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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!
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...
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.
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.
Yes, that was my thought exactly. Remember Nosedive? This would be even worse.
...but they'll never integrate the ecosystems because kb+mouse will still forever pwn consoles.
-Styopa
So he predicts a future that was pretty much portrayed in Black Mirror S01E02.... 5 years ago.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt20...