Video Games

Question 1

What is the ‘CRT Amusement Device’?

Answer 1

An early video game involving eight vacuum tubes to simulate a missile being fired at a target

Question 2

What is ‘NIMROD’?

Answer 2

A computer built for the 1951 Festival of Britain which was designed exclusively to play the game of NIM

Question 3

Whats is ‘OXO’?

Answer 3

A computer built in 1952 that ran on EDSAC, and played noughts and crosses by displaying contents of RAM through a CRT.

Question 4

What is ‘Tennis for Two’?

Answer 4

An analogue computer built in 1958 that displayed a pong like game on an oscilloscope.

Question 5

What is ‘Spacewar!’?

Answer 5

A PDP1 computer built in 1961 at MIT which simulated a spaceship war in space between two spaceships.

Question 6

What features made ‘Tennis for Two’ or ‘Space War’ considered as the first “Video Game”? (4)

Answer 6

• 2 players competitive play
• Real-time play
• Physical controllers
• Physical simulation

Question 7

What is the ‘Galaxy Game’?

Answer 7

The first coin operated video game based on the Spacewar! game built in 1971, which was installed at the Stanford Union.

Question 8

What is ‘Computer Space’?

Answer 8

The first commercially-sold video game based on the Spacewar! game built in 1971, which was a state machine and had no ROM/RAM

Question 9

What is considered as the first video game?

Answer 9

Pong

Question 10

What is a ‘Perfect AI’?

Answer 10

An AI which will always make the best possible move in any situation, and a game with a perfect AI is called solved.

Question 11

What are 2 ‘Solved Games’?

Answer 11

• Connect 4 (1988)

* Draughts (2007)

Question 12

What is ‘Rubber Banding’?

Answer 12

An AI technique which prevents players from getting too far ahead/behind of computer-controlled opponents.

Question 13

What are ‘Vector Displays’?

Answer 13

Displays that draw lines by moving the electron beam to follow the line (not broken down into dots)

Question 14

What are ‘Raster Displays’?

Answer 14

Displays that represent graphics as bitmaps (grid of pixels), where electron beam scans each row, turning on and off to display each pixel

Question 15

What was the first video game console?

Answer 15

The Magnavox Odyssey (1972), which could display 3 dots on the screen at once

Question 16

What is the ‘Sinclair ZX Spectrum’?

Answer 16

A computer built in 1982 that stored colour information separately from the pixel bitmap.

Question 17

What is ‘Parallax Scrolling’?

Answer 17

A ‘pseudo-3d’ technique used to fake 3d graphics, where objects in the background scroll past more slowly than those in the foreground.

Question 18

What is ‘Isometric Projection’?

Answer 18

Another fake 3d technique where the viewing angle is chosen carefully so the angles between the projection of the axes are all equal.

Question 19

What is ‘Sprite Scaling’?

Answer 19

Another fake 3d technique where sprite sizes are changed as they vary in distance from the viewer to give impression of 3d

Question 20

What is ‘Rasterisation’?

Answer 20

A 3d graphics technique in which you take a 3d scene compromised of polygons and render it onto a surface (the screen)

Question 21

What types of shading are there in terms of 3d graphics? (4)

Answer 21

• Flat shading - shade each polygon according to its angle with respect to a light source
• Gouraud shading - do a lighting calculation at each vertex of a polygon
• Phong shading - does the lighting calculation at the pixel level
• Cel shading - lighting calculation at pixel level but mapped to a small number of discrete shades (hand drawn graphics)

Question 22

What is ‘Texture Mapping’?

Answer 22

Instead of representing every detail as a shaded polygon, a texture map is wrapped around a 3d object.

Question 23

What is ‘Latency and Lag’? (2)

Answer 23

• Latency is the time taken for a packet of data to get from one point to another
• Lag is the noticible delay between an action and its results