In its most literal sense, social gaming is ancient history. It started about 5,000 years ago with origins traceable back to Egypt. It could have existed long before that but God knows what civilization played them, what games they are, when, where and why.

But as far as modern gaming is concerned, spawned by the 1972 Magnavox Odyssey and 1977 Atari 24600, things have come a long way from being solitary and home-based, to being socially competitive and wirelessly-connected, and from being single-player to massive multiplayer online.

The evolution of games entails the development of the social experience as well.  The single-player was too unsociable–they had to make it two-player; then the traditional two-player is home-based, but it would be better if one can bring it wherever so they can enjoy it anytime.  Then people started yearning for a bigger audience with which to socialize, while being portable at the same time, thus, giving birth to the social online games as we know them today.

Healthy gamers? That’s a laugh

Game developers are also aware of the health concerns that comes from being too stagnant as you hook yourself up with too much computer games. Therefore, they fashioned something that’s not only mentally and socially interactive, but physically-engaging as well. That’s how Nintendo Wii and Microsoft Kinect came to be. Over decades of development, games are geared more and more towards bringing comfort into our lives. From network connectivity to internet connectivity and social media, it just keeps getting cozier.

Total popularity

Games are immensely successful. See, from 150-250 million gamers a decade ago, it has surged to 1-1.2 billion today.  It’s also around this time that games developed from play only, to voice-integrated, and then with video. The game industry is expected to swell up from $16.1 billion today to $19.2 by 2014.  On a per platform basis, 56 percent of players are console-based, 53 percent online casual, and 41 percent social network.

Here’s an interesting infographic that shows the social evolution of games.