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EGM On the Future of Games
A few issues back, EGM ran a cover story theorizing on what gaming would be like in the future. Attempting to sidestep the easy answers of neural interfaces and crazy inventions, the editors at the magazine spoke with game makers of all stripes to get a feeling for the pulse of gaming in the next twenty years. They discuss everything from control to display, to the business of gaming itself. "How long until Bleszinski's dream comes true? Answering that question is just one of the goals of this months-in-the-making cover story. We've asked experts across the industry to track the next 20 years of everything from game-design trends to the evolution of your living room. A two-decade forecast, we figure, is near-term enough to be tangible (we're staying away from silly sci-fi stuff) but far enough out to fire up your imagination. And maybe give you some kick-ass dreams, too. Your trip to 2027 begins now...."
My interest in the plug-in matrix type game is to visit the billions of places I'll never afford to be able to go, or that simply aren't possible. How about being a noble in the dark ages? Or a knight in a battle? Or be king in your own fantasy world and run the universe. These sorts of "games" would not only be entertaining to the inquisitive type, but would be quite educating as well, both in the strictly historical sense, yet also in the real life sense-- where else would you learn the complexities of running a kingdom? Where could you spar "for real" without fear of getting hurt?
But in reality, games will be the same they are now, there will be enough cool new features here and there to get you to buy it, but none more; else what would they put in the next game? We'll get the same old same old from the usuals, marketed to heaven and shipped from hell.
Why assume that consoles are going to be around? Or in a common area? I've been playing video games since around 1982 (when I wrote a crappy Asteroids clone in BASIC on my VIC-20). The last console I owned came with an orange plastic gun and a copy of Duck Hunt. Consoles have a horrible interface when compared to PCs, and until recently, TVs had a horrible screen on which to display games.
More than that: I have a very nice set of computers in my office, and only one TV (which is in the family room). My 24" LCD can display pretty much any game beautifully, and someone can watch TV if they want at the same time. People can do this without interrupting each other. If I want to play a video game, I want a little peace and quiet, a little alone time. I don't want to be in the middle of the family room. I think the rest of the house (who might be arguing over the remote) wants the same.
Anyway, I'm probably in the minority, but I don't ever see myself buying a console, or playing video games in the living room.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
This would be really powerful for dream psychology. Meaning if it can respond to your thoughts you can work though your own pain and fear of the past, by living it in the dream world created in realtime. Today lucid dreaming can be a powerful tool because during the dream state, the mind trys to work on problems that you might be having a hard time dealing with during your waking hours. Some times fear and pain of past experiences can cause you to live your life in a less meaningful way, and dreaming helps you overcome that. But somethings take allot of time to get though, unless you are seeing a hypnotherpist. To be able to call this type of imagery up at will would probably cause an evolutionary shift in how we handle situations that we stumble though by relying on past negative experiences that don't do our current situations any justice.
I can see us coming to terms with things we have done or had done to us in the past in an accelerated pace. Alowing us to transcend the substantial weight of the ego, making easier for us to truly live in the now.
In 20 years, we'll all be playing Duke Nukem Forever...
The world always seems brighter when you've just made something that wasn't there before. - Neil Gaiman
Games will all be web based, using some souped up evolution of Flash or whatever, and you'll have to log in to play; this will make any kind of piracy irrelevant. The servers will control all access to the game and thus you always need access rights. And cheating will then be impossible, too.
Of course 10ghz multi core processors with 64gb RAM will be the norm by 2027... *eek*
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Now that we have some broadband penetration, at the theoretical level of networking that thousands of players to play at once if you can get over the video card and memory bottlenecks caused by thousands of players. P2P is a good solution, but even at the client-server model you can stop the number of connections being n^2. Here's the good part: if you're running a mostly melee video game: you don't have to update people that are far from you as often. You update the closest 4 people at 50 ms increments, and then as you go outwards, you send packets less frequently. It turns out that a melee game like a Tekken MMOG can easily have 1000 combatants on the field at once. It takes a little bit more work to get the next 9000 combatants, but theoretically it is possible with P2P melee games.
God spoke to me.
That's the question every developer on the planet would love to answer. "If I saw a whole new genre that needed to be created, I'd probably go create it myself," says Warren Spector. "The fact is, no one can predict a new genre's creation. I feel pretty safe in saying that someone, probably a 12-year-old staring at the ceiling avoiding doing her homework, will create something entirely new in the next 20 years, but I wouldn't presume to say what that might be."
Translation : we don't know what will be created within the next 20 years, but one thing's for sure, new things will be created, and some of them might be created by people who currently are children. Or to make it simpler, we don't know what will happen in the future, but things will happen, and young people who'll grow up in the future will make some of these things happen.
And about how long games should last, what about the next trend is not games which have a defined duration like adventure games do, but rather an undefined duration, like, open ended games? Why should we have nothing but games that can be completed? And why so much emphasis on having stories? If we cared so much about stories when we want to have fun, then how come we now have nothing but plot-less porn movies?
You just got troll'd!
In 20 years, we'll smell our avatar's farts. Huge advance. As a result, we'll all be having sex in 3d virtual worlds instead of the real world. For the first time in human history, recreation will be fully separated from procreation.
r -has-arrived.html/ + http://www.fuckingmachines.com/ + http://www.nvidia.com/page/home.html/ = http://www.3d-sexgames.com/
http://www.buzzle.com/articles/day-smelly-compute
Probably won't take 20 years. All the pieces are there, just waiting for some shameless pervert to assemble and market them.
> My interest in the plug-in matrix type game is to visit the billions of places I'll never...be able to go.
Like a vagina?
Oh come on. You wish you thought of this.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
This assessment couldn't possibly be farther than what I want to get out of gaming.
One theme tends to ring clear: INTERACTIVITY, INTERACTIVITY, INTERACTIVITY! And to that, I'm yelling back, STOP, STOP, STOP! It's difficult to up interactivity without in some ways destroying immersion. The more control the audience has over the environment, the less they're able to freely immerse themselves in it. I have no interest in creating an environment or a persona, I'd like to see what a great artist can come up with, and experience that... the same way I love listening to a great piece of music.
I love how their definition of RPG seems to be limited to the much smaller subset of American PC-style RPGs. That definition may be a realistic one, but it's pretty much moot for a good 75% of games that are considered "RPGs". So what if half the genre needs a new name, that's what they're called.
Also, I found the definition for "platform game" to be completely wrong, and over-complicated: A platform game is simply an adventure game in which the character's movements are key to progressing through the environment. A staple has been to have a plethora of floating and moving platforms... hence the genre name, "platform game". Some have unrealistic graphics... some don't. Many traditional adventure games have unrealistic and stylized graphics too... but I'm noone's going to call the latest Monkey Island a platform game. Action Adventure and Platformers are merging to the point of indistinguishability. Every action/adventure these days has platform elements, and platformers are fastly becoming epic and intriquite like their action/adventure counterparts. But it's not graphical style that dictates the traditional boundary.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.