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In 5 Years, Games Experience Will Move From Discrete To Indiscrete, Says EA CEO (theverge.com)
The Verge has an insightful interview of Andrew Wilson, CEO of Electronic Arts. In the wide-ranging interview, Wilson has talked about how the landscape of video games have changed over the years, and where it will be in the next few years. One remarkable comment he has made is about how video games will move from discrete experience that we have today to indiscrete experience in the next coming years. From the article (condensed): The biggest shift I think we'll see is games moving from being a discrete experience to an indiscrete experience. When I was 15 years old, if I wanted to listen to music, I had a couple of choices. I could sit up all night and hope they'd play what I liked on the radio, or I could go down to the record store. [...] Today, by virtue of the fact that almost every device I own plays me music, and services like Spotify curate and cultivate and personalize that music for me, music permeates almost every aspect of my life. It's moved from being something I have to make a conscious decision to engage with, to something that really surrounds every aspect of my life from the minute I get up in the morning to the minute I go to bed at night. When we think about games today -- already we've got more people playing more games on more platforms in more geographies around the world than ever before. It's not just a console business, or a PC business, or even a mobile business. We've now got virtual reality and augmented reality and streaming, too. Now fast-forward that to the future, and you think about what the world looks like with a 5G network streaming latency-free gaming to every device you own. It's really easy to imagine that games would permeate our lives much the way digital music does today. From the minute I get up in the morning, everything I do has an impact on my gaming life, both discrete and indiscrete. The amount of eggs I have in my internet-enabled fridge might mean my Sims are better off in my game. That length of distance I drive in my Tesla on the way to work might mean that I get more juice in Need for Speed. If I go to soccer practice in the afternoon, by virtue of internet-enabled soccer boots, that might give me juice or new cards in my FIFA product. This world where games and life start to blend I think really comes into play in the not-too-distant future, and almost certainly by 2021.
Does he own a dictionary?
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The obvious pushback: why should videogames influence and be informed by everything I do in my life? They're fantasies and by definition not related to real life at all.
I think this guy has forgotten that Pokemon Go was a flash-in-the-pan.
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
Really, the absolute last thing I want in my games is overlap with reality. I play games (in part) to get away from reality.
What I think he's really talking about, when you read between the lines, is cross-marketing. "Hey, let's run a cross promotion where if you buy product X, you get some benefit in the game (and we get kickbacks)." We've seen it before in certain limited areas (like buy Mt. Dew, get double xp in CoD or whatever), but games where it becomes all but necessary to play? No thanks.
In five years, my Fitbit will gauge the strength, frequency, and stamina of my masturbation to boost my character strength in World of Warcraft?!? Nerds everywhere celebrate!
So does that mean in a few years I have to go to the gun store to buy ammo if I want to play an FPS? Ammo is expensive enough now as it is. Also , if you buy a Class III weapon does that mean you can have access to it in game? Talk about play to win.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
And if you die in Battlefield your internet-enabled pacemaker will kill you in the couch....
As if EAs current policies and behaviour weren't troubling enough, this dystopian future they have in mind scares the bejesus out of me....
No, thanks!!
He lost me at the eggs changing his Sims (and similar things). It got weirder with the "One of the core reasons why we engage with games is for social interaction" comment.
I think this guy, while maybe he's good at something, either doesn't know anything about games, or he's warning everyone that if you want to do something fun, don't bother looking at the EA titles, since they'll all be networked-RL-grind-jobs. "Hey, team, I ate 3 eggs today. Anyone got a spare egg credit to trade for my mileage credit?"
"The amount of eggs I have in my internet-enabled fridge might mean my Sims are better off in my game."
I do not want my life merged with some bullshit gaming "experience", which will sell the details to marketers who will then exhort me to "Buy more eggs!"
This is not about a richer or more immersive gaming experience, this is about finding newer, more invasive ways to market stuff to you.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
If EA does this they will be out of business in 5 years.
Let's all cheer on EA! Great idea EA! Go for it like gangbusters!
That's what this guy's vision sounds like.
This sounds like a guy who just learned about VR and augmented reality games, and thinks that it trumps all other genres. And he is taking lots of disconnected unrelated things and using them as justification for his tunnel vision. I suspect this is either genius, or really stupid because I just can't make out what the heck he is saying.
He seems to be arguing that, eventually, all video games will be casual augmented reality games. First: No, and second: even if that happens, the line of reasoning presented makes no sense.
