It’s easy to forget that the internet as we know it is only 30 years old.
In that relatively short span of time it has completely revolutionized the world we live in, connecting people from every corner of the globe and providing unrestricted access to the world’s sum total of knowledge.
And it’s not just lofty goals that the internet has achieved during its tenure – it has also come to define the way we seek out and consume entertainment.
In 1995, if you wanted to watch a new movie at home, you had to drive to your nearest Blockbuster and rent out a VHS.
Now you simply press a button, and the film in question will be streamed into your living room on Netflix from a remote server.
Games have also witnessed a substantial overhaul, with popular online-optimized video games from Call of Duty: Warzone to League of Legends proving a powerful draw for a new generation of extremely online gamers.
What’s more, it’s not just video games that have benefited from the online revolution.
In fact, many of our best loved conventional games have found new lives for themselves in cyberspace.
Some of these, such as the titles we’re looking at below, have even become more popular in this guise than they ever were before in their physical form.
Roulette
The enigmatic spinning wheel game of roulette has enjoyed a colorful history.
It started life as a botched experiment by the Parisian polymath Blaise Pascal, who attempted to create a low friction wheel capable of achieving perpetual motion.
Before long, his wheel was repurposed as the centerpiece of a new and incredibly popular table game.
It’s hard to pinpoint the moment that roulette made the jump from physical to digital, but there’s no escaping the fact that its online variants furnished by reputable platforms have enjoyed far greater success and acclaim than its brick-and-mortar counterpart could have ever hoped for.
With the ability to switch between European and American formats at the click of a button, and the infinitely greater accessibility afforded by being able to play online and on the go, digital roulette looks set to define the way we think about and play this game for many years to come.
Chess
Chess started life as the ancient Indian game of strategy, Chaturanga.
Amazingly, the intervening 2000 years have done remarkably little to change the underlying format of this game of kings.
The core pieces remain the same – albeit what were once war elephants are now bishops, and chariots have given way to castles.
In fact, one can say that the 20th century saw more change in the game of chess than at any prior moment in its long history.
This is because this was the century that saw the game serve as the battleground upon which a human would lose to an AI for the first time.
It was also the moment that chess made its heroic leap into the world wide web.
Now chess is played the world over on platforms like Chess.com, where dynamic Elo ratings seamlessly match players with those of comparable skill levels.
It’s actually not uncommon to see many of the world’s best players tuning in from time to time to do battle on the digital board.
The past few years has seen the popularity of chess sky-rocket.
The release of Netflix’s popular drama The Queen’s Gambit introduced the strategic depth and elegance of the game to whole new audiences around the globe.
At the same time, grandmaster Magnus Carlsen was renovating the stuffy image of the chess prodigy with his rock ‘n’ roll attitude and irreverent persona.
Now, as chess finds a new home on the Twitch platform as one of the world’s fastest growing esports, and the IOC is carefully weighing up its prospects as a future Olympic sport, its heyday may yet be ahead of us still.
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