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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."
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.
Here's your sig.
Duke Nukem Forever still won't be out, but Leisure Suit Larry will be the new most anticipated game.
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
"Don't Forget to bring a towel!"
"The Most Fun Possible on 4 wheels" is at SunBuggy in Las Vegas
When I read about the towel interface I got really excited. I hope this means I'll be able to put the towel over my head and play the old Infocom game Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Because you never want to go anywhere without a towel. Douglas Adams was ahead of his time.
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.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I very much respect Bruce Sterling; I loved Holy Fire and "Red Star, Winter Orbit", and his writing about cyberpunk itself is even good.
However, in this case he's mostly hamming it up LARPing a character from Rainbows End.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
... useless.
35 years ago was 1973. Richard Nixon was in office. We were decades away from the personal computer, the Internet, MUDs, and MMORPGs. Who in God's name could predict how instancing in WoW trades off versus public quests in Warhammer? For that matter, who PRIOR TO THE RELEASE OF FREAKING DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS would have predicted that **ten million people** really want to spend their time pretending to slay those green thingees that English professor dude wrote some fairy tale about?
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.