When he starts out talking about eggs in your fridge, he is talking about targeted advertising. But the statement "This world where games and life start to blend I think really comes into play..." doesn't follow from there. Advertisers knowing your buying habits doesn't mean that those things will be gamified. Jeez, I sure hope not.
He is right about games being social, but that is only 50% of gaming. He seems to have forgotten the other half, which is that games are an escape. I like games with stories, and fantasy, and space ships, and abstract shapes. That doesn't fit with AR. I don't want to be me, I want to be someone or something totally different.
The music analogy also doesn't work. Music can be a background thing, while video games cannot. When someone listens to Pandora instead of picking a specific song, it is because they are casually listening to music and not really paying that much attention to it. That is just one small part of music. Has he forgotten that there are musical instruments? And musicians? And people who listen to a particular song over and over because it occupies their entire consciousness? It is like this is a guy who only listens to elevator music in the background and thinks that is the future of music. Video games are even less of a background thing than music. Music is cheap and lasts a few minutes while video games last for hundreds of hours. Starting a video game is an investment in time, a big choice. You get emotionally involved with characters and strategies. His proposal might work for casual players of The Sims, but that's about it.
And I sure as heck don't want people playing Need for Speed in their cars!
The latency argument doesn't make sense either since there is no known technology which will remove latency. Speed yes, latency no.
Okay, now that we've gotten past the discreet vs. discrete misunderstanding, this is just "Game Executive Says Games Will Be Everywhere In Future."
Just self-promotion, nothing more.
only if revote trump in 4 as the other choice may end the 2th rights.
and hit your data cap in 1 day!
I play games to challenge myself on a personal level, not to interact with people. Social interaction happens in meatspace, everything else is abstract. If someone's idea of social interaction truly is playing an online video game, I recommend they turn it off and leave the house for at least a month. Online socializing is social masturbation.
If the garbage in his message is the furte of video games, I'm done with video games....
And it was exciting and fun... for about a week? Then everyone got bored of tying physical achievement to in-game tracking?
This is the advanced notice that the company will no longer be discrete with your personal information or privacy, not that they ever were. They want to mine every bit of information they can from you, converting every user into a revenue generating machine.
I think it's a mistake to equate a passive activity like listening to music in the background with an activity requiring your full attention and active participation like gaming.
Just because you can do something doesn't make it a good idea, and IMO, this is one of those situations. People really don't NEED to have access to video games from the time they wake up until they go to bed, from every single device they happen to get in front of.
We've already got problems with video game addiction as it is!
I think gaming is just fine, but it's best done in one environment where you've configured an optimal experience for it. And the rest of the "hype" promised in the original article is just talking about "gamification" -- something that marketing and advertising people have been focused on for the last few years or so. "How do we take a game and tie it into real-world activities?" I think results are mixed with such things, but it's generally going to be a tool to subconsciously motivate you to do more of something in order to earn the in-game reward. If they're rewarding you for exercising, for example -- maybe that's a net positive and a valid selling point for the game. If it's rewarding you for driving your car around more, it's probably not doing anyone any real good.
I was talking to Don Mattrick one day and he was saying how the EA board doesn't understand gaming. They just want to make a game exactly like the last successful game on the market.
He was constantly fighting with them to not scrap products that were sure successes.
Thus it doesn't surprise me that the board has put in a CEO that is as clueless as them.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
You don't need to concentrate on the music to listen to it. You can have it playing in the background and it doesn't interfere with the task at hand .Games by definition require you to concentrate on them to be playing them.
The closest you could come to his prediction is something like Pokemon Go, except you don't have to have the game running as you're walking around. It automatically buzzes your phone if there happens to be a Pokemon nearby that you haven't yet captured, giving you the option to play it for a while. This is more akin to your phone alerting you that a song you like is about to play on the radio, not leaving songs playing all the time with Spotify.
What EA CEO is talking about is streaming games and per-play micro-fees. Nope. Not interested. Next.
Music seems like a bad analogy, as the requirements to play are minimal. My coffee pot probably has enough computational power to play an MP3.
Music can also be a passive experience. I can just put the headphones on and zone out. Games are, well, games. They require input.
So, no... vidya gaems will not reach the ubiquity of music.
One aspect he is somewhat correct on: games will become more integrated: console, PC, mobile, etc. will all have games that interact, if not directly. You'll have a mobile game to walk around and catch Pokemon, which fills the roster for your Pokemon MMO on your PC. Or maybe your mom can play Bejeweled to increase your salary cap in Madden.
I could very easily see this going awry (i.e. a game give you bonus gold for visiting a starbucks) but if executed well, games could become much more accessible, allowing people to play together and enjoy the same overall narrative, while contributing in their own personal way.
