{"id":394,"date":"2014-12-07T22:37:52","date_gmt":"2014-12-08T05:37:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/erraticplay.com\/?p=394"},"modified":"2014-12-12T18:48:12","modified_gmt":"2014-12-13T01:48:12","slug":"the-beginning-of-a-revolution-in-thought-remembering-ralph-baer-the-father-of-the-videogame","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/erraticplay.com\/?p=394","title":{"rendered":"\u201cThe beginning of a revolution in thought:\u201d Remembering Ralph Baer, father of the videogame"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ralph H. Baer, inventor of the Magnavox Odyssey, the first home videogame system, died December 6. Although Baer didn’t create\u00a0the first videogame, he invented something more important: videogaming as a mainstream medium. \"Baer\"<\/a>Perhaps\u00a0this would have happened anyway, with the personal computer bringing\u00a0games and other amusements\u00a0from the research lab into the home office and living room by the 1980s, but Baer intuited that screens and interfaces didn’t have to wait for integrated circuits or software. Television technology was sufficient to\u00a0give people screen-based agency in the service of play–but it would take Baer’s insight\u00a0to blend play and technological know-how into a new cultural object and activity. Recall that, in 1972, most people had no concept of what a videogame was –the name “videogame” hadn’t even been coined yet. Most people at the time still saw the TV set as a fragile, impenetrable device–an appliance that could only receive airwaves from afar, not generate self-controlled images. To remediate TV into a playable device, Magnavox took the unusual step of demonstrating the Odyssey within television’s own ludic context–the game show–as poof of concept. Here’s Rod Serling(!) playing Odyssey Tennis before a befuddled group of panelists on “I’ve Got a Secret” in fall 1972 (go to about 15:40 for the Serling\/Odyssey segment):
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