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I was reading about the PS5 and the new Xbox and it felt like game consoles improve themselves by using existing (high end) technology. This made me wonder if any new (at the time of creation) technology has been invented which came from videogames.

A quick internet search shows many results on how games evolved over the years and how they have incorporated modern technology but it seems that nothing new has come out of the video game industry other than video games. Is this true?

By new technology I mean anything from hardware to graphics and other fields.

Have videogames advanced technology or are they only for entertainment?

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    This question is a built difficult to answer. What exactly do you mean by advanced technology? AI? Physics? Engineering? Real-World problems? They certainly benefit from Video Games, but idk if we can say they were the catalyst to advancement.
    – Rapitor
    Commented Mar 21, 2020 at 20:52
  • @Rapitor When you say other fields benefit from Video Games, do you have any examples? That would be quite interesting to read about. How have Video Games incentivized any of the mentioned fields?
    – Marcus
    Commented Mar 21, 2020 at 21:28

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Gaming is not just for entertainment, I didn't specifically study this at University but I did complete a module on the topic. What you're specifically looking for, I believe, is Serious Games.

A good video on the subject can be found here

Their main goal isn't so much to play for entertain but rather to allow you to teach a topic as well as making it more accessible and/or cheaper than having someone doing said exercise in the real world.

Some examples of Serious Games and their applications.

  1. Flight Simulators (Microsoft as a prime example)
  2. Programming "gamification" (Scratch by MIT as an example)
  3. Surgery and medical simulation (Paper discussing this)

It actually covers a wide range of things from simulation to AI and most modern subjects use some form of Serious Games.

With this in mind, we should now ask ourselves if this has actually advanced technology and the answer is simply yes. A good example would be Microsoft's new flight simulator which will be making use of new technology on a level that has never been seen before. An example being the use of auto-generation within their bing map to create 3D structures that are accurate to the real world. A video that covers this can be found here

Now we can also look at this from a hardware point of view and again we would find that indeed gaming is pushing new technologies. A good example of this would be NVIDIA RTX Ray Tracing or G-Sync.

I'm really only scratching the surface but hopefully, this will help answer your question.

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