This signature is false.
He couldn't refrain from reminding us what a big dick he has. Chances are that he is using the wrong verb though.
When a game starts feeling like work, I stop playing the game. One reason I hate achievement whoring. "Great, I've beat the story of the game and know all there is...let's go back and run this level over and over 300 times to get that achievement that requires just the right button pushes at just that immediate right time..." Had a roommate play Destiny that way... Just seeing the same areas over and over in passing was enough to turn me completely off even trying the game.
Music as the background to your life is already bad enough -- poor quality sound, poor quality experience, unpaired environment, not relaxing at all, and completely unshared -- but it's the background to other things. Putting recreational gaming as the background to life is just even more stupid. 24 hours of candy crush, wonderful.
Somewhere along the way, I think this guy has forgotten the reason we play games -- not his fault, since he's obviously forgotten the reason people used to spent tens of thousands of dollars buying music.
So here's my advice. Look at pictures of a music room from 1985. The kind that had a $20'000 music collection. Realize that the same collection and the same audio quality is now possible with $1'000 of investment. Spend it. Sit in a proper music room with proper sound and your music collection.
What's you'll discover is this: after an hour, you'll have zero stress following a stressful day; after an afternoon, you'll love your children more; after an evening, you'll feel soothed like a three-day vacation; and after a full day/weekend of your music room, you'll actually be healthier, happier, and more focused than ever.
Or, you can drive to work worried about your gaming score.
I just can't get away from the fact that in the whole article/summary it seems like 'music' is seen as a consumable. Not something that we can and should all act to create.
Listening to recordings of other people making music is a passive undertaking. In fact, oftentimes playing back recordings of music into an environment is a manipulative act to calm or alter the mood of those in that environment.
I view the 'classic rock' that drones on and on in many workplace environments as 'slave songs.' The same rotation of songs that I heard on the radio back in the kitchen when I was a dishwasher in an Italian restaurant in 1979 is played today. It's the tunes that keep the slaves calm, singing in the cotton field. Except we don't even sing them ourselves.
The fact that somebody is allowed (part of the time) to 'choose' which recordings of music (out of a catalog of the recordings that are made available) isn't that freeing. Only if we make music ourselves do we really participate in the act.
And if the world is wall-to-wall carpeted with music already, there's no room for us to participate, and certainly little possibility of us singing 'off the track.'
Yeah, about that... the same people that want to strip you of #2 also want to strip you of #1. Both parties are equally eager to strip all your other rights.
A candidate that wants to revoke the Patriot act and dissolve the TSA. That would be a real change.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
"The amount of eggs in my fridge might mean my Sims are better off... the distance I drive to work might mean I get more juice in Need for Speed... "
Umm... mister Wilson? Neither of those ideas sounds like fun.
> That length of distance I drive in my Tesla on the way to work might mean that I get more juice in Need for Speed.
Seriously? Can I unsubscribe from this future?
...but they'll never integrate the ecosystems because kb+mouse will still forever pwn consoles.
-Styopa
I agree with many of the above posts: We play video games for recreation as a form of escapism and mental exercise. If we could do the things in video games - live another life, have super powers, fight terrorists with the backing of a shadow government, and so on - we would. Potentially. Unless we're having a lazy day. So the idea of my life activities being gamified and affecting my recreational play is actually a violation of my game space. It's a way to penalize me for not changing my life to suit the game du jour. ... and if they make me pay for that, perform certain activities that provide benefit to corporations, political parties, or governments, that's sticking the knife in and twisting it. Even things that are supposed to benefit me personally - like public work projects, social projects, or personal fitness - that I don't associate with the game itself - feels like a shackle. It's a fine I have to pay to play the game, and NOT in any way an enhancement.
At least, that's how it is in western culture.
I think many of the above folks have not considered:
- The degree to which products, people, and brands are commoditized in asian nations
- How the above commoditization is considered normal, if not expected
- The level of competitiveness that some asian cultures place on games
- How the combination of the above 3 come together to make it ludicrously easy for providers to monetize video game
- The size of these populations when it comes to video games and what that means for target markets in the future
For these target markets, video games are not recreation specifically, any more than football is recreation for a college football hopeful, with the added pressure of maintaining a separate and likely much more engaging social life around it. These sorts of tie-ins are considered value adds to these players. "I was already going to drink GAMER/X FUEL brand energy drink, and now I get bonus XP with a code? Awesome!" It's not necessarily considered a detriment to develop a brand loyalty because of these sorts of tie-ins, but could even be a sort of badge of honor, like name brand loyalty was in the 1980's US (anyone remember cola wars?)
