Slideshow: The evolution of video game addiction: Tech: mensvogue.com

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Evolution of Video Game Addiction: Starting with a wildly popular galactic shooting challenge 30 years ago, here's how video games turned everyday arcade players into hard-core addicts. By Ben Popper

Article: D.B. Weiss explains that video games aren't just for kids anymore

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The Forefathers

In the late 1950s, deep in the bowels of MIT's Radiation Laboratory, better known as Rad Lab, a group of the school's brightest young minds gathered with a single lofty goal: to have utterly pointless fun. The renegade students would hijack equipment from around campus and use it to create some of the world's first computer "hacks." Like the gamers of today, they would often gather at night, earning them the nickname the "Midnight Requisitioning Committee." Early hacks included teaching their computers to run their model trains, simulating a bouncing ball, and playing chess against human opponents. Soon, however, these young gamers were looking for a bigger challenge. In 1961 they set out to create Spacewar!, a galactic shooting game where two players face off as dueling rocketships. The meticulous students used real astronomy maps and factored in gravity, and the first piece of video game software was born.

(Photo of Spacewar!)

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