What is a "video game"?

What is a "video game"?

Bill Kunkel (Editor-in-Chief, "Tips & Tricks" Magazine) gives expert video advice on: What are the most influential first-person shooters?; What is one of the best strategy video games available?; What are some of the most influential role-playing video games? and more...

A video game is an interactive gaming experience. You can play games with other people, but one of the virtues, I think, of the video game is that it will play you. You don't need another person, generally speaking, to play the game, and it's kind of a unique experience. The man who invented the concept of the video game is a gentleman named Ralph Baer. He was working for Sanders and Associates, and they had a contract with Magnavox (in fact, they produced the very first game system, the Odyssey, in 1971) and his idea was basically that we've got all these TV sets, millions and millions of TV sets, and yet everything that's coming through them is passive; we're sitting back, we're couch potatoes, we're watching and we're absorbing. There must be something we can do with those televisions where we can interact with them.