Well first blog, here it is! Belated, as I tend to find writing a bit of a daunting task unless it's a story. I didn't realise that computer games had started as early as the 1950s, though I can say I'm not surprised since mankind finds games to play with absolutely anything.
While looking through the history of computer games from the stage they're at at the moment, it's hard to imagine such primitive games such as "Tennis for Two" and "Spacewar!" needing a computer the size of a refrigerator to run them. As the computers themselves were not really a household item at that time, these games were created and used in military bases and government places, where the funds to run them were available.
The main creators of these games appear to be from scientific backgrounds, using the games as for academic and military purposes.. or so some of the sources i read said. I'm not entirely sure that Pong and Spacewar! are learning programs, but I guess they would be good for hand-eye co-ordination and honing reflexes. The fact that these institutions were the first to make computer games does indeed strike me as significant, because most of our technological advances seem to be made during times of war as each part of the world struggled onwards to create better and more sophisticated devices and programs than the last.
And now back to me..
The first games I played... and remember of course... were Word Rescue and Math Rescue by Apogee [http://www.3drealms.com/math/index.html] which was around the age of 3. They were simple yet fun games that helped me to learn to read, write and count. After that came Thinkin' Things and Thinkin' Science by Edmark. My Dad has always been into computers, so me and both of my brothers were able to get help in using computers to play education games. However, the educational side of this didn't last much longer, and soon I was playing Doom and Wolfenstien 3D. I am currently playing (as much as I feel embarrassed to say) World of Warcraft, as well as a few Nintendo DS games such as Tenshu: Dark Secret and Drawn to Life (that I'm borrowing from Aby). I'm not really sure what's driven me to continue playing games all these years, but one of the things that I have been pleased to see and play is the fast paced progression of in game graphics.
That's all for today, will post more later.
This one feels a lot better than my last, I also put a bit more time into it. I think I like this method of painting, or at least it's growing on me. I chose this view point because the day that I went down to the canal, the colours were so intense, and the view really was quite breathtaking for something as ordinary as a canal.
