It's quite fascinating to look at how far we've come in so little time. The interactive entertainment industry that began as little more than a dream for a handful of people has become a very serious and widespread medium of entertainment. The tiny white blips on an otherwise black monitor that stole so many of our hours decades ago are now gone, replaced by the vibrant characters and detailed worlds of today's cutting edge games. While naturally it seems like a positive evolution, somewhere along the way, we stumbled. As much as we'd like to deny it, we have returned to an age-old predicament - games have become too complicated.

Although it may be unclear for those heavily caught up in their games, the issue is a very real one. The issue of the overly-complex video games might not threaten to bring the industry to its financial knees immediately, but it presents a particularly nasty long-term ultimatum: change the game or risk losing millions of potential customers. This may sound like a brash statement upon first glance, but take a deeper look and you will see that the damage is already being done.

Where and when did we drop the ball? That's a difficult question to answer, to be sure. In this N-Sider special we plan to unravel the issue of game complexity, present a real-world study, and offer insight into the future of this fragile industry. First we shall look at where it all began - that famed white blip on a black monitor.

Inventing the Wheel

In 1958, William Higinbotham created what most consider to be the first video game ever. The game, Tennis For Two, was little more than a technical demonstration. Four years later, Steve Russell created the first video game actually intended for the public with SpaceWar!. Russell's title was met with praise from those who were privileged enough to have access to the code. SpaceWar! was seen as a taste of what was to come in the newly born medium. Yet, the development that followed shortly after was the most outstanding of all.

After seeing SpaceWar! in action Nolan Bushnell decided make his entry into the digital foray. Nolan first tried to create a SpaceWar! knock-off game with the decidedly flat name Computer Space. However, while doing so he made a curious observation, one that holds a great deal of relevance today.

"You had to read the instructions before you could play, people didn't want to read instructions", Nolan remarked. "To be successful, I had to come up with a game people already knew how to play; something so simple that any drunk in any bar could play."

As the story goes, Nolan and a friend who helped him form Atari asked a recently graduated engineer named Al Alcorn to develop a ping-pong-like game. After completing a prototype of the game, Nolan decided that it was fun and simple enough to warrant a test run at a local bar. Scott Cohen recounts the story:

"One of the regulars approached the Pong game inquisitively and studied the ball bouncing silently around the screen as if in a vacuum. A friend joined him. The instructions said: 'Avoid missing ball for high score.' One of [them] inserted a quarter. There was a beep. The game had begun. They watched dumbfoundedly as the ball appeared alternately on one side of the screen and then disappeared on the other. Each time it did the score changed. The score was tied at 3-3 when one player tried the knob controlling the paddle at his end of the screen. The score was 5-4, his favor, when his paddle made contact with the ball. There was a beautifully resonant "pong" sound, and the ball bounced back to the other side of the screen. 6-4. At 8-4 the second player figured out how to use his paddle. They had their first brief volley just before the score was 11-5 and the game was over.

Seven quarters later they were having extended volleys, and the constant pong noise was attracting the curiosity of others at the bar. Before closing, everybody in the bar had played the game. The next day people were lined up outside Andy Capp's at 10 A.M. to play Pong". - Scott Cohen (Zap, pg. 29)

The rest, as they say, is history. What followed the Pong phenomenon were many ups and downs -- from unfair business practices to the subsequent diversification of game types. It's interesting to think that at a time when games were composed of, at most, a couple of commands, Nolan and co. decided to show restraint with their design. One thing is for sure - even though our palette has become richer, our canvas has grown, and our tools have diversified, the basic rules of the medium have not changed. A washing machine may be a more sophisticated version of a wash-board, but it still holds the same basic function; it helps us clean our clothes. It will be important to keep this in mind as we move ahead and look at the evolution of the console interface (aka, the controller).

For the sake of comparison and familiarity, we will be using Nintendo as the primary example of console interface, since they have been through the most system generations and usually have a controller that sets the standard for that particular point in time. Below is a brief depiction of console control, and relates to the domestic releases of the given products (i.e. the North American versions of the given products.)

As you can see, we have come a long way from the digital joystick and one-button interface. It might surprise you that a return to the "days of old" might be sooner than you think. But we'll get into that later