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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."
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?
Have you seen what's out there on the Internet? I'm not sure I want that stuff smeared all over my meatspace.
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?
While some games are just games, there are many games that have a very artistic style to them. I remember playing Fallout 3 and just stopping and staring around at the scenery once I got outside of vault 101. It is certainly safe to say that many games transcend being simply entertainment, and have enough style and beauty to invoke a powerful emotional reaction in many of its users. Isn't creating an emotional response what art is all about?
Games are not art
Says who?
Sure, there's no need for a plot in a simple shoot 'em up, but I think good storytelling is important to things such as role-playing games. No, it's not a full blown AI, but neither is a book or a movie. Surely part of the fun is using your imagination, just as we are expected to do for books.
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.
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.
The only emotions a good game inspires are frustration of defeat and joy of victory... If a game is trying to inspire any other emotion it is failing as a game.
Obviously, you haven't played anything after Pac-Man.
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
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.
Movies are art because movies can inspire the full range of human emotions. The only emotions a good game inspires are frustration of defeat and joy of victory (which cannot exist without the former). These emotions are intrinsically linked to the game itself, and don't require any cutscenes or dialog.
Um, have you played anything more involved than an Atari 2600 game?
If a game is trying to inspire any other emotion it is failing as a game. You can tell this is true because removing all the "gameplay" would improve it, eg. JRPGs would be better without all the random battles, wandering about the map, item management, etc. If the game were really good you would get annoyed at all the interruptions to the playable parts. It would be better to separate the "artistic" parts and repackage them as a movie or illustrated novel.
So wait, you would rather have a J-RPG thats a point and click adventure? Sure, sometimes random battles are annoying, sure, sometimes you think you would do better without them, but they add depth to the game and can be used in very creative ways (such as Pokemon). Wandering about the map is also part of the fun, otherwise the game becomes a chore. So what do you want to do? Have a point and click adventure with no plot, only boss battles and a giant checklist?
Games are supposed to be fun, not something you have to grind through to get to the "plot" and "achievements". The fun comes from challenging yourself and developing your skills, not mindlessly pressing buttons like a laboratory rat.
Um, so what games do you classify as "fun"? Pac-Man, Galaga, Space Invaders? You obviously haven't experienced a game with a decent storyline. They can invoke many, many, many emotions. Have you not played Final Fantasy VII and experienced its plot? Have you never played Halo and realized that it was a good game because of the strong plot?
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
"while I enjoy mid-life"
Crysis?
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.