Image Beyond the Screen

7Projection Mapping Gaming

7.1. Introduction

A characteristic of video games is that they offer an analog or digital display as an outgoing interface. The screen usually plays this role. We find the idea of associating screens with games as early as the early 1950s if we refer, for example, to Oxo, a tic-tac-toe game programmed on the Cambridge University EDSAC computer by the English computer scientist Alexander Shafto “Sandy” Douglas (Djaouti 2019, p. 11). It should also be noted that in the late 1940s, Thomas Toliver Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann filed a patent for the Ray Tube Amusement Device Cathode (Djaouti 2019, p. 3), a game where you must succeed in firing a missile at a target., all played on a CRT screen. However, as no trace of the device has been found to date, it is not yet known whether it is just a paper invention or whether a prototype has been developed.

Thus, this link between screen and video game has long been the norm according to Mark J.P. Wolf to define the video game (Wolf 2008, pp. 3–8). The very nature of screen technology was a differentiating feature. This made it possible, for example, to distinguish between video games and computer games. This positioning thus explains disagreements between video game experts when it comes to defining the first video game in history. Since Oxo was played on an oscilloscope, it is not really a video game in the view of some specialists. So, for them, it is better to wait until 1962 and the advent of SpaceWar! ...