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Within the space of less than three decades, video games have blossomed from an obscure pastime of solitary computer nerds into a multi million dollar arts and entertainment medium spanning cultures and generations. Every new medium, from the written word to the silver screen, from poetry to the printing press, has had a great impact on the way humans communicate, create, and even think. Video games are no exception to this rule. Far from being a trivial time waster for teenage boys and hopeless social rejects as some would have us believe, video games are a force of change which are transforming the way that people perceive, learn about, and interact with the world around them. So it's worth our while to take a look at where video games have come from, how they are already affecting society, and how they may continue to change it in the future.

Games have been a part of society for a long time, probably from its earliest beginnings and even before. Every culture on earth has its own unique games, and it's probable that our remotest hunter-gatherer ancestors engaged in sporting contests of strength and skill; indeed, sports and games definitely predate writing, probably predate painting or drawing, and thus can compete with singing, dancing and story telling for the title of 'world's first art form'. Primitive board games have been found in ancient royal tombs and preserved under the Scandinavian ice. The most signature aspect of gaming is the concept of interactivity. Players of games are interacting with each other, with their own capabilities, and with a system of rules which simulates a process of reality. Games have thus always been the most effective means for people to learn about complicated nonlinear phenomena such as economics and trading, governance and warfare, probability, and natural forces. However, for most of human history games have been limited in the order of complexity they were capable of reaching. In order for a game to be played effectively, all of the rules had to be memorized and self-enforced by each individual human player, tokens and symbols had to be manipulated, and those with sufficient skill were capable of cheating or gaming the system in a way which rendered the simulation void, the process of playing the game essentially pointless. All of this changed when computers came on the scene. With a virtually endless capacity to store and manipulate information, a computer can embody an endless succession of arbitrarily complex simulation

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