I'm asking because I really don't know. I was researching and found a couple of interesting years.

1958 - Tennis for two was created in a laboratory. It used an Oscilloscope screen,

1961 - Spacewar, a game for a very expensive computer was created.

1972 - Pong was released, becoming a success. Also, Odyssey started the 1st generation of consoles.

I think there's more, but those were the dates I was considering... So, would one of them be the true year when gaming was born? Or do you think another event was more important?

1972 - Pong was the dawn of gaming.

Games on mainframes and the Magnavox Odyssey are interesting facts, but they didn't creating the entertainment medium known as gaming. Pong was the first game with significant commercial appeal. It's not enough to simply create a video game if no one wants to play it.

Pong

That's a very good point.

Pong, because it was my mom's first video game (she's not a gamer).

Pong 

Still incredibly playable with the right controller 

The dawn of gaming is pretty clearly Pong in 1972.

If we want to talk about gaming as a hobby, I'd put the dawn of that about a decade later, when the Atari 2600 achieved mainstream sales success.

Talking of the Magnavox Odyssey created by the man called the father of Video Games Ralph H. Baer and pong from Atari pioneered by Nolan Bushnell, it turns out both have a shared history, Nolan Bushnell wanted a tennis style game so engineer Allen Alcorn designed and built Pong mainly as a training exercise and then it was put into a cabinet and set up in a local cafe where it was popular later on during licencing negotiates Alcorn was called out to fix a problem with the machine only to find out it was caused by being blocked full of coins this lead to Atari deciding not to licence the game and manufacture it themselves where the Magnavox and Ralph H. Baer comes into the picture is Allen Alcorn the creator of Pong says the idea for Pong came from Nolan seeing a demonstration of a Magnavox tennis game, while this shows that mass market success isn't always directly attributable to the markets originators and cross pollinated ideas along with evolution and refinement quite often play a major part in moving things forward, it also shows that without one there wouldn't be the other so using dawn in the context of the beginning I give the dawn of gaming to Ralph H. Baer and the Magnovox .

It's important to have clear terms

• 1958 - Dawn of Video Games
• 1962 - Dawn of video game distribution
• 1971/1972 - Dawn of the video game INDUSTRY , arcade gaming, video game consoles, etc.
• 1976 - Dawn of PC Gaming industry (Microchess), Dawn of Handheld gaming (Auto Race)

If you are looking at actual computers (otherwise all kinds of things count, even Pinball) then you are looking at things like Space Wars - you can't ignore it because computers were expensive. If you don't count "non-computers", then the Magnavox Odyssey and Pong consoles aren't in contention...

To be controversial, I will propose the date as the release of the 6502 processor: 1975. This was in the Atari 2600, Commodore PET/VIC20/64 and NES.