During the early history of video games, games such as Tennis for Two (1958), Spacewar!(1962), Pong (1972), and its follower, Elimination (1974) explored different multiplayer modes. These arcade and experimental games served as a base to create and show the great potential for social interactions in the area of computed gaming. For example, Higinbotham created Tennis for Two in order to give hands-on experience of one of the technologies available in the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton. Students, who were among the most common visitors, appreciated the idea to the point that “You couldn’t pull them away from it.”(Anderson 1984). The game was obviously very simple but much more dynamic than the rest of the exhibition, and naturally “Everybody stood in line to play.”(Lovece 1983: 40). Creating a two player game, instead of programming an artificial intelligence to play with, was certainly an easier task, but at the same time, this mode was allowing multiple visitors to play simultaneously and interact with each other, leaving space for the rest of the non-players to stand and participate as an audience.
Savasta, D. (2016). Collocated Gaming: Analysis of Social Relations in Gaming Through Interaction Ecologies. xCoAx 2016 — 4th Conference on Computation, Communication, Aesthetics & X, pp. 160-175.