Slashdot Mirror
Extrapolating the Near Future of Gaming
Sci-fi author Charlie Stross gave a keynote address at the recent LOGIN 2009 conference about what we can reasonably expect from games and game-related technology over the next 10 to 20 years. He takes a realistic look at the limitations we'll face with regard to processing power and bandwidth, and goes on to talk about how augmented reality software and aging gamers will affect future titles. Quoting:
"But the sixty-something gamers of 2020 are not the same as the sixty-somethings you know today. They're you, only twenty years older. By then, you'll have a forty year history of gaming; you won't take kindly to being patronised, or given in-game tasks calibrated for today's sixty-somethings. The codgergamers of 2030 will be comfortable with the narrative flow of games. They're much more likely to be bored by trite plotting and cliched dialog than todays gamers. They're going to need less twitchy user interfaces — ones compatible with aging reflexes and presbyopic eyes — but better plot, character, and narrative development. And they're going to be playing on these exotic gizmos descended from the iPhone and its clones: gadgets that don't so much provide access to the internet as smear the internet all over the meatspace world around their owners."
Thank you very much. You 60 year old gamers can keep playing your old people games while I enjoy mid-life.
we will be still waiting for DNF!
Those 60+ years old gamer will be a minority market in comparison to the 14-20 years old. Which is why today despite having 40 years old demographic, we still have a majority of game geared toward a less mature audience as a whole. And yes, I don't need to be 60 years old to recognize a trite story already made 100 times. I could already recognized that at 25. We don't get wisdom suddenly at 60 years old you know...
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
More like bionic eyes. It should be easy as long as they're connected to your blue tooth.
And wtf is it with the iPhone reference, sure these future devices will be descendents of the iPhone in the same way they'll be descendents of Nokia 5110 or the original Gameboy. Srsly, the iPhone is nothing more than a portable touchscreen device with a rather childish looking interface. To put a reference to it in your article is only an attempt to freeload off it's hype.
1. Develop radical new gameplay idea.
2. Get off my damn lawn!
3. Profit.
I think he would probably prefer the term SF.
Sci-fi is Hollywood entertainment with explosions, technobabble, and spaceships that make rumbling sounds as they travel through space. SF (speculative fiction) is something that might contain a bit of actual intelligence hidden inside.
It wasn't too long ago that I realized that in 2050 and 2060, old folks homes will be blasting metal so loud that their hard of hearing residents can hear it. By then, heavy metal will be what grandpa listens to and the young'ns will be listening to something equally infuriating and weird as linkin park is to our parents.
Anywho, instead of bridge or cribbage, there will be virtual dungeon crawls and WoW guild reunions. I think that the direction that games have been taking over the past 10 years has already pushed games to a point that they can be enjoyed by almost everybody with the proper background. While I won't be able to play quake 3 as well in 40 years as I did 8 years ago (when twitch gaming was at its peak and I was in practice), I might be a challange in 40 years in a game like bf2 that is more about resource usage, anticipation, and strategy. Granted there are narrow alley encounters where twitch wins, most of the kills (ignoring air combat) in bf2 came from having a resource (tank or apc), being in the right place, and seeing somebody before they saw you. All of that came from knowing the flow of the map and the more experienced player would most likely kill a rookie who doesn't know what's going on or how to handle the map. The experienced player will track along a hill, not make a silhouette, and watch choke points, they probably won't camp, and I will never equate camping with skill. So knowing how to traverse a map, handle your in game weapon, and not make yourself a target comes with experience and will lead to more kills than being able to whip around and headshot someone. If they can't pick you out, they can't headshot you.
So what I'm saying is that I will probably be playing games with veeery similar mechanics to those that I am playing now. Twitch gaming, a style that favored picking out movement from a sea of chaos, fast reflexes, and precise movements hasn't been in vogue for the past 5 years. I am certain, dead certain, that playing games like COD and bf2 have killed my abilities to be competitive in games like unreal 3, but in every pick up game I drop into in u3 (for the pc), I dominate. I was pretty OK in UT when it was at its peak and was mediocre at q3. I'd say that U3 is far more twitch than UT, but not as much as Q3. The twitch players aren't the majority of the FPS community. By the time i'm old and wrinkly, Twitch will be a long forgotten relic that we will talk about like people talk about terminals and punch cards.
