Futurologists and science fiction writers have long been making claims about the role of technology in our lives, either speculatively in futurological texts, or simply as entertainment, in science fiction films, books, and comics. However, they’ve only recently begun to take videogames as they actually exist in the real world seriously as a major part of our future. Look back to 1960s visions of the future, and games aren’t even a twinkle in the futurological perception And yet in terms of the reality of future-becoming-present that we actually experience they are a major factor. They’re one of the most visible symbols of both technological progress, how that progress is influencing our culture. Games are a hybrid thing: a fusion of art and science, and as both disciplines push onward, so they push games ahead of them. They’re the construction yard in which many of the people who are working on the future – designers, occasionally writers and artists – are to be found.
One important factor in both articles is the "rapidly ballooning bandwidth" of mobile devices. This has big implications for the future, because of the various things we might do with it. We don't know exactly what we will do, but it's certainly interesting to speculate.
But Stross [science fiction author Charles Stross] sees another trend too, a blurring of real and game worlds. He argues that the sea-change will come with “ubiquitous location services.” Those systems that can pinpoint our mobile phone down to a single street. “We haven’t quite gotten our heads around the idea of having devices on our person that always know where we are,” says Stross. “This is less obviously gaming related, until you start thinking about augmented reality, or live action role-play. You can play games in the real world without having arranged to meet. If you’re in the same area as another player of one of these games, for example, your phone could steer you towards each other, so that you could interact.”
That "blurring of real and game worlds" sounds a lot like Jesse Schell's "Design Outside the Box" presentation, doesn't it? The implications are similar, though they focus on different uses by different interests.
[Ray] Kurzweil argues that the progress of the computer is a progress inwards. It’s going to become increasingly part of our our biology, and that means it’s going to become part of what it is to be human. Continuing the “smooth curve” of our cybernetic integration with things like mobile phones (which, in practical terms, render us telepathic) or even wrist watches – which firmly position us in time – the future will deliver more and more tech into the body. Within a couple of decades nanobots will be in our very blood, says Kurzweil. These will allow us to experience games in “first-person”, where our very eyes are the screen we carry around and use. Reality, he says, could be reduced [to] a window in the corner of our specially augmented consciousness.
Unlike Stross, Ray Kurzweil isn't a science fiction author, he's a futurist - and as such, his predictions are even wilder. I'm going to take all that with a grain of salt, but even relatively modest advances might make a big change from today. Artificial intelligence, for example, is with us today. No, these aren't cybernetic people - and they may never be cybernetic people, I can't say - but they're bound to seem more and more like real people, and that's the important point when it comes to games (and game-related kinds of programing in other types of software, too).
Eskil Steenberg ("Swedish coding-mastermind") has an interesting point to make, too. He argues that "technology has digressed gaming," since higher graphics and voice acting have made it too difficult to implement some gameplay.
Steenberg argues that the future of games is one in which software will have to find solutions for the enormous problems that following the curve of increasing hardware sophistication has presented us with. “The examples of how things that used to be simple have now become hard are numerous,” he explains. “Dwarf Fortress and similar games give a hint to where games would be, if graphics and sounds didn’t stand in our way.”
I have a hard time arguing with that, since Dwarf Fortress is a truly incredible game, light-years ahead of mainstream games in the actual gameplay. I never thought of the poor (basically nonexistent) graphics as being necessary for that kind of game - with today's technology, anyway - but it's certainly an interesting thought.
And so we come back around to Kurzweil’s speech. “Play is how we principally learn and principally create,” said Kurzweil to the game developers. In saying that he points to another reason why the coming decades of gaming might be more about how we interact and how we play, than about how hi-tech the platform is. It’s the exact reason why the billion-fold increase Kurzweil predicts might not be the key factor in our gaming future. The key factor will be our own interest in creativity. We have to want games to do new things.
Stross agrees on this point, highlighting the crudest of gaming technologies, and their sophisticated results: “The reason pen and paper RPGs don’t die is that it’s about consensual story-telling. It’s about creativity. Most people don’t want to be creative, but one in a hundred people want to get involved: they’re bored by passive consumption..."
That's interesting to me, but I'm a gamer. And Rock, Paper, Shotgun is a gaming site. But I still think that gaming's impact on the rest of the world is going to be bigger, much bigger, than just the kinds of games we gamers play...
The point, it seems, is not that games are “going to be competitive with real reality,” but that games are going enrich “real reality”, and be interwoven with it. “Virtual reality” was never a good term. As American writer Steven Shaviro points out, it should always have been know as “prosthetic reality”. Games are going to extend our reality, and they’re going to do it by being smarter, and more varied. The future is gaming heading off in all kinds of different directions.
Yes, that's where the potential lies for truly mind-blowing changes in our lives. Maybe our toothbrushes won't start giving us gaming "points," as in Jesse Schell's vision, but it wouldn't surprise me if gaming became a much bigger part of all of our lives (even just for training or educational purposes), and "virtual reality" become ubiquitous (with advertising only a part of it).
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