15

Video Games

Brant Guillory, M.M.C.*

*Senior Consultant at Harnessed Electrons, and Editor-in-Chief of GrogNews.com, Raleigh, North Carolina

Video gaming is a multibillion dollar industry whose cultural penetration far belies its roots in entertaining mental exercises for overeager engineers. Video games include a variety of hardware and software, as well as multiple delivery and distribution models. Gamer culture has served as the subtext for successful media franchises, such as CBS’s The Big Bang Theory and Disney’s Level Up. Major video game conferences and events, such as E3 and PAX (Penny Arcade Expo) pull in tens of thousands of attendees.

In monetary terms, video games are easily competitive with the largest media. The opening day sales of Call of Duty: Black Ops III exceeded $550 million worldwide, easily exceeding the largest-ever weekend movie gross through 2016 (Star Wars: The Force Awakens) (Call of Duty, 2015; Box Office Mojo, 2016).

Additionally, video game franchises are themselves becoming hot media properties, with such series as Resident Evil, Bioshock, Fallout, HALO, and Mass Effect spawning multiple sequels, websites, videos, downloadable games, and physical content ranging from action figures to comic books to coffee mugs.

“Video games” as a catch-all term includes games with a visual (and usually audio) stimulus, played through a digitally-mediated system. Video games are available as software for other digital systems (home computers, mobile phones, tablets), standalone systems (arcade cabinets), or software for gaming-specific systems (platforms). There have also been forays into games delivered through set-top boxes and digital integration with offline games.

A video game system will have some form of display, a microprocessor, the game software, and some form of input device. The microprocessor may be shared with other functions in the device. Input devices have also evolved in sophistication from simple one-button joysticks or keyboards to replicas of aircraft cockpits and race cars. Recent controllers have integrated haptic feedback (enabling users to “feel” aspects of a game), as well as accelerometers that detect the movements of the controllers themselves. Finally, systems like Microsoft’s Kinect enable games to be played using three-dimensional detection of the actions taken by a player’s body. These systems include cameras used as input devices into the video game system.

Video gaming has advanced hand-in-hand with the increases in computing power over the past 50 years. Some might even argue that video games have pushed the boundaries of computer processors in their quest for ever-sharper graphics and increased speed in gameplay. From their early creation on large mainframe computers, video games evolved through a variety of platforms, including standalone arcade-style machines, personal computers, and dedicated home gaming platforms.

As media properties, video games have shared characters, settings, and worlds with movies, novels, comic books, non-digital games, and television shows. In addition to a standalone form of entertainment, video games are often an expected facet of a marketing campaign for new major movie releases. Media licensing has become a two-way street, with video game characters and stories branching out into books and movies as well. As video gaming has spread throughout the world, the culture of video gaming has spawned over two dozen magazines and countless Web sites, as well as industry conventions, professional competitions, and a cottage industry in online “farming” of in-game items in massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs).

Although some observers have divided the history of video games into seven, ten, or even 12 different phases, many of these can be collapsed into just a few broader eras, as illustrated in Figure 15.1, each containing a variety of significant milestones. Most histories of video games focus on the hardware requirements for the games, which frequently drove where and how the games were played. However, it is equally possible to divide the history of games by the advances in software (and changes in the style of gameplay), the diffusion of games among the population (and the changes in the playing audience), or the increases in economic power wielded by video games, measured by the other industries overtaken through the years. Regardless of the chosen path, as the history of video games developed, however, it became increasingly fragmented into specialty niches.

Most industry observers describe the current generation of home gaming consoles as the seventh generation since the release of the first-generation Magnavox Odyssey. Handheld consoles are often said to be on their fourth generation. No one has yet attempted to assign “generations” to computer gaming software, in large part because console “generations” are hardwarebased and released in specific waves, while computer hardware is continually evolving, and major computer milestones are the releases of new operating systems (Windows Vista, Mac OS X, etc.).

