Video game terms and history

I believe that it is important to understand some terms and a bit of gaming history to fully understand my blog.

First some frequently used terminology:

• Noob - Some one that is new to a game or gaming, otherwise known as a newbie.

• Pwn - primarily used with online gaming crowd, it means to own or to overtake an opponent. Originating from the word "own" and is thought to have started as a typo and then just became accepted.

• "Casual gamer - is a loosely defined term used to describe a type of video game player whose time or interest in playing games is limited compared with a hardcore gamer," as explained on Wikipedia's website.

• "Hardcore gamer - This type of gamer prefers to take significant time and practice on games, in contrast to a casual gamer. Many hardcore gamers pride themselves on mastering the rules or use of a game, although this is not a strict requirement," as explained on Wikipedia's website.

Click on the links to get a better understanding of those terms through Wikipedia's website.

Something that most people, including gamers, don't know is that the idea of video games and consoles started back before most of our parents were even born. While searching my favorite video game website, www.gamespot.com, I myself found out that one man opened up the idea for video games and in the year 1949 too!

"In 1949, a young engineer named Ralph Baer was given an assignment to build a television set. He wasn't supposed to build just any television set, but one that would be the absolute best of all televisions. This was not a problem for Baer, but he wanted to go beyond his original assignment and incorporate some kind of game into the set. He didn't know exactly what kind of game he had in mind, but it didn't really matter because his managers nixed the idea. It would take another 18 years for his idea to become a reality, and by that time there would be other people to share in the glory, like Willy Higinbotham, who designed an interactive tennis game played on an oscilloscope, and Steve Russell, who programmed a rudimentary space game on a DEC PDP-1 mainframe computer. And then there was also Nolan Bushnell, who played that space game and dreamed of a time when fairground midways would be filled with games powered by computers," as explained on gamespots website, http://www.gamespot.com/gamespot/features/video/hov/





So thanks again for visiting my blog and check back often for updates. For my next post I will be discussing the "big three" consoles.