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
Games are not art, and games are not a substitute for novels and movies. Games are games, and should play to their own strengths instead of poorly emulating other media. I hope that 20 years from now people will have realized that "narrative games" are a dead end. Interactive storytelling is "AI complete", so the only satisfactory way to include it in games is to use a real intelligent storyteller, as with pencil and paper RPGs. As graphics and physics simulation improve but narrative choice remains the same the railroading will only get more distracting.
The only change I anticipate in my game playing is switching from action to strategy if my reaction time slows too much.
I'm waiting for virtual reality gaming. Like the one they used to show on "Real Adventures of Johnny Quest". TFA mentions it briefly. No idea whether that kind of technology will be possible in 30 years.
Everything else is just wasting everyones money and time.
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
Have you seen what's out there on the Internet? I'm not sure I want that stuff smeared all over my meatspace.
... If anything it is the OLD TIMERS in the game industry making games, Chris Taylor, will Wright, etc... hardcore gamers grow up and get jobs in the gaming industry. The so called "young gamers" will get old one day too.
This stupid idea that all older gamers are a homogenous group vs younger gamers is stupid, there are lots of young gamers that prefer games that the older generation does because they are at HEART gamers. They aren't in gaming for the fads, they are in it for the fun.
There is discontent among older gamers about what they best games were newer vs older, we are not a homogenous group so lets not pretend that somehow young gamers will not like anything older gamers like and vice versa.
I refuse to believe my amazing Counter-Strike skills will diminish over time.
Because when I'm 60, I'll be fragging 16 year olds in the newest Counter-Strike iteration, and be able to retort to any flame with "Boy, I was playing this game when your daddy was in diapers".
By the way, in my post I made a few assumptions that should be cleared out. I ignored single player games because I have no clue if they'll be around in 40 years. Yes, there will be a demand for them, but they're also the easiest to pirate and have less replay value than multiplayer games. So while there may be a market for them, developers may stop making them in favor of MMO's or as tutorial modes for multiplayer. They may also finally find a voice and become as established as novels and graphics and authoring tools may become so advanced that a single author can purchase something titled gameshop pro and start whipping out a game that will be marketable in a year and the single player game market may be just as expansive as a borders book store, and just as affordable due to the competition.
I have no clue what is held for the SP market, but I did focus on the multiplayer dynamics, which is also what the summary focuses on. (I refuse to RTFA).
By the way, what I talk about in bf2 sounds similar to map control in q3, but map control is half of victory in q3, the rest is skill, reflexes, and winning fire fights. In bf2, winning an encounter is often an instance of spotting someone first, lining them up, and killing them first, less dodging, jumping, and fast reflexes. Its a fine difference but I could imagine a 64 year old Me doing just as well as a 24 year old Me in BF2. I can't say the same of q3. I also view Q3 to be the pinnacle of twitch gaming, almost everything after that was made more "accessible" to the "casual" gamer.
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
I can do it while stoned. Which is how I intend to spend my entire retirement. Until then I'll live in semi-retirement. ;)
But the sixty-something gamers of 2020 are not the same as the sixty-somethings you know today. They're you, only twenty years older.
Is this a dupe from Y2K? 2020 - 20 = 2000
And they're going to be playing on these exotic gizmos descended from the iPhone and its clones: gadgets
... with screens the size of a postage stamp?
He has to be kidding. I won't play games on my phone because the screen is too small, and I'm a "young guy". My grandma uses a magnifying glass to operate her TV remote control. I have a 24 inch monitor for a reason, and its not to justify buying pants with 24 inch wide pockets. Similarly, my nice zillion watt surround sound subwoofer speaker system is not quite as portable as my phone. Without a mouse or trackball I would not be able to play FPS.