The early years of video gaming were marked by small hobby programs, many developed on large university and corporate mainframes. Willy Higinbotham, a nuclear physicist with the Department of Energy, had experimented with a simple tennis game for which he had developed a rudimentary analog computer (Anderson, 1983). A team of designers under Ralph Baer developed a variety of video game projects for the Department of Defense in the mid-1960s, eventually resulting in a hockey game, which started an ongoing tradition of leaving military sponsors underwhelmed (Hart, 1996). Baer also led another team that developed Chase, the first video game credited with the ability to display on a standard television set. In the early 1960s, SpaceWar was also popular among the graduate students at MIT and inspired other work at the Pentagon. Although many different treatises have been written arguing over the invention of the video game, it is still unclear how much, if at all, any of the early video game pioneers even knew of each other’s work; it is completely unknown if they drew any inspiration from each other.

In the early 1970s, dedicated gaming consoles began to appear, starting with the Magnavox Odyssey in 1972. Built on switches, rather than a microprocessor, the Odyssey included a variety of “analog” components to be used in playing the video portions of the game, such as dice, play money, and plastic overlays for a common touchpad. The first home video game product built on a microprocessor was a home version of the popular coin-operated Pong game from Nolan Bushnell’s Atari. Although it contained only the titular game hard-coded into the set, it would be a popular product until the introduction of a console that could play multiple games by swapping out software (Hart, 1996).

The second generation of video gaming began around 1977 with the rise of consoles. This generation was marked by the integration of home video gaming with other media licenses, whether tie-ins with popular movies such as E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial and Raiders of the Lost Ark, or adaptations of popular arcade games, such as Pac-Man, Defender, or Missile Command. The Atari 2600 led the market for home video game sales, in which consumers would purchase a standard console and insert cartridges to play different games. While Colecovision and Intellivision (two other consoles) were popular in the market, nothing could compare with the market power wielded by Atari (which was eventually purchased by Warner Communications) from 1977 to 1982, during which an estimated $4 billion of Atari products were sold (Kent, 2001). Atari’s success also led to the formation of Activision, a software company founded by disgruntled Atari game programmers. Activision became the first major game studio that designed their games exclusively for other companies’ consoles, thus separating the games and consoles for the first time. Business deals in the early 1980s also began to evolve that tied certain media licenses to specific platforms, establishing several precedents in exclusivity among game “families” and the console systems.

Figure 15.1

Video Game Chronology

Source: Guillory and Technology Futures, Inc. (2016)

After a brief downturn in the market from 1981 to 1984, mostly as a result of business blunders by Atari, home video game consoles began a resurgence. Triggered by the launch of the Sega Master System in the mid-1980s and the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) shortly thereafter, home video game sales continued to climb for both the games and the hardware needed to play them. The inclusion of 8-bit processors closed the gap between the performance of large standalone arcade machines and the smaller home consoles with multiple games and signaled the start of the decline of the video game arcade as a game-playing destination and focal point for the videogame subculture of teenagers in the US. By 1987, the NES was the best-selling toy in the United States (Smith, 1999). The NES also continued the platform-specific media tie-ins with their repeated use of the character “Mario”—first made popular in the Donkey Kong arcade game—and leveraged that character into a burgeoning empire that today spans over 50 titles. Nintendo’s characters also crossed over between NES and traditional arcade games made by the company.

During this time, video games also began to appear in popular culture not as mere accessories to the characters, but as central plots around which the stories were built. Tron (1982), War Games (1983), and The Last Starfighter (1984) all brought video gaming into a central role in their respective movie plots.

Computer games were also developing alongside video game consoles. Catering to a smaller market, computer games were seen as an add-on to hardware already in the home, rather than the primary reason for purchasing a home computer system. However, the ability to write programs for home computers enabled consumers to also become game designers and share their creations with other computer users. Thus, a generation of schoolkids grew up learning to program games on Commodore PET, Atari 800, and Apple II home computers.

The commercial success of the Commodore 64 in the mid-1980s gave game publishers a color system for their games, and the Apple Macintosh’s point-and-click interface allowed designers to incorporate the standard system hardware into their game designs, without requiring add-on joysticks or other special controllers. Where console games were almost exclusively graphics-oriented, early computer games included a significant number of text-based adventure games, such as Zork and Bard’s Tale, and a large number of military-themed board games converted for play on the computer by companies such as SSI (Falk, 2004). In 1988, the first of several TSR-licensed games for Dungeons & Dragons appeared, and SSI’s profile continued to grow. Other prominent early computer game publishers included Sierra, Broderbund, and Infocom. Still, home computer game sales continued to lag behind console game sales, in large part because of the comparatively high cost and limited penetration of the hardware. Additionally, video games were still seen as an “add-on” to a primary media channel (television, computer, etc.) and had not yet developed their own market channel through which to distribute titles. Thus computer games tended to be sold where other computer software was sold, and consoles (and their supporting games) were typically found in home electronics stores, alongside television sets.

