Bruce Sterling On Gaming in 2043

At this year's Austin Game Developer's Conference, sci-fi author Bruce Sterling gave a keynote speech about the gaming industry — looking back from the year 2043. GameSetWatch has a summary of the speech, and the full transcript is also available. "So do people make games for this platform? Sure. Not the sort that were built for flat glass screens. We don't do those anymore, cumbersome, like a covered wagon. We don't pretend a glass screen is a window into another virtual worlds. The idea sounds silly, it's all the same world. It's always been the same world, it just changes. What we do is hang the towel [his metaphor for cheap, ubiquitous, unremarkable computers in the future] up in midair and gaze through it. And all the light that hits the far side passes through it except that the image is tagged and altered. We don't call it augmented reality, because we think reality is real, but you can still have fun with a game interface is that is everything you see."

Comments

Typical flawed predictions

[TriggerFin]

That's one game, or even several. It isn't every game, or even most games. I want to see a place other than the room I'm sitting in when I take a break a break from reality.

Re:Everything Together

[Valdrax]

Considering the level of industry cooperation and coordination involved, I don't unless the game or computer industry as a whole collapses into a monopoly, either natural or government mandated.

The barriers to doing this a social, economic, and political -- not technical. We already have Xbox Live doing much of that now. I doubt those barriers to One Gaming Profile To Rule Them All are going to go away no matter the march of progress.