Trying to convince me to "upgrade" from my current system to a cellphone is about as likely as convincing me to "upgrade" back to msdos 3.3, CGA graphics, and a 40 MB pre-IDE era hardcard.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
...gadgets that don't so much provide access to the internet as smear the internet all over the meatspace world around their owners
Using the term "meatspace", automatically identifies you a hipster doofus in my book...
Goofy, Geeky Gifts and More!
Its electronics and should concentrate on doing everything fast rather than trying to emulate the mechanical limitations of real life.
Prior to electronics, H. sapiens had thousands of years to adapt to the mechanical limitations of real life. Animations tap into that adaptation, giving the mammalian brain valuable subliminal cues as to how two pieces of information are related.
Something like Second Life 3.x, or the virtual world in Snow Crash. Or GTA as a MMORPG.
(I'm surprised that there isn't an online version of GTA yet. Admittedly it's tough to do well until the lag problem is solved. We need networks where you're guaranteed about 10KB/s with under 50ms of round trip delay, for the data that really has to be timely. The rest of the data (geometry updates, etc.) can have far more lag, but a fraction of the data needs priority. The QoS people need to get their act together, so that clients and servers can request a low-bandwidth low-latency end to end path. To make this work, the bandwidth has to be limited.)
Sci-fi is Hollywood entertainment with explosions, technobabble, and spaceships that make rumbling sounds as they travel through space.
The near vacuum of space does not transmit sound. But it does transmit electromagnetic signatures from a spacecraft that the navigation systems in the cockpits of other craft may render as sound.
Not really much point extrapolating beyond 2012... (now i would like to put a tounge in cheek or winky smiley but i fear in the /. world it's the mark of a moron... actually fuck it...) :P
[Single-player video games] may also finally find a voice and become as established as novels and graphics and authoring tools may become so advanced that a single author can purchase something titled gameshop pro and start whipping out a game that will be marketable in a year
Let me fix that: "authoring tools may become so advanced that a single author can purchase something titled Multimedia Fusion or Adobe Flash and start whipping out a game that will be marketable in a year." This already happens. The real question is whether console gatekeepers such as Nintendo are willing to open themselves up to microISVs.
Reading through that article made me think of the novel "Rainbow's End" by Vernor Vinge:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End
He spends a lot of time in that novel describing a world where augmented reality and total interconnectedness makes our day-to-day living into an ginourmous Second Life-esque, instant-messaging, avatar-riddled inferno.
I found it to be a difficult book to get through, because I kept thinking to myself, I don't believe people will be so banal as to take such incredible technology and make it into something so frivolous and pointless.
But, then I realize, it has already happened, and it's naive to think it won't happen again.
-- Marcio
I don't know about you, but I could really do with a prosthetic memory like that -- and as our populations age, as more people have to live with dementia, there'll be huge demand for it
Actually, if you look at all the current research going on, there is a good chance that by 2020 (and an extremely good chance by 2030) that we will have cures for most forms of dementia (i.e. Alzheimers etc.) by then.
Games of today look great, but a couple of aspects of some of the most popular games like GTA, Call of Duty and Resident Evil are outdated and I'll take the optimistic risk to say they'll soon start to disappear.
I'm talking about ultra linearity (yes, even GTA is very linear) and the annoying aspects that accompany it, most noticeably the "try this missing again and again and again until you succeed it", and to a lesser extent to put the player in a ultra scripted environment where you could pretty much dictate them what they have to do, and have to prevent them from doing such trivial things as jumping over a small fence. As games become ever increasingly realistic, those sorts of unrealistic limitations are becoming important threats to the player's suspension of disbelief, and game designers will I believe have to get more subtle and work their way around it.
But in my opinion both the problems of linearity and unrealistic limitations means that game designers and developers will enter an uphill battle to rethink the aforementioned ageing paradigms, but I think that in a way those new paradigms will be the new shiny graphics. To use the GTA series as an example, right now it's basically all centred around a long string of very scripted fixed missions cut with cinematics, with an "either succeed in all the required aspects or try again like nothing happened" system which is arguably incompatible with realism. In my opinion, the GTA of the future should be much more life-like, dynamic, one way to see how it would work would be like the Sims series, you are one person, you make encounters, create connections, obtain things from your connections such as jobs or whatever you may need, and everything you would do would have an influence of sorts. Fail a job and you have to deal with the consequences and impact on your reputation, start shooting people at random and you earn a reputation of psychopathic killer, by drugs, sell them on someone else's turf and watch things escalating with them, become a real estate agent, spend ten years in jail, join a gang, start a gang and delegate tasks, become a politician, etc, in other words, a free unscripted crime world/business world simulator.
