Short answers, pulled from the story.
The earliest example dates to 1947, when Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann filed a patent on the 25th of January 1947 for a "cathode-ray tube amusement device" inspired by radar displays. It was issued on the 14th of December 1948 as U.S. Patent 2455992 and let a user steer a dot on screen to simulate firing a missile at paper targets.
Computer Space, released in 1971 by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, was the first arcade video game. The first home video game console was the Magnavox Odyssey, released in 1972 and built from Ralph H. Baer's "Brown Box" prototype.
Both Ralph H. Baer and Nolan Bushnell have carried the title "Father of Video Games." Baer devised a television table tennis game at Sanders Associates in 1966, while Bushnell co-created Computer Space in 1971 and co-founded Atari, Inc.
The North American home video game market crashed in 1983 due to a loss of publishing control and saturation of the market, after many companies formed to clone popular games. Nintendo helped revive the industry by releasing the Nintendo Entertainment System in North America in 1985.
Ed Adlum is credited with first naming these machines video games, borrowing the word "video" from how Billboard described movie jukeboxes. The Oxford English Dictionary cited a BusinessWeek article from the 10th of November 1973 as the first printed use, though the term appears in a letter dated the 10th of July 1972.
Yes. In 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association that video games were a protected form of speech with artistic merit. The Art of Video Games exhibit appeared at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and toured other museums from 2012 to 2016.
By 2019 the global video game market drew estimated annual revenues across hardware, software, and services that were three times the size of the global music industry and four times that of the film industry.