As more and more of the chinese population enters the market, I wouldn't be surprised to see the focus of video games especially swing in this direction. Just because it's not as popular or lucrative in the US, who cares, there's 20x the market elsewhere, and money follows the market.
... I'll just go on a little shooting rampage.
No? Well, you lost me then.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
So he predicts a future that was pretty much portrayed in Black Mirror S01E02.... 5 years ago.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt20...
It's really easy to imagine that games would permeate our lives much the way digital music does today.
There is no action (air guitar notwithstanding) needed to have music playing. Although when I visited a Disney Store once I was confronted with "music" playing the entire time. That (the wrong type of music) is a living hell.
But back to games. While we can live with music, we cannot passively play a game. A game needs input and the "twichy" ones need fast reactions which implies paying attention all the time. This is clearly impractical.
I would suggest that either this guy has a radically different view of what future "games" will be like, or he was making this stuff up as he went along.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
He's just setting up a story so he has supposed business justification for ubiquitous DRM and surveillance components in software that's supposedly for fun. In reality, he knows this Christmas season's biggest moneymaker is going to be Nintendo's Classic NES for HDMI, for exactly the opposite reasons of what he pretends to believe here. But he has to pretend to believe it, because his supercustomer masters require him to keep providing excuses for surveillance. I'm so happy I am not this man.
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
Stop the future, I want to get off.
I'm sick and tired of these hip, "ironic" sigs. This is an actual, honest-to-goodness no-nonsense sig!
Well clearly it's not going to be eggs. Because eggs don't have a brand and can't easily be pushed over another brand for the video game manufacturer's profit.
I don't want to go in the the forest and kill animals or 'demons' in order to play diablo, or to get boosts for diablo or WoW. I mean come on, forcing the users/players to index themselves more, just so they can serve ads or try and mislead people into thinking they've been given a greater value seems so bizarre to me.
The so called "indiscrete" gaming is pervasive gaming. We have the tech to do it now, we had it for years in fact and it only produced one-shot gimmicks.
Let's start with the PocketStation and the Dreamcast VMU. A memory card that acts like a tiny portable console that you could use to play minigames that affects the main game. Maybe it had some success in Japan but no one I know really used it.
The DS has wireless features that allows limited interaction with the real world, and the 3DS improved on this and can count steps and do augmented reality too. Yet most players don't use it much differently from an overpowered oldschool gameboy.
Now we have smartphones with an impressive array of sensors and connectivity. But how many PC or console games take advantage of this to extend the gaming experience ouside of your room? Some of them do, and no one seem to care.
Linking games to your fridge or your car will certainly produce interesting gimmicks that will be fun for a short time because of the novelty but I really don't think it will change our approach to gaming.
What we may see more often in the future as technology advances are games you can bring with you. You play at home on you big screen TV than switch to your smartphone as you take the train (oh, sorry, hyperloop, that's the future right), then to your laptop in your hotel room. Just like movies, you can watch one on your phone and in a theater and it will still be the same movie.
music permeates almost every aspect of my life
Sure, but you can tune it out to get on with life. Games generally require all of your attention.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
At least in my view.
What he's talking about seems to be what's already happening with TV, where the marketing people are all about the "second screen" effect, getting people to do social media things and otherwise interact with other aspects of the programme at the same time as watching the programme. This annoys the living shit out of me. I hate background TV, I hate channel-surfing in the hope that something's on, I hate doing something else or being interrupted while I'm watching TV - if I've chosen to watch something, I want to sit down and watch it, in the same way that I go to the cinema.
I used to be very much the same with music, especially as a teenager, but that's slipped somewhat - it's fairly rare now that I would choose at home to sit down and just listen to some music. I do still try to while I'm travelling, but obviously the quality is not the same.
For gaming, even more so - it's something I'm not just consciously and actively consuming, but I'm participating in it. I'm either doing it, and doing it fully, or I'm not doing it. Vaguely-related check-in type activities are just going to result in me not buying or playing games.
No, let me repeat for emphasis: DoNOTWantâ. I want nothing to do with any such thing. At all. Period. Ever. For many reasons, none of which are EA's business. Just go away. And if this guy thinks "5G" will make anything "latency free", he needs to pass the next couple of rounds on the crack pipe the execs at EA have been using for an asthma inhaler the last few years.
"Inveniemus Viam Aut Faciemus" 'We will find a way... Or we will make one!' --Hannibal of Carthage