I'm not saying it would be easy at all to create, but I think there is lots to be done and innovated in that domain, and I think and hope that within the next few years game designers will see themselves forced to explore such solutions, and if it becomes a crucial aspect of making a successful game then great resources, talent and work will be put into it and the results will be very much worth it. Since both the market and technology push us towards realism we'll have to make things realistic in more ways than just the reflections on cars or the physics of driving.
You just got troll'd!
But the sixty-something gamers of 2020 are not the same as the sixty-somethings you know today. They're you, only twenty years older. By then, you'll have a forty year history of gaming; you won't take kindly to being patronised, or given in-game tasks calibrated for today's sixty-somethings
Today's sixty-something gamer doesn't like being patronized either.
If you began with the PC in your thirties, you entered a game market that remarkably diverse and often explicitly "adult."
But not as the adolescent imagines it. You can't shoot your way through a Lucas adventure or a Maxis simulation.
For a senior, the most satisfying moments in a stealth shooter, an RPG or strategy game, come when you sense the most economical solution. You aren't role playing as 007 in his prime - you are playing the aging, wounded Batman of The Dark Night Returns or perhaps the very young Carrie Kelley.
Without gadgets. Without armor.
Using only her wits to survive.
You don't have to be in your sixties to have "presbyopic" eyes.
And the notion that we're going to be playing our games on "exotic gizmos descended from the iPhone" sort of defies current trends.
I especially can't imagine playing a game on any descendant of the iPhone if I'm going to have "presbyopic eyes", unless the author foresees us connecting our iPhone-descendants to large displays and HID controllers, which sort of defeats the whole purpose of using the iPhone descendant.
Other than all of its assertions, the article is fine.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Link to full text on Charlie's blog: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/05/login_2009_keynote_gaming_in_t.html
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Lensflare. JJ Abrams certainly agrees.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
Plot? Character? Narrative development? WTF? These are games. Guitar Hero needs none of the above to be totally entertaining, and the product of the decade.
Obviously to a writer, the writing is the big thing game developers should work on. He's missing the big picture.
There is nothing wrong with achievements. They are not unethical at all.
They are part of gaming experience that many players find enjoyable. Gamers are not required to complete achievements, so as long as the player can choose whether he will pursue or not the achievements and still gets an enjoyable experience for doing or while not doing so, it is fine.
If there is still a sizable amount of game content and/or other games to satisfy the unsatisfied player, there is no need to complain.
The good, the evil and the vacuum tubes.
This: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_stick
Also this: http://xkcd.com/243/
Have fun.
The good, the evil and the vacuum tubes.
...and actually people volunteered for it. There was a lot of hype.
In case you are wondering:
The good, the evil and the vacuum tubes.
experience under my belt. And today's games bore the crap out of me. Except World of Goo.
Movies are art because movies can inspire the full range of human emotions.
It depends on your involvement. If I chose not to get involved with a movie I can watch it without missing one bit and not to feel what was intended, doing witty remarks instead. Same for games.
A game allow a higher level of immersion because of its interactive nature. Some young gamers often are agitated when they play, moving towards the direction they want the character go. Often gamers not only relate to the main character, as it is expected but feel as is it was some sort of impersonation of themselves.
Maybe game plots don't appeal you and you doesn't feel very involved. If you did, you would see that games can at the very least cause the same effects as movies... unless they are crappy.
Personally lack of plot adds to the crappiness level, YMMV. It would be interesting to know what kind of games you do like.
The good, the evil and the vacuum tubes.
New Achievement: Style of the Time Age 60+ while wearing or talking about wearing an onion on your belt.
