With Wimbledon under way, I am going to grasp the opportunity to make a perhaps contentious claim: tennis is the most important sport in the history of video games. Sure, nowadays the big sellers are EA Sports FC, Madden and NBA 2K, but tennis has been foundational to the industry. It was a simple bat-and-ball game, created in 1958 by scientist William Higinbotham at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, that is widely the considered the first ever video game created purely for entertainment. Tennis for Two ran on an oscilloscope and was designed as a minor diversion for visitors attending the lab's annual open day, but when people started playing, a queue developed that eventually extended out of the front door and around the side of the building. It was the first indication that computer games might turn out to be popular.

It is a game about love and identity, but it also has forklift truck races. It is a game about bloody revenge, but while you're waiting to retaliate, you can buy lottery tickets and visit the arcade. When Bafta recently asked gamers to vote on the most influential game of all time, I'm not sure even the most ardent Sega fans would have gambled on the success of an idiosyncratic Dreamcast adventure from 1999. Yet the results, released on Thursday morning, show Shenmue at No 1, with perhaps more predictable contenders Doom and Super Mario Bros coming in second and third respectively. How has this happened, especially considering the game was considered a financial failure at the time of its release, falling short of recouping its then staggering development costs (a reported 70m, which would now get you about a third of Horizon Forbidden West or Star Wars Outlaws)?

The recent leaps in complexity and fluency of Large Language Models (LLMs) mean that, for the first time in human history, people can interact with computers using natural language alone. This creates monumental possibilities of automation and accessibility of computing, but also raises severe security and safety threats: When everyone can interact with LLMs, everyone can potentially break into the systems running LLMs. All it takes is creative use of language. This paper presents Hacc-Man, a game which challenges its players to "jailbreak" an LLM: subvert the LLM to output something that it is not intended to. Jailbreaking is at the intersection between creative problem solving and LLM security. The purpose of the game is threefold: 1. To heighten awareness of the risks of deploying fragile LLMs in everyday systems, 2. To heighten people's self-efficacy in interacting with LLMs, and 3. To discover the creative problem solving strategies, people deploy in this novel context.

In need of a quiet getaway after completing my fourth novel, last week I booked a hotel on the seafront in Paignton, Devon and planned to spend three days wandering about and reading in cafes. As soon as I arrived, however, I saw that there were several arcades on the main street and on the pier. Obviously, I had to visit them all. As a child living in Cheshire in the 1980s, I spent many happy summer days in the arcades along the Golden Mile in Blackpool. These vast cathedrals of leisure, their exterior walls covered in flashing multicoloured light bulbs, were crammed with the video games of the era.

Last year, Lego released a set for the Atari 2600 console released in the 1970s, and now it's paying homage to the definitive '80s arcade game. The 2,650-piece Logo Icons Pac-Man set recreates the classic Pac-Man arcade cabinet, complete with a light-up coin-slot, joystick and mechanical crank that lets you move characters around the maze mechanically (though not actually play the game). There are brick versions of Pac-Man, along with the ghosts Blinky and Clyde, that can rotate on a base or be displayed on top of the cabinet. "Once complete, you can light up the coin-slot, plus there is a small vignette of a female mini-figure playing Pac-Man on an arcade, hidden inside the cabinet," Lego notes in a press release. Lego detailed some of the history for Pac-Man, noting that first focus test with members of the public was held 43 years ago today on May 22nd, 1980.

In the early 1980s, before the arrival of affordable home computers and major consoles, handheld electronic games were the most desirable hi-tech toys out there. From Mattel's Soccer and Auto Race, to the legendary Nintendo Game & Watch series, these pocket-sized gadgets were the kings of the Argos winter catalogue. Among the many emergent designs, however, the tabletop games were my favourites. Astro Wars, Caveman, Tron … these beautiful devices were designed to resemble miniature arcade machines, complete with teeny joysticks, buttons and detailed artwork. Most featured built-in vacuum fluorescent displays (VFDs) which were capable of emitting light and colour, unlike the dour monochrome screens found on LCD-based electronic games such as Game & Watch.

It's the early 1990s, and you – a college dropout – have been tasked with babysitting your chronically disappointed father's launderette business. It is not an exciting job. You pick up rubbish, you unclog the toilet, you load laundry into machines and take it out again. But in the back room, there's a small collection of arcade machines to help customers while away the time as their shirts dry, and there's enough money in their coin hoppers to buy a whole new cabinet. And so you begin the slow process of secretly transforming your father's business into a thriving arcade, reinvesting the cash you make from washing people's dirty underwear into buying more video games.

'OK, Dad, this is an incredible essay on the effects of grief and grey morality in a postapocalyptic society," says the eldest child, AKA the millennial. "It's got proper female characters, progressive takes on sexuality and tonnes of rain." "They've made a video game of The Handmaid's Tale?" And both games have the best ending ever." Now she has my interest. Video game endings fascinate me, because my generation started out with arcade games that didn't have them.

Pong was, however, the game that kickstarted the video arcade and home console industries, the profitability of its hardware and the simplicity of the gameplay – just two bats, a ball and a scoring system – ensuring its huge success and iconic afterlife. Devised by development engineer George J Klose as a means of repurposing calculator chips, it was a big success, leading to Mattel's legendary American football and soccer titles, and no doubt piquing the interest of a certain Nintendo engineer … It's a formative space shooter, with the player battling two computer controlled UFOs amid a rudimentary star-scape, but it's that curvaceous fibre glass cabinet (which earned the game a cameo in the 1973 sci-fi movie Soylent Green) that we'll always remember. Players aim and fire at passing battleships, targeting them via a rotating periscope fixed to the front of the cab. Its success inspired the nascent arcade industry to experiment with elaborate novelty interfaces, a factor that proved vital in maintaining the success of the coin-op industry as home consoles proliferated. Western Gun (1975, Taito) Alongside Tank, Western Gun (known as Gun Fight in the US) helped lay the foundations of the multidirectional shooter genre, allowing two players to navigate a cactus-strewn landscape, blasting six-guns at each other until one cowboy fell.

In the 1970s, Pong was a very popular video arcade game. It is a 2D video game emulating table tennis, i.e. you got a bat (a rectangle) you can move vertically and try to hit a "ball" (a moving square). If the ball hits the bounding box of the game, it bounces back like a billiard ball. If you miss the ball, the opponent scores. A single-player adaptation Breakout came out later, where the ball had the ability to destroy some blocks on the top of the screen and the bat moved to the bottom of the screen.