Life After the Video Game Crash

codecasting writes "There's an interesting, very satirical story over at David Wong's Pointless Waste of Time where he makes a good case for the upcoming death of the video game industry. His key points include gaming platforms largely reaching a technological plateau, the aging of the 'Original Gamers' audience, and the slew of games that are just copies of the same game from last year, but with a new title and different cars/guns/bikinis/etc. An interesting and humorous read."

Comments

Not a death, but a transformation

[Samir Gupta]

I do not think that the game industry will die. Rather, I think it will actually expand, but in a way not envisioned by many.

Being an employee of a major Japanese video game corporation, as an avid gamer at heart, I have myself deplored the commercialization of games, and the tendency for games to be produced "cookie cutter" style in one of several well-explored genres, and to not sell unless it has a popular movie license behind it like Star Wars or Lord of the Rings, guns, and/or scantiily clad women -- even though the production values and budgets of today's games far outweigh those of before.

Yet, I do think that the enormous gains in technology on the hardware side will result in a transformation of the video game industry -- specifically breaking out of its roots in "entertainment".

Games, especially when powered by today and tomorrow's graphics hardware and multimodal I/O technology, have already been discovered by organizations such as military, fire, and police to be valuable education and training simulations. In fact, this year's GDC will have a Serious Games Summit to promote the use of game hardware and software for uses other than entertainment, for education and other uses.

At Nintendo, my research group has been heavily looking into ways to dissociate games with pure "entertainment", and have been working with the Japanese military and other groups to incorporate our hardware and software into their training, and even in their actual weapons systems.

Besides training, we are working with an unnamed Japanese automaker to explore the use of game controllers -- the product of our years of HCI research -- as an alternate control mechanism for tomororow's "drive by wire" automobiles which will hopefully greatly reduce the accident rate, especially for a generation of drivers already trained and honed on video games.

We are also working with underdeveloped nations such as China, to produce customized games such as "Super Marx Brothers" and "The Legend of Deng Xiaoping" to use as educational materials in their school systems, making their textbooks come alive.

These are just a few examples of how we in the industry are seeking to diversity, and why I feel the game industry is by far, the most exciting industry to work in today.