You can pry my cribbage from my cold, arthritic hands.
"Anonymous could not immediately be reached for further comment." - International Business Times
His picture of the future is an interesting one - but his grasp of the past is shaky at best. In particular, the picture of the civilian aerospace industry he paints is largely wrong.
You know, we've had the vacuum tube for many years now, and despite this we can only fit one or two inside of something made for the consumer. As I understand it, in today's computers they have to constantly replace vacuum tubes. Even if we could fit thousands of vacuum tubes in a consumer appliance or machine, nobody would be willing to use it as it would constantly break. He is also one of this science fiction writers that see some things advancing and others not advancing for no particular reason. It's like "The Final Question", a computer smarter than everybody put together, but nobody invented the Internet or home computer.
We will still be landing on omaha beach.
Zombies need to be killed. AGAIN.
The princess will still need to be saved.
Here's the google cache: http://209.85.229.132/search?q=cache:hfakwNq-YlQJ:www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/05/login_2009_keynote_gaming_in_t.html+http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/05/login_2009_keynote_gaming_in_t.html&hl=en&gl=uk&strip=1
The near future of gaming is easy to predict... More and more publishers will go bankrupt and/or get consolidated with the big ones. In the past 20 years development costs have been increasing exponentially, while revenue hasn't been increasing as fast. It's easy to tell where that leads to.
The cause is mainly that graphics are getting better and better, which means more and more artists are required to make a game. Polyphony Digital, makers of the Gran Turismo series have said a single artist takes 6 months to make a car model for GT5 (for PS3), whereas the same artist took a month doing so for GT3 and GT4 (for PS2), and just a day in GT and GT2 (for PS1).
This has lead to a lot of bankruptcies and consolidation in the gaming industry, with publishers like EA growing a lot. However, we're now at the point that even these big fish are losing money, with EA full of red ink ever since the current generation of consoles started. Take 2 has been posting losses even with its GTA4 multi-million-units cash cow (which has allegedly cost around $100 million to develop. Just open up google finance and check out these companies earnings, they're consistently dismal in the last few quarters/years.
In recent times, Midway has gone bankrupt, troubled Eidos got bought out by Square-Enix and 3D Realms has gone bankrupt. More will follow, THQ being one of the most troubled in the short term.
About the only big companies making money on gaming these days are Nintendo (which took a cautious approach to graphical capabilites in order to keep development costs manageable), Ubisoft, Epic (which makes a lot of its money from engine licensing), Valve (which has Steam) and of course Activision-Blizzard with the WoW cash cow.
Graphical improvements must be toned down for the gaming industry to be viable. Expect the next generation of consoles to take a Wii-like approach towards hardware power, increasing little over the previous generation. Instead the gaming industry will have to generate real innovation, instead of just more polygons and pixels on the screen.
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
Erm, no, actually, I'm 42 and I listened to plenty of metal when I was a teenager, and the fact is, your body changes as you get older, and your mind is part of your body. You just aren't interested in that kind of obnoxious crap any more after a while. You can be all nostalgic and WISH you were still into it, but that doesn't change anything.
There won't be any "toning down" of graphical improvements. At the very least, games will be held to current graphical standards. The expectations have already been set. What is needed here is better tools. The single artist needs to be able to once again create that car model in a day. Raw graphics capability has grown without a matching increase in the competency of game engines and authoring tools. So there is big money for whoever can figure out how to start addressing that.
Along with the decline of big budget gaming, you'll see an increase in small time developers with low budgets and overhead who simply make a good game. You'll see far fewer GTA4s and COD4s, and many more World of Goos, Everyday Shooters, and Cave Stories. This is a good thing, MO.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Games are games, but these things aren't defined to be games. To be honest, they aren't defined to be much of anything specific. They can be fiction, a game, a social experience, a workplace and many other things. Any given implementation can focus on whatever the designers are interested in.
As for the linked article, the author is a science fiction author, so his future is colored by the idea that storytelling is important. For me, just being able to experience new things online with other folks is important. I don't care about winning or losing, reading storylines or making friends online.
