will there be a paradigm shift in video games?

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they have improved dramatically within 20 years …but they seem to be reaching a certain limit in terms of their levels of complexity. there are definite boundaries when it comes to the standard “video game genres” or the overall concepts behind the games. and to me it seems like there has to be a limit as far as the quality of the graphics is concerned. at least a limit in terms of the media by which video games are presented (the television-type screen).

(some may get this, some may not) but think about the paradigm shift from “super nintendo” (where most of the games were set in a 2-d video game world) and “nintendo 64” where most of the games became 3-d…the depth (and length) of the game was taken to new heights.

i’m not forgetting that there’s virtual reality… but its been around for awhile now and it hasn’t quite taken off or become widespread or anything.

so seriously, what’s the next level for video games?

:sunglasses: :sunglasses: :sunglasses:

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better stories, they’ll be like novels.

3

Online worlds.

Everquest, one of the most successful massively multiplayer online realities is continuing to INCREASE users, 5 years after it went gold.

There’s a multitude of new gaming experiences that are just fantastic. City of Heros which just came out allows you to create your own online superhero crime fighting force, Lineage 2 which had my attention for a long time allows you to have you to own your own castle (much like Shadowbane, but less sucky) and raise your own dragon to fly around the world like you’re the man. Guild Wars is allowing you to interact with other players in instanced FPS magic fighting style, and from what I hear from E3, it’s downright amazing. SimsOnline is still picking up steam, and the next step for that would be to make it more immersive and 3d without limiting the functionality.

Virtual property is going to be the BIG thing, though…and it’s happening right now. People are spending real time in a fake world to make real money from real people willing to buy fake items. It’s considered illegal and a do-at-your-own-risk type of deal, but certain games like Second Life lindenlab.com/press_story_12.php are allowing you to actually own the property in game. This makes things very… interesting.

In other words, the major major revolution in gaming is making games that don’t feel like games… instead, they feel like real life with half the risk and more rewards.

Consol gaming is very far behind the curve as it is generally targeted to poorer classes who cant afford a nice computer/internet connection. This will change very soon as Moore’s Law overcomes Rafajafar’s Law: Programs will double in coolness and quadruple in minimum requirements every time I upgrade my system.

4

The quality and intelligence of the Ai’s will change. You will be able to speak to your Ai’s charachters and they will be much smarter at learning and acting on their own.

In essence you’ll be able to interact more with the game itself without another human controler. Imagine a fps game where your team mates are ai’s and you can communicate and give commands to them that they understand through speech.

5

THIS IS SO GREAT! when i wrote that thread i was a little unsure of how it would go over. i thought maybe it was a silly question or something.

rafa, you are clearly the man to talk to concerning these matters.

do you guys think the “medium of presentation” will change in some fundamental way? like a shift from monitor-based games (as in console or computer games) to some other type of medium? like holograms or full-on virtual reality?

i think we should break this up into two parts:

  1. what’s the next level for hardware?

  2. what’s the next level for software?

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Dark Magus, I have to say you rock man. I know that non-critical essays aren’t hard core in the frenchy tradition that spawned me, but you deserve some awesome props.

  1. Named after a Miles Davis album

  2. Likes the Chaos and Complexity

  3. Starts A various thread about the evolution of video games.

Here’s some shit to consider. I’m focused on the plots and the story experience and the other guys are focused on the player aspect. Good.
Both sides are completely necessary. Why would you jump into a world without reason.

I nearly have a real esate license and I gotta say it scares the shit out of me that people are trying to buy virtual real estate. Spooky.

I’m done. I’m listening to sublime and having flashbacks to driving through the swamps.

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Internet is obviously the new frontier of video games (as previously mentioned). Even the lower-life-form consols are going online in an attempt to recreat the days of yor when dorks gathered with pockets clanking in arcades.

Has anyone else noticed how eas 1-player games are becoming? Back in the day it took hours of play, talent, skill and blistering fingers to be able to completely beat a video game. Today it seems like they are making games so that victory is assured, so they can draw more casual gamers. I was honestly dissapointed when I beat the “legendary” difficulty on HALO. I sure didn’t feel like a legend.

