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Computers as Theatre, Second Edition
book

Computers as Theatre, Second Edition

by Brenda Laurel
September 2013
Intermediate to advanced
272 pages
7h 59m
English
Addison-Wesley Professional
Content preview from Computers as Theatre, Second Edition

1. The Nature of the Beast

In 1962, The first modern video game was invented by some hackers at MIT. It was called Spacewar!, and it ran on a DEC PDP-1, the world’s first mini-computer, connected to a CRT display. One of the game’s designers explained that the game was born as a group sat around trying to figure out what sort of “interesting displays” they could create for the CRT with some pattern-generating software they had developed. “We decided that probably, you could make a two-dimensional maneuvering sort of thing, and decided that naturally the obvious thing to do was spaceships.” The MIT hackers weren’t the only ones to invent Spacewar!. As Alan Kay noted, “the game of Spacewar! blossoms spontaneously wherever there is a graphics display ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780133390889Purchase book