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Originally posted by Undertoad
I don't remember any theoretical goal of, say, saving humanity or the world. (In the 70s, gameplay fun hadn't advanced to the point where an actual goal was required. Turning the knobs and watching the display was all we had, but we liked it.)
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The first single-player mass-market game I can think of that had an actual "you win" ending was Adventure, for the Atari 2600 (released in 1980). Everything else were either sports games (which had timers), competitive games (Space War, Combat, Air-Sea Battle, etc. with a winner and a loser) or play-endlessly-until-you-lose games (Space Invaders, Breakout).
Games with "winning" goals were rare until later in the 80's. In general, if you were good enough at many games, you could play forever or until a variable overflow caused a crash. Pitfall! comes to mind as an early-80's game with very-well-designed goals -- it had both a final "winning" goal (collecting all 32 treasures), a score by which to measure your progress towards that goal (so it wasn't a simple win/lose binary), limited lives AND a timer.
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28 years later, it's obvious that we were never in danger of running out of these things; economics, innovation, and productivity have twiddled the knobs where no single person ever could.
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But had awareness of the problem not been increased by the environmental Chicken Littles, would there have been as much R&D and effort poured into said innovation and productivity, and might we be worse off for it today? (That's not to say that we'd be bone-dry on oil today, but as the Jewish mother said of chicken soup, "Environmental warnings may not help, but they can't hoit.")
Watching advances in food production, fossil fuel production/management, etc. is sort of like watching Moore's Law in action. I marvel at the ingenuity involved and how technology keeps striding forwards, but a little voice at the back of my head keeps mumbling "But that can't keep up forever, can it?"