With video games ensconced in U.S. and Japanese households and expanding worldwide, it was only a matter of time before portable consoles began to rival the home siblings in quality and sophistication, and thus began the third phase in the history of video games.

Portable video games proliferated in the consumer marketplace beginning in the early 1980s. However, early handhelds were characterized by very rudimentary graphics used for one game in each handheld. In fact, “rudimentary” may even be generous in describing the graphics—the early Mattel handheld Electronic Football game starred several small red “blips” on a one-inch-by-three-inch screen in which the game player’s avatar on the screen was distinguished only by the brightness of the blip.

Atari released the Lynx handheld game system in 1987. Despite its color graphics and relatively highspeed processor, tepid support from Atari and third-party developers resulted in its eventual demise. In 1989, Nintendo released Game Boy, a portable system whose controls mimicked the NES. With its low cost and stable of well-known titles ported from the main NES, the Game Boy became a major force in video game sales (Stahl, 2003). Although technically inferior to the Lynx—black-and-white graphics, dull display, and a slower processor—the vast number of Nintendo titles for the Game Boy provided a major leg up on other handheld systems, as audiences were already familiar and comfortable with Nintendo as a game company. Sega’s Gamegear followed within a year. Like the Lynx before it, superior graphics were not enough to overcome Nintendo’s catalog of software titles or the head start in the market the Game Boy already had. By the mid-1990s, most families that owned a home game console also owned a handheld, often from the same company.

Although the portable revolution had not (yet) migrated to computer gaming, it was hardware limitations, rather than game design, that prevented the integration of computer games into portable systems. The release of the Palm series of handheld computers (Hormby, 2007) gave game designers a new platform on which they could develop that was not tied to any particular company. This early step toward handheld computing would include early steps toward handheld computer gaming.

The third and fourth generations of video game history begin to overlap as the console wars included the handheld products of various console manufacturers, coinciding with the release of Windows 95 for Intel-powered PC computers, which gave game designers a variety of stable platforms on which to program their games. The console wars of the late 1990s have continued to today, with independent game design studios developing their products across a variety of platforms.

As Nintendo began to force Sega out of the console market in the mid-1990s, another consumer electronics giant, Sony, was preparing to enter the market. With the launch of the PlayStation in 1995, Sony plunged into the video game platform market. Nintendo maintained a close hold on the titles it would approve for development on its system, attempting to position itself primarily as a “family” entertainment system. Sony developers, however, had the ability to pursue more mature content, and their stable of titles included several whose graphics, stories, and themes were clearly intended for the 30-year-old adults who began playing video games in 1980, rather than 13-year-old kids (Stahl, 2003). Sony and Nintendo (and to a lesser extent, Sega) continued their game of one-upmanship with their improvements in hardware over the next several years.

As the graphical processing power of consoles increased, and games gained greater notoriety in the press as they pushed the edges of storytelling and explicit graphics, the Interactive Digital Software Association finally caved to public pressure and instituted a rating system for games, which sought to better inform consumers about the target ages for games, as well as the reasons for the ratings. The ISDA became the ESA in 2004 (ESRB, 2009), and the ratings for video games have become a standard feature of every game, both console and computer. More granular than movie ratings, video games ratings break down into more than a half-dozen age categories and more than twenty content descriptors. Controversies have (predictably) ensued; unlike movies, video games can easily incorporate alternate, hidden, or add-on content which might alter their ratings. Among the most famous ratings controversies was the “Hot Coffee” content in Grand Theft Auto, in which downloaded patches opened up sexually explicit and violent content (BBC, 2005).

