Perhaps you think that video games are a contemporary invention, but the reality is they've been around since 1950—albeit, in much simpler forms than the high-tech games available today. At the National Videogame Museum, you can learn more about the long history of gaming alongside fellow enthusiasts.

The best place to start is the Timeline of Consoles, which shows the lineage of contemporary video games. The first home console, Magnavox's Odyssey, showed up in 1972, and since then, more than 50 other consoles have joined the trend, each more advanced than the previous. Learn more about each at this exhibit, or actually play some of the old-school games at the '80s arcade called Pixel Dreams. You get four tokens to use at the arcade included with your admission, but you can always buy more and play your way around the entire arcade.

CC-BY-2.0/Flickr wwward0