A Diverse Audience of Gamers - Computer Games

Computer games, also known as PC games, are games that can be played on a personal computer.  Computer games have a long history from the very simple games of yesteryear to the sophisticated, graphics-intensive games available today.  Because PC games are played on personal computers rather than on dedicated gaming consoles, they serve what is probably the most diverse audience of gamers on any gaming platform. 

A History of Computer Games

Although the first videogame was created in 1947 on a cathode ray tube, one of the first notable computer games was Spacewar, created in 1961 on a PDP-1 computer.  Although this game had rudimentary graphical representations of two battling ships, most early PC games were text adventures.  Text adventures were essentially a type of interactive fiction in which the environments and events of the game were described in text form.  You then made decisions or gave commands which lead to further descriptions or events.  This type of game came into being in the late 1970s and continued in its purest form through the 1980s.  Graphics became a more and more important part of computer games in the 1980s, but some text adventures were developed which included simple graphics of the characters and environment, such as the famous Bard’s Tale series. 

In the 1990s, computer games began to move into the realm of 3D environments, notably with the release of Wolfenstein 3D, a first-person shooter which first popularized this genre and Doom, which was a landmark game for its 3D graphics.  Graphics made even further improvements through this decade, as increasingly powerful graphics cards and drivers began a virtual graphics arms race that continues to this day.  Game developers have utilized these graphics cards to create increasingly stunning graphics, but occasionally developers create games difficult to run on all but the highest-end systems, such as the recent Crysis. 

Today’s Computer Games

 The current PC gaming landscape is incredibly diverse, with numerous distribution models and types of games available.  Some games, known as freeware, are available to the consumer at no charge and are usually distributed through digital downloads.  Shareware computer games allow you to play part of the game for free but ask you to pay if you wish to play the entire computer game.  These are also distributed primarily as digital downloads.  Traditional commercial games are as omnipresent as ever, distributed as DVD-ROM discs or through direct download services such as Direct2Drive or Steam.  In addition, there are now many computer games available online.  Some are subscription services and others are completely free.  Many casual gamers go to websites to play simple card and puzzle games for free, while hardcore gamers often pay to play massively multiplayer games such as World of Warcraft.  With the increasingly realistic graphics, diversity of players, and the ability to play a huge variety of games online, computer games remain an important part of today’s gaming industry.