War and Spacewar! How Government Action Created the First Video Game

Abstract

This paper explores the curious relationship between wartime tensions and the first video games. The author zooms in on Spacewar!, an academic demonstration and the very first video game, created in a computer lab by a group of government-funded students. Though it had not been the nature of the game itself that had been war-inspired. Instead, the author asserts that a dialogue between war and academia provided an environment that allowed for the creation and spread of what would become the video game industry.