8

i just want to refocus the discussion…

by “paradigm shift” i mean a fairly drastic and fundamental change from (in this case) one mode of being to another. and by modes of being i mean (as i said earlier) 1) the software or programs and 2) the hardware media that run the programs.

i have the feeling that eventually, in the case of (1), the games (or programs) will undergo a major fundamental change in their mode of being. the basic concepts behind games of the future will extend beyond our current catalog of possibilities. if you look at the legend of zelda (nes) and a super-sophisticated online (ultima-style) game …they’re not all that different. you’re on a quest of some kind and you interact with (computer-generated) “beings” or (in the case of the newer online games)… “actual beings”. you do stuff…buying and selling things, killing things, making alliances… there are specific parameters or limits to what you can do. those limits have been expressed and they keep showing up in current video game concepts. i think that a lot of what has been mentioned…the examples above… while they are important to bring up, represent more superficial differences than fundamental differences.

i think that there may be a time when the concepts of games go beyond just furthering the complexity of pre-existent video game categories, and onto something more deep and more basic. “sublime” even. hell, i don’t know. i wish i could come up with an example, but …i guess that would involve me telling the future. :sunglasses:

as far as (2)… the hardware is concerned… a similar leap should take place …a radical departure from past concepts and modes. the media on which games are presented will change in a drastic way. again… 8-bit NES is not all that different from nintendo 64. and those two are not all that different from playstation 2. obviously, over time everything gets faster and better and all that…they get expressed through different types of media (cartridges, cd-roms…etc) but all three of those console examples are very very similar. they are all utilizing images projected onto a 2-dimensional screen and they are utilizing by hand-held interface devices.

think far off into the future… can’t you imagine a different type of interface than the ones that we are currently familiar with? can’t you imagine a different setting or concept behind the games themselves?

think: FUNDAMENTAL, DRASTIC CHANGE! :sunglasses:

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How about this: Holodecks. You know, from Star Trek, those rooms that create holographic images and can concentrate light to the point that holographic bullets can actually kill if you turn of the safty guards.

In Star Trek people use the holodeck for training, to play their favorit character in a novel, to meet a beautiful woman in a smokey jazz club in Chicago in the 30’s.

Certainly the Sims and any number of RPGs are early forms of this “live another life” concept. The only problem is the technology, not only in holographic imaging but in artificial intelligence. Rember the episode of “The Next Generation” where the holodeck Dr. Morearty(sp) learned he was a computer program and developed free will?

Something like that would defenitaly catch on. It would start as something you’d only find at malls and Dave and Busters and be a pay-per-hour type thing, but it might be compressed and spread to households.

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Holodecks, while fanciful and nice sounding, they are too far away to be the “next” generation. In fact, they may not even be possible like in Star Trek.

To kinda tap on DM’s questions…

Software is the game itself. The hardware is important, but it is garunteed. The hardware will advance as fast as the hardware will advance (it has and probably will follow Moore’s law for quite some time until quantum computing becomes an options and we abandon silocone technology). This means, they will have the means to create a system better than the previous system every 18 months. It will take 3 years to build market and start selling a new system. So, about every 3-4 years you can expect a “leap” in consols…for PC’s, completely different… every 18 months there will be a leap and you have to wait for the SOFTWARE to catch up.

In other words, either the software is built for the system or the advancements in systems are waiting on the software. As a result, the real hitch will be the software, not the hardware. It’s rather easy to design a new system if you have the know-how. It’s even easy to build a new chip, really. Nothing in a computer chip is a complex as it seems…it’s just abstractions layer on top of abstraction layer on top of abstraction layer.

Software, however, is pure unbridled grunt work. It is unique from program to program and requires an ENORMOUS amount of work and quality control per program. My point… fuck the hardware. Gadgets come, gadgets go. Purpose… PURPOSE is the key. Where’s your VR helmet? Right… it had no real purpose. It didnt improve anything other than your balance. It made you naseaus. Bleh. Fuck hardware.

