If you think the first videogame ever made was Pong in 1972, guess again. If you think it was Spacewar!, a 1962 concoction of the MIT Tech Model Railroad Club, you are also wrong. The answer is Tennis for Two, designed by William A. Higinbotham, a physicist at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. The year was 1958. Higinbotham wanted to entertain the locals at the lab's open house. According to Heather Chaplin and Aaron Ruby, authors of Smartbomb: The Quest for Art, Entertainment, and Big Bucks in the Video game Revolution, the game's "net" was strung across an "oscilloscope's five-inch screen." The "ball" was "a single green blip. Willy attached two boxes with a knob and a button each to the oscilloscope, so that people could control the motion of the ball as it bounced back and forth." The game was a big hit but, as Higinbotham saw it, Tennis for Two was strictly a novelty--what purpose did it serve?--and after two years he dismantled it.

Today, videogames are a $10 billion industry--a couple of years ago their sales surpassed U.S. movie box-office receipts--and still people are asking the Higinbotham question. Some have blamed videogames for juvenile delinquency and violence. Take Grand Theft Auto, in which you can rise through the ranks of a criminal enterprise and "power up" with prostitutes. In one version of this game, players were able to unlock a secret sex scene (known as "Hot Coffee"), creating an outcry on Capitol Hill. Or take Left Behind,

Was Higinbotham right? Should we have pulled the plug? Maybe. But then we wouldn't have games like Civilization, the thinking man's Grand Theft Auto, the video game version of a classical education. Yes, there is the potential for violence, on a global scale no less. But really the game is more of a grandiose chessboard than a combat zone. Here's how it works.

Let's say you are "Caesar of the Romans," presiding over a tiny tribe at the dawn of time. You send out settlers to found cities across the continent and discover resources like horses and iron, and luxury goods such as wine and silk. The governors of your cities ask you what they should build--barracks, a temple, a marketplace? At the same time you must decide what your scientists should study--developing the wheel is always a good first step. As your nation begins to take shape, you will inevitably run into other civilizations, such as Egypt and Carthage, or maybe even the Germans and the French. All of these other powers (regardless of when they existed in real history) originate at the same time as yours, circa 4,000 B.C. And from ancient times up to the present and beyond, it is a race to see which of the various civilizations becomes culturally or militarily dominant.