By early 2001, Sega admitted defeat in the hardware arena and focused instead on software. The next salvo in the platform wars was about to be launched by Microsoft, which debuted the Xbox in late 2001. With built-in networking and a large hard drive, Microsoft’s Xbox began to blur the lines between computer video gaming and platform-based video gaming. Additionally, building their console on an Intel processor eased the transition for games from PC to Xbox, and many popular computer titles were easily moved onto the Xbox. Around the same time, Sony entered the handheld arena to challenge Nintendo’s Game Boy dominance with the PSP: PlayStation Portable. Capable of playing games as well as watching movies and (with an adapter) having online access, the PSP was intended to show the limitations of the Game Boy series with its greater number of features. Although the platform wars continue today, every one of them supports networked gaming with highspeed data access, online accounts and multiplayer gaming and chat, and downloadable content to onboard hard drives.

With high-speed data networks proliferating throughout North America, Japan, Korea, Western Europe, and (to a lesser extent) China and Southeast Asia, online gameplay has become a major attraction to many video gamers, especially through massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). These pervasive worlds host shared versions of a variety of different games, including sports, military, and sci-fi and fantasy games. MMORPGs are most commonly accessed through computer platforms rather than game consoles. Since its launch in 2004, World of Warcraft has grown to exceed 10 million simultaneous subscribers at any one time, though their rate of subscriber turnover continues to be high. MMORPGs have highly-developed in-game economies, and those economies have begun to spill over into the “real world” where websites and online classified listings offer game-world items, money, and characters for sale to players seeking an edge in the game but are reluctant to sacrifice the time to earn the rewards themselves. Fans’ reactions have not been universally positive to these developments, and some have started petitions to ban such behavior from the games (Burstein, 2008). MMORPGs were among the first widespread systems that allowed a distributed user base to share a single game, rather than forcing a physical co-location on the participants to play together.

Wireless networking has also extended the ability to participate in online-based games to handhelds, both dedicated to gaming (Nintendo DS) and consumer-oriented (tablets and cell phones). Moreover, many software-specific companies have designed their online game servers such that the players’ platforms are irrelevant, and thus gamers playing on an Xbox might compete against other gamers online who are using PCs.

The 2006 release of Nintendo’s Wii game console drew a new audience by attracting large numbers of older users to the motion-based games enabled by the Wii’s motion-sensitive remote. Not long after its release, the Wii began to appear on the evening network news as a new activity in senior citizens’ homes and in stories about children and grandparents sharing the game (Potter, 2008). Although graphically inferior to the Xbox or PS3, the Wii has developed an audience of players who had never tried video gaming before.

The availability of broadband connections has resulted in many software companies selling games online directly to the consumer (especially for computer gaming), with manuals and other play aids available as printable files for those players who wish to do so. Steam, from Valve Corporation, is a download site that boasts over 25 million accounts (Steam, 2010) and delivers downloadable games directly to computer platforms. Most computer game manufacturers sell virtually every title as a download directly to their customers either directly or through online stores. These sales are not simply mail-orders of physical copies, but actual direct-to-PC downloads. This direct-to-consumer sales route has reduced the dependence on local computer software stores for computer games; these stores have reacted by stocking more console games.

Similarly, with the ability of consoles to hook into in-home data networks (either by Ethernet or wirelessly), direct-to-console downloads are also growing in popularity, as storefronts such as the Xbox Arcade sell digital-only copies of games that are stored directly on the console’s hard drive. This low-overhead market channel has allowed low-cost games to proliferate, as they eschew any physical costs (packaging, disks, etc.), transportation costs (no shipping), or retail support costs (no markup by a brick-and-mortar middleman).

Recent Developments

By some estimates, video games may be in their seventh, tenth, or twelfth generation. Those generations have been collapsed into five for this chapter: the early years, the rise of the consoles and computer games, portable gaming, the console wars, and pervasive online gaming. Computer gaming roughly followed this same trajectory, although the introduction of portable computer gaming lags behind for hardware reasons. While the fourth generation described above is still ongoing, it seems as though the market has stabilized in that the three current major players in the console market have all released major new hardware within the past several years. Microsoft’s Xbox One and Sony’s Playstation 4 (PS4) spend each holiday shopping season dueling each other for consumer attention, and dollars with exclusive games, as well as branded console “packages” that include custom graphics for particular platform-specific titles. Nintendo’s Wii U was released before either the Xbox One or PS4, but the marketing focus was less on the technical specs of the system and more on the stable of characters in Nintendo’s long-running game franchises.

