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  • Essay / Interacting with Media: How Video Games Have Influenced Storytelling

    From Pong's debut 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 a basic objective: try to get the most points. These days, games are a bit 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 with and become a 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 was looking for a way to capture the interest of guests while visiting the laboratory where he worked during an open house. Using an oscilloscope with a small screen and simple wiring, he created a very simple tennis game called Tennis for Two, which had two lines, one for the ground and one for the side view of a tennis net, with simple timing controls to return the tennis ball. on the other side (Tretkoff). Not knowing what he had started, he abandoned the project a few years later and moved on to something else. 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 gaming trend. From there, the video game industry grew slowly over the next decades before becoming one of the largest technology industries in the world. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay One of the most memorable early 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 a lot like an adventure novel where players started in a dark room and could input simple logic commands to move your character and advance the story. In the early days of video games, it seemed like you could have either a story or graphics. The processing power of early computers was so low 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 either had 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 would just be walls of text where you enter commands to move the story to another wall of text. Today, the power of home gaming machines is astounding and only gets better with time. Whether you're a PC gamer or choosing a console, like PlayStation or Xbox, there are so many different games to choose from. You no longer have to choose between great 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 the game's ending. Players take control of several teenagers as they attempt to survive a night of horror on an isolated mountain. You are forced to make quick life or death decisions for these teenagers and one wrong choice or slow reaction and it could create a rippling butterfly effect that can make a game completely..