My future is colored by my hope that I'll get more of the sort of thing that I enjoy - those new virtual experiences. I also hope that y'all get more of what you enjoy so long as it's something that isn't going to mess up your life.
I haven't read every comment, but a quick search of the higher-modded ones indicates the word "Moore" doesn't even come up.
It seems that Stross's comments on the "End of Moore's Law" around 2020-2030 are not a matter for argument.
In 1987, a Scientific American article by the head of IBM's research division wouldn't commit to improvements beyond about 2002. By 1995, staff writer Gary Stix was back to point out that at 30 nm, electrons would start to wander between circuit elements by quantum tunnelling alone. In 1996, a father/son team, Dan & Jerry Hutcheson, with about 40 years in the business between them, noted that the problem wasn't just physics, but the point where nobody was willing to pay enough for a better chip to fund the exponentially-more-costly fabs. They were figuring on the curve flattening out by a few years ago.
Intel gleefully made fun of all of them with their introduction to 45nm technology in late 2007, but the problem was that 2007 was a little "late" already for 45nm - a strict Moore's Law prediction from 10 years earlier would have had it happen around 2003-4. I still have a news clipping of Andy Grove in the early 90's was predicting 4 GHz for 2001. (Still waiting, Andy.)
I summarized it all in a little essay for my local Unix group in 1996, The End of Moore's Law, Thank God! that has duly been made fun of since, as it repeated the "around 2005" predictions.
It's easier to make fun of if you assume the predictors are talking about a brick wall being hit, a "Last Chip" with no successors.
But nobody seems to be making fun of Stross, I think partly because we now have seen a sharp tapering off of GHz increases, years ago; and partly because the imaginary "wall" is now understood to mean a gradual flattening of the curve - we'll only realize it's actually flat after it has been for a few years.
I think those old 2005 predictions were pretty good in sense that it was the "beginning of the end", when the curve started to bend, when the 2nd derivative went negative, if you will.
The Hutchesons in 1996 talked a lot about the industry fragmenting into specialized products when the improvements tapered off; and now Mr. Stross is echoing that idea.
Normally, these discussions bring out what I call "Moore Boosters" who Just Believe, they got Faith, that the exponential curve will continue forever, "They'll Think Of Something". I'm not sure whether Stross placated these types with his handwave to quantum computing (don't forget DNA test-tube computers...) or whether they're finally going away. Guys: the industry has performed the Exponential Miracle for five decades now. But it's unwise to ever *expect* miracles, and less wise still to count on them.
The smart move is to assume Stross has it figured about right (he has done his homework) and then you can have only pleasant surprises.
Erm, yes, actually. I'm 40 (I don't think these 2 years make a difference, given my musical record) and started listening to Metal with 12 and still enjoy it as much as when I discovered it back in the days. Granted, I listen to different (read: more) bands now. But I never felt that Metal is no longer for me. The opposite is true: while as a kid I could only afford to buy a LP here and there, I'm now able to buy (Yes, BUY. Not download.) everything record I like. And not to mention that visiting concerts is now much easier than with 12. My parents had the typical prejudices against those "long haired do-not-goods" and rarely let me go somewhere.
Some of my favorite moments of gaming life were in the Thief and System Shock (no, not Bioshock) mythologies.
Infocom's text adventures drew from every genre in popular fiction, except perhaps the gangster story and the western.
Sierra and Lucas in their prime had a similar range.
"The Dig" was a science problem story - the sort of thing Arthur Clarke cut his teeth on - set in an environment heart-breaking in its loneliness and isolation.
Later games like "Grim Fandango" and "Planescape: Torment" were true journeys of the soul.
The console game designer has played animal characters against their comic stereotypes.
Children had at least a nominal presence as NPCs in "Fallout." It shapes your thinking and decisions in very subtle ways.
"Bioshock" takes you a place that you wish you had the time to explore more fully. There can be greater rewards and deeper satisfaction to be found in a game than the body count.
When I'm a 60 something gamer, I'm going to have plenty of built-in response times (not reflexes... that's when a doctor hits your knee).