Key among the marketing of the Xbox One and PS4 was the idea that the gaming console has morphed into a more robust media hub that can download (or stream) other non-game content as well as enabling gameplay. Netflix, a popular online movie rental business, is accessible on most consoles, enabling users to watch movies and television shows ondemand through their consoles. Most consoles with internet access include access to streaming content such as YouTube, as well. Additionally, the new consoles all ship with DVD and Blu-ray software built in, which allows one device to serve multiple purposes when connected to a user’s television.

The marketing buzz created by the Xbox One and PS4 was accompanied by a variety of game titles released specifically for the new consoles, hoping to piggy-back on the marketing buzz of the new hardware to capture consumer attention.

Crowdfunding
Sell the Game, then Make the Game

Building on the long-established practice by tabletop wargaming companies of allowing customers to “vote with their dollars” by pledging to purchase certain games still in development (Roeder, 2014), crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter, Indie-GoGo, and Steam Greenlight now allow game designers and developers to appeal directly to their audiences for assistance in funding the completion of their game projects, usually in return for discounted copies of the finished product, and possibly other “rewards” like branded merchandise or exclusive bonus content. These platforms allow for the creators to specify a target goal for their fundraising campaign, as well as “stretch goals” that include bonus content for reaching certain additional funding levels. Kickstarter, the most popular platform for crowdfunding, allows general artistic projects (including games), while Steam Greenlight restricts its content specifically to video games to be released through Steam’s platform. In 2013, Kickstarter (the most commercially successful crowdfunding site) passed the $1 billion threshold in pledges for all projects, with video games accounting for nearly 22% of the total (CrowdBox, 2014).

While crowdfunding of video game projects sometimes fails to result in a creator delivering the promised game (Schreier, 2015), platforms like Kickstarter are also instrumental in funding the initial production of game-focused projects like the virtual-reality Oculus Rift headset, whose initial funding was through a Kickstarter campaign that raised over $2 million (Kickstarter, 2012). Moreover, with the rapid growth in the popularity of crowdfunding, legal cases are starting to be filed on behalf of customers who supported projects that did raise their requested funds, but failed to deliver any product (Mullin, 2015).

The ability to raise funding from prospective customers before the completion of the game development significantly reduces the economic risk to smaller game developers and allows games with a smaller commercial appeal to still find funding. The “pledge” system for preorders also allows game developers to judge the commercial viability of a project before committing an overwhelming amount of time towards it, reducing the likelihood that they might build a game for which there is no audience.

Social Gaming
Your Friends Help You Play

With the proliferation of social networking sites over the past decade, from MySpace to Facebook to Google+ to Instagram, SnapChat, Pinterest, and others, software companies and game designers have developed a new twist on video gaming that not only encourages social interaction, but very nearly requires it for the players to fully experience the games. Games such as Farmville 2, Candy Crush, and Criminal Case on Facebook allow users to not only share their performance metrics online, they also allow users to invite their friends to join the game, and provide rewards to those recruiters. Additionally, players may help each other during the game by lending resources when online.

These sorts of persistent engagements have resulted in several effects. First, the lack of time commitment to learning rules, commands, or interfaces has resulted in very high rates of adoption of the games. King Games, the largest of the social gaming developers/publishers, boasts over 318 million unique users. In comparison, World of Warcraft hovers at just over 5.5 million registered players at any one time, and Xbox Live has approximately 48 million users (King, 2015; Statista, 2016; Hickey, 2016). Second, many of the games have been designed with time-lapse effects that require the users to return to them after certain time intervals, resulting in continual engagement with the games.

Most importantly, though, is the business model through which many of these social games generate revenue. Players may play freely, but with time-lapse limitations, and certain in-game purchasing limits, attaining the highest-status rewards within the game (items for decorating a virtual restaurant, or virtual farm equipment, or just virtual cash for use with other online goods) can be extremely challenging. Social gaming companies offer these extensions within their games to players in exchange for real currency (Buckman, 2009). These monetary transactions have resulted in significant revenues for very small startups since 2005. Within the game design industry, however, there have been significant criticisms of social games as merely a time-lapse collection of clicks, and many video game creators have come down starkly on either side of this debate (Tanz, 2012).

