In the time it took me to type my reply, "McSecret" closed her five hour old question on Yahoo! Answers. So my time & research aren't a total waste, I present to you my answer to Why do people invent video games?:

I mean really sure we love playing them but who invented the first video game? And why did they do it. I mean we had the atari system with games in it and we didn't have to buy video games for thirty dollars. And some video games make people so mad they curse or punch a hole into something. I am not saying that video games are bad I am fond of them to it's just that why did the first person to invent a video game make one?

US Patent 2,455,992, filed Jan 25, 1947, describes a "cathode ray tube amusement device" which played an early Missle Command like game. I don't know if such a game was ever actually built. If one were, it certainly didn't attract much attention.

The first graphical game for a computer was a version of tic-tac-toe called OXO, written for the EDSAC computer in 1952. Since there was just one EDSAC in the world, nobody outside Cambridge got to play it for many, many years. Why was it written? Probably to brighten the day of the workers who built and maintained the beast.

"Tennis For Two" was invented at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1958. The lab held "visitors days", and the scientists there wanted to create something interactive and fun to give the public a chance to experience some of the equipment they worked with and maybe get some more people interested in the work they did. It was a pong-like game whose output was displayed on an oscilliscope. It was based off analog and digital circuits, but didn't run a "program" of any sort. It was mostly just a novelty.

Spacewar!, written in 1962 for the PDP-1 computer at MIT. Digital Equipment sold fifty or so of these machines, and Spacewar! was ported to their successors over the years. Most notably, it was ported to the PDP-11 (a very famous minicomputer). This one we know was written by a pair of college-aged hackers looking for something fun to do with the new computer.

Sources:

US Patent 2,455,992
OXO (Wikipedia)
Tennis for Two
Spacewar! (Wikipedia)
Joystick Nation review
Many years of classic videogame & computer collecting

I've learned over the years that the only way Amy will try something new (be it an old movie, a TV show, a band, an activity, or even food) is for other people to say it's good. I guess my tastes are too eclectic…I don't know. All I know is that now all of a sudden she wants to try Indian food. For years, I've been bugging her to go to this local Indian restaurant and she hasn't wanted to. Then, she posted a blog entry about it, a bunch of people responded saying "Indian food is the shiznit, foshizzle!" and now she wants to hit the lunchtime buffet.

Last night I picked up some chicken kiev at Jewel, and of course she didn't want any.

So, could those of you out there reading this PLEASE post a comment about how absolutely WONDERFUL chicken kiev is? Be really generous with the praise. Make it sound like pure ambrosia.

Even better, podcasts seem to carry a lot of weight with her. So if you run a podcast, be sure to put in a good word for chicken kiev!

It amuses me greatly when people harken back to the "good old days", when sex wasn't used to sell magazines.

"Personally, I'm willing to close my eyes to Reverend Thornton's methods
– after all, the basket fund has already doubled last year's record."
Esquire cover from 1939

I was going to post a link to some 1920s lesbian erotica, but I have a pretty much PG rating going here and I'd kind of like to keep it.