Like I said, the next leap in games is making them more real… to blur and blend the lines between real life and online reality. What will do this? Like monkey boy said, it will take some pretty immersive plot and story line. That’s why Everquest is so popular… it has one of the most complex and amazing story lines of any online world out there. One month you’re hunting cougars in the Southern Deserts of Ro where the god Solusek Ro had burned down the Eldarr Forest centuries earlier in a jealous fit of rage against the goddess Tunare and her people the Antonican Elves… a few months later… you’re killing Tunare for fun and games in the Plane of Growth… a few months later… you’re killing Solusek Ro in order to gain access to the Plane of Fire so that a few weeks later, you can kill his father, Fennin Ro. LOL … see what I mean? The story line grabs you by the balls from day one and just gets better. That’s why I had an addiction, and had to quit. It’s also why it’s called “Evercrack” in jest.

However, that’s only part of it. Challenge is a big key. More and more as you work in worlds online where everything becomes real, you have to manufacture real reality. Real reality has a pretty decent natural order and balance. However, when you’re in an online reality, you have to manufacture a false sense of order and balance. If you do not, you begin to see this horrible inflation in online economies called “MUDflation”. This is quickly becoming an artform in and of itself for game designers.

Now, you have graphics. Graphics are almost insignificant. We’re only using about 1/8th of the potential talent we can in these games due to the slow nature of hardware advancement and the lack of hardware updates seen in the gaming culture. Graphics… fuck graphics. They’re secondary. Advancements in graphics, as you noticed, are insignificant overall. Sometimes, I go back to SNES and play Zelda. Why? I don’t care if the graphics are amazing, the game was fun for me. It had …plot… and … storyline.

Detail, though. The devil is in the detail. The real next generation video games will need DETAIL. Why? What makes the real world different from the online world the most? EVERYTHING in reality is INTERACTIVE. Not so for online games. If you want to open the blinds in real life… you open them. If you want to do it in most online worlds… you can’t. The blinds are simply graphical textures. If you want to bend over and blow on a blade of grass in real life, you bend over and blow (shhhh, dirty minds). If you want to do it in an online world… well, for any game to date… you cannot. Details make you enjoy the game.

However, and maybe this is my perversion speaking… online games are going to be catering to a much older audience… especially in years to come as the children of the baby boomers finally grow up. As a result, I think sex and relationships will play a major role in the future of video games. There’s a reason that porn is the largest venue in the online market. Sex sells. Online reality will one day make sex a game. Sounds fanciful, but… I dont know. I’ve seen some crazy shit. I’ve heard crazier. I’ve had online relationships. I’ve had cyber sex. I’ve met women online (not for sex, but just to “see” if there was anything there… we’re friends but I didnt want “her”… her friend, on the other hand… I’m very interested in her friend… and we’re currently engaged in an online thing to keep the lines of communication open). I think that catering to more corporeal desires and less cerebral desires will shift the mindset of “gaming” all together. Again, though, I’m a HUGE pervert.

Other major issues will be object permanance and value. Selling of online property is a BOOOOMMMINNNG business… especially in Taiwan and China where it is a second career to many people. Being able to keep the value of a character up makes every moment spent playing the game somewhat of an investment. I could have sold my character in Everquest for about a thousand dollars real life money (however, that game is NOT meant for such things to take place, and as a result, would hurt the in-game and integrity economy… I’m not playing games to hurt other people). However, like in Secondlife, some games may actually begin to encourage such things. If you look at online gambling, you’ll see that people definetly are interested in making money. In a situation where actual gameplay can generate actual money when you’re done with the game, it makes the hours you put into the game a minor investment as well as a leisure activity. This encourages many people to keep playing.

Either way, most will agree that no matter how amazing the AI is, a human opponent will ALWAYS be better… even if they suck. Why? Computers aren’t random enough. No matter how you code them, they wind up having these… patterned randomness… that humans can pick up on. You can guess that they’re going to do something, and if they don’t, you can pin them in a corner because that means they screwed up. See? With current and pretty much all AI for the next ten years, it’s going to be a standards such that computers will not be able to handle tooo much complex AI (unless companies start manufacturing AI cards a la graphics cards). Due to this, humans are going to be the best opponents one can have… why? Even when dumb, humans are CREATIVE.

Wow, I guess that’s “it”. Online games… they will begin to foster more creativity. The next leap will HAVE to revolve around that.

EDIT:
games.slashdot.org/games/04/05/1 … =98&tid=99 <---- astonishing!