Larger strategy games have also moved into the social gaming world, on both mobile and traditional computing platforms, allowing for browser- and app-based access to a variety of “large-world” games centered around conflict and grand strategy. Games such as Grepolis, Mobile Strike, and Clash of Clans have garnered millions of downloads for players seeking a 4X-style game in a shared massive multi-player environment.

Another variation on the social gaming theme is the delivery of certain rules-light games through mobile platforms. Games such as Words With Friends include mobile clients accessible through smartphones that allow players to interact with other live players, in real time, from their phones. These smartphone games, sold through a mobile phone app infrastructure that has been created and diffused since 2006, are marked by incredibly high sales volumes, allowing even very inexpensive games (as low as 99¢) to gross tens of millions of dollars.

Regulatory Environment
Continuing Legislative Efforts to “Protect the Children”

While the legislative landscape continues to treat video games as a child-oriented medium with and average player age of 10 years old, several major events cast new, negative lights on video games from a legislative perspective. Key among these was the 2012 school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT. Although the final report from the State’s Attorney found no link between the shooter’s behavior and violent video games (Sedesky, 2012), popular media and news commentators tried vociferously to draw links between playing of violent video games and lethal, violent behavior.

Laws targeting video games have continually been struck down in the courts, however, there have been post-Sandy Hook laws under consideration in several states that will surely face challenges should they pass. The last major legal cases to wind through the U.S. courts were each several years before Sandy Hook. In 2009, the Ninth Circuit Court upheld a ruling that a California law was too restrictive and violated free speech rights (Walters, 2010). The law restricted the sale of violent video games to minors. In 2011, the Supreme Court of the United States also upheld this ruling (Savage, 2011).

Innovations in Mobile Gaming

With the increase in computing power available in handsets, mobile gaming has split along two lines. First, Nintendo and Sony both have handheld game platforms with wireless capability built in, allowing for head-to-head gameplay with other nearby systems, as well as shared gameplay through an Internet connection, where available. Platforms such as Nintendo’s DS line and Sony’s PSP machines are capable of establishing local networks for head-to-head gaming without any wireless service.

Table 15.1

Annual 2015 Top 10 Games
New Physical Retail Only—Across All Platforms Including PC*

Title (Platforms)	Rank	Publisher
Call of Duty: Black Ops III (Xbox One, PS4, 360, PS3, PC)	1	Activision
Madden NFL 16 (PS4, Xbox One, 360, PS3)	2	EA Sports
Fallout 4 (PS4, Xbox One, PC)	3	Bethesda Softworks
Star Wars: Battlefront (Xbox One, PS4, PC)	4	Electronic Arts
Grand Theft Auto V (PS4, Xbox One, 360, PS3, PC)	5	Rockstar Games/TakeTwo Interactive
NBA 2K16 (PS4, Xbox One, 360, PS3)	6	2K Sports
Minecraft (360, Xbox One, PS3, PS4)	7	Mojang
FIFA 16 (PS4, Xbox One, 360, PS3)	8	EA Sports
Mortal Kombat X (PS4, Xbox One)	9	Warner Brothers Interactive
Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare (Xbox One, PS4, 360, PS3, PC)	10	Activision

*(includes CE, GOTY editions, bundles, etc. but not those bundled with hardware)

Source: NPD Group

Apple’s App Store, and the subsequent similar stores from Google (for the Android OS) and Microsoft (for the Windows Phone OS), have allowed the proliferation of huge numbers of “casual games” with simple, intuitive interfaces and playtimes measured in minutes rather than hours. Many app store games are also free to download and play, with in-game purchases to upgrade player capabilities or change the tempo of play to allow completion of in-game activities quicker.

The continued improvement of mobile phone hardware (larger screens, greater resolution, faster processors, accelerometers) has made the devices far more attractive to game-makers. For consumers, the ability to have their games in-hand regardless of location, without an additional device, has proven quite popular. Sales of games for mobile phones have jumped dramatically since 2010, with the loss of sales being felt primarily by the handheld “console” manufacturers—Sony and Nintendo (Farago, 2011).

