first and most memorable examples of complex storytelling in video games was a game called Zork. Zork was created by a team of computer scientists at MIT as a fun programming exercise. It felt like an adventure novel where players started in a dark room and could enter simple logical commands to move their character and progress the story. In the early days of video games, it seemed like you could have both story and graphics. The processing power of early computers was so small that programs like Zork took up all available memory and left little room for anything else. So, in the early days of video games, you would have very simple graphics and little to no story like Jumpman, which later became Donkey Kong; Pac-Man; or Tetris or you would have text-based adventures that were just walls of text where you entered commands to move the story to another wall of text. Today the power of home gaming devices is staggering and only seems to get better as time goes on. Whether you're a PC gamer or choose a console, like PlayStation or Xbox, there are many different games to choose from. You will no longer have to choose between beautiful graphics or a detailed and complex story. In 2015 Supermassive Games released a game called Until Dawn, a game that uses character choices to change and influence how the game will end. Players take control of several teenagers as they try to survive a night of horror on a secluded mountain. You're forced to make quick life-or-death decisions for these teenagers and one wrong choice or one slow reaction and that could create a rippling butterfly effect that can cause one match to be completely different from the last. In an article written by Robin Burks in Tech Times, Dave Gilbert, the founder of Wadjet Eye Games, was quoted saying: "Video games achieve something that other.