get connected to digital literacy Great GAME DESIGN Clive Gifford Crabtree Publishing Company www crabtreebooks com
Computer games also known as video games are a type of computer program They are made up of lines of code which are instructions to the computer arcade machine or game console Games were once played only in black and white on large silent computers in businesses and colleges Today they blaze with color and action roar with sound and are played everywhere Fun screen on the Big business Computer gaming is now a major industry There are more than 3,000 computer-game companies just in North America New games are launched with a splash of publicity just like major movies It is big business computer game sales worldwide were 91 billion US in 2015 COMPUTER H e ro Most computer games today are the work of a large team of people In 2009 the first version of Minecraft was created and coded by just one person Markus Persson also known as Notch from Sweden Persson wrote his first simple computer game at the age of eight Markus Persson 4
Games everywhere Games can be played on personal computers laptops and tablets They can also be played on smartphones or handheld game consoles for users on the move When a game is created it is often converted to different formats so it can work on many different machines This is called porting Tetris was invented in 1984 TRUE STORY Out of this World The first video game played in space was Tetris Invented in 1984 the goal of the game is to fit falling blocks together like a puzzle In 1993 it was played by Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Serebrov on a Nintendo Game Boy a handheld game machine on the MIR space station Meet and Greet Many game players or gamers compete against one another in game competitions Gamers and game makers meet at events called conventions The world’s biggest gaming convention is Gamescom which is held in Cologne Germany each year In 2016 345,000 people attended 5