Game designers have now started leveraging the additional features of smartphones, such as cameras, barcode/QR code readers, GPS locators, and web connections to create “immersive reality” games (such as Niatic Labs’ Ingress) that are designed to modify the players’ perceptions of the ordinary world by providing location-specific challenges, geo-tagged competitions with nearby players, and real-world scavenger hunts for features that must be photographed or scanned by the game’s software to unlock the next feature or challenge.

Broadband-Enabled Downloads for Consoles as Well as PCs

In a manner similar to the Steam download service, console manufacturers have integrated online participation and downloadable content through their consoles. Not only can networks of players compete cooperatively or head-to-head around the world, but broadband networking has enabled the push of content through storefronts including the Xbox Live Marketplace and the Nintendo Wii Virtual Console.

Xbox Live Marketplace includes not only games, but movies from major studios. Nintendo’s Virtual Console has seen competition from WiiWare (Chan, 2010) for the download market on the Wii consoles. Sony’s PlayStation network is integrating connections to popular online destinations such as Facebook (Thorpe, 2009) and Netflix (Kennedy, 2009), further blurring the delivery lines between computers and other Internet-enabled devices. Additionally, online broadband delivery of video games has significantly reduced the physical overhead costs of PC game publishers, with major companies such as Firaxis releasing the popular Civilization franchise for download through Apple’s App Store for Macintosh computers.

Current Status

After a half-decade of no new platforms from 2006-2012, all three major console manufacturers released new hardware between 2013 and 2015. Since its 2013 launch, Sony’s PS4 has sold over 35 million units (Poladian, 2015) while the Xbox One has cleared over 20 million units, both worldwide.

Because consoles are primarily dependent on their software to maintain customer interest, constant hardware upgrades may not be as necessary once the newest consoles leap ahead, and in fact might be considered detrimental to sales if the consoles are not backward-compatible with older games in the same product family. Computer-based games are not as dependent on regular hardware updates, and software continues to appear daily for computer-based video gamers.

In 2015, U.S. income from video games totaled slightly more than $13 billion (Grubb, 2016). However, those numbers have been disputed by the Entertainment Software Association for failing to account for game rentals, subscriptions, or digital downloads (especially on mobile devices) (Hannley, 2016).

Given the multi-function nature of desktop and laptop computers, counting the hardware for computer game sales makes little sense. Console sales have typically fueled a significant end-of-year uptick in sales during the holiday seasons, and 2013 exceeded many expectations with the releases of Sony’s and Microsoft’s new entrants in the marketplace.

“Gamer parents” have continued to be a phenomenon of interest, and as yet an insufficient number of the media and legislative leadership have been replaced by longtime gamers. Frequently used to refute the argument that “video games are for kids,” gamer parents are those game players who grew up with a game console in their households and are now raising their own children with consoles. The average game player is 35 years old and has been playing for over 12 years (ESA, 2015); children who owned an Atari 2600 console in their home in the 1980s are now over 40 years old. Although legislative action has often been touted as a remedy for inhibiting access to video games that legislators feel is inappropriate, gamer parents have repeatedly noted that they are intimately familiar with video games and capable of making informed choices about their children’s access to video games. In addition, gamer parents tend to take the lead in game purchases for their households, thus making them a valuable target for the corporate marketing machines. In fact, 91% of all game players under age 18 note that their parents are present when they purchase or rent their games (ESA, 2012). By way of comparison to the stereotype of teenaged video gamers, a 10-year-old child who started playing video games at home on an Atari 2600 console in 1982 is today a 40-year-old gamer with 30 years of video gaming experience.

As noted above, legislative action against video games continues in multiple venues. Not every legislative action is opposed by industry trade groups, however. The Entertainment Software Association has consistently supported measures designed to prohibit access to sexually explicit games by minors, as well as supporting legislation that increases access to ratings information for consumers (Walters, 2008). However, laws intended to severely limit games access to a large segment of the population have yet to stand up to judicial scrutiny.

Factors to Watch

The 2016 release of the Oculus Rift headset has generated a great deal of excitement in the video gaming community for its ability to fully immerse the gamer through the use of a head-mounted display. With its wide field of view (virtually identical to normal peripheral vision) and a head mount that completely blocks out the view of the “real world,” the Oculus Rift headset is a level of immersion thus far not achieved by any other device. It is no surprise that the initial list of games with Oculus Rift support are those played from a first-person point of view, such as shooters like Half-Life 2 and Left4Dead.

Piggybacking on the desire to create “full-field-of-vision” VR projects, Google introduced “Google Cardboard,” a build-it-yourself headset (Google, 2016) designed to hold a mobile phone or small Android tablet close to the user’s eyes, and adapt existing hardware into a makeshift VR viewer. Samsung also introduced the $99 Samsung Gear VR headset which works with the Samsung Galaxy s7 series. Although VR-style viewing tools have now been available in the market for several years, there has yet to be a seminal hit piece of software to drive adoption of the hardware.

The release of the Xbox One, and Microsoft’s heavy focus on support of their new console hardware (as well as their tablet hardware) leaves most industry-watchers with the impression that Microsoft is unlikely to release any dedicated hand-held gaming-specific system for several years, at least. After years of misplaced rumors, it seems almost pointless to expect Microsoft to release a handheld game-specific device.

Moreover, the introduction of the iPad and iPad Mini, and other Android and Windows tablets has also contributed to the huge increase in mobile game sales, as well as distribution channels. Tablet devices are now a significant factor in video gaming, especially for adaptations of popular board games and social games played across networks.

In typical secretive fashion, Nintendo announced in April 2016 that it will be releasing a new console, code named “NX” in March 2017. Officials didn’t release any details except to say it will be a “whole new concept.” The Wii U was pretty much a failure, so the new concept will have to have some innovations that will make it distinctive from other hardware much like the Wii when it was first released in 2006 (Goldman, 2016).

Women continue to make up a large percentage of the video game playing population, but after a decade of expanding participation rates, their percentage of the overall market appears to have stabilized since 2010. As of 2015 40% of the game-playing public are women, which is within 3% of the participation rate of the past 5 ESA surveys. Adult women continue to represent a greater share of the market (33%) than young males under 17 (18%) (ESA, 2015).

Government funding of new projects with video game developers will also continue as sponsors search for projects applicable to their specific fields. The U.S. Army’s TCM-Gaming office, specifically designed to leverage video game technology for training purposes (Peck, 2007), has run into challenges with unifying the acquisition and development of game-based training tools across the Army enterprise. Nevertheless, government-focused events, such as the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference (I/ITSEC) bring in over 20,000 attendees (IITSEC, 2014). In late 2015, the U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense specifically called for the U.S. military to refocus on the use of games for training (Peck, 2016). Although some video game projects have migrated from the commercial world to the Department of Defense, with games such as Close Combat being adopted by the U.S. Marine Corps, many government projects are still bound by existing acquisition regulations, which means fewer rapidly-developed initiatives competing with entrenched government contracts. Interestingly, there does seem to be a growing movement among wargaming veterans to move away from video games for training in favor of tabletop games (Lacey, 2016).

Despite years of video game legislation being rejected by the courts, legislators will continue to react to media coverage of parental concern about video game content, especially in the wake of the Sandy Hook school shooting. Overwhelming demographic data shows that video gamers are typically adults, and 25% of them are over age 50. Nonetheless, many news outlets and legislators continue to view video games as toys for kids, and make no distinction in subject matter between mature-themed games and games clearly targeted at children. Legislative efforts are further complicated by legal precedents being established in cases about online distribution of content, which is increasingly relevant as Internet-enabled consoles are connected to broadband networks.

All three major console lines and many computer games allow for collaborative online play. Expect to see two developments in this area. First, as game titles proliferate across platforms, expect to see more games capable of sharing an online game across those platforms, allowing a player on the Xbox to match up against an opponent on a PC system, as both players communicate through a common back-end server. Second, many of these online systems, such as the Xbox Live, already allow voice conversations during the game through a voice over Internet protocol system. (VoIP is discussed in more detail in Chapter 20.) As more digital cameras are incorporated into consoles, either as an integrated component or an aftermarket peripheral, expect these services to start offering some form of videoconferencing, especially for players involved in games such as chess, poker, or other “tabletop” games being played on a digital system.

Getting a Job

Careers in video game design and development are growing. One of the best ways to enter the field is to get a college degree in game design and development. Universities such as the University of Southern California, NYU, Cornell, Carnegie Mellon, and more offer both undergraduate and advanced degrees in the field. Another way to get involved is to get an internship in the field.

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