The future of gaming...?

Interested in how gaming got to where it is today? See our companion article here!

Michael Cook

It’s hard to look at where we came from and try to assess where we might be in even a few years time. How impossible something like OnLive might have seemed before the Internet was even a possibility makes it hard to guess at what technologies might pop out of nowhere in the next decade. Despite this, there seem to be a few things going on in the industry that we’ll look back on in years to come as a sign of impending change.

When Felix 2000 comes around, console manufacturers will probably either have finally opened up their platforms, or died a death to the likes of OnLive. We’re already seeing waves of this – the PlanetSide remake simply isn’t feasible on Xbox LIVE thanks to hardware and infrastructure restrictions, and even things like Portal 2’s free updates or CCP’s forthcoming DUST are only just about possible on the PlayStation 3 – and that’s after some pretty major concessions from Sony.

Platforms will open up because they have to –with the possible exception of Facebook, the games industry of 2027 will hopefully look a lot more like the PC industry today. Full of vibrant indie development, flexible pricing models and better connections between developers and players. It’ll give rise to things like the first indie MMO, open APIs for systems like Steam and Origin, and bigger and brighter mod communities as programming skills become basic knowledge for schoolchildren.

We’ll still see echoes of what’s going on today – single player games will be alive and well, and micro-transactions are such a psychologically effective model as to never disappear – but most aspects of gaming will be unrecognisable thanks to a shift towards openness and customisation. If console manufacturers refuse to make the shift towards these areas, they’ll risk becoming fragmented from the gaming mainstream, or die altogether. Technologies like OnLive will offer the same high quality of videogame experience without the needless external faffing of Xbox LIVE or PlayStation Home, and as broadband speeds increase the technology will easily take over from these manufacturers unless they push to offer something better.

Omar Hafeez-Bore

Felix Games has changed a lot since its inception. We know this because for our round-up of the year 2027 we took a look at old issues of the Felix to play a bit of spot the difference. But we soon lost count. The first thing we noticed is how deep into the paper (we know! quaint, right?) we had to dig before getting to the games section itself. The second is the talk of using different ‘consoles’ for different games, akin it seems to having a different television for different channels.

But the most notable difference is that Felix Games is pretty much limited to, well, games. As in playthings, toys, virtual escapes, button-powered stories or – in a word – entertainment. How far we’ve come: nowadays gaming devices are an integral part of our modern life, acting as the foundation for learning of every kind. The primary-coloured make-believe of the Guitar Heroes and Rockbands of old are unthinkable in a world in which nearly every child learns to play using digital instruments and its associated training programme (not to mention the most inexplicably popular and insufferably annoying mascot of all the government’s Skillset Schemes: Harmony the Hamster).

Similarly the tongue-in-cheek appraisal of an early Cooking Mama game looks a little naïve now that the Japanese megabrand is now the international standard for cooking training, and whose all-speaking-measuring-and-advising digital utensils can now teach everything from Indian Curry to Jamaican Chilli Sauce. And we’d rather chat to Cooking Mama over Harmony the un-road-killable hamster any day.

In a world where jobs are given based on skill-set points from completed Skillset Schemes, where even dating matches are made using a comparison of compatibility of Personal Interest points, where any car can be turned to Sim-mode and replicate the bucking and judders of real racing from the comfort of one’s garage, it is hard to imagine a time when scores and levels, friend-challenges and international Cooking Mama tournaments were not part of the background hum of life.

In fact, it was reading through the old issues that first made us realise that a little something may have been lost along the way. We are not saying that we here at Felix don’t like the ability to go outside with our iVisors and learn about the difference between nimbus and cumulus clouds before competing with our friends at differentiating them, or wear the visors in select National Parks where we can experience our own Nintendo-designed Zelda adventures to find hulking beasts born from apple’s magnificent glasses. Nor are we even arguing against the more left-field devices such as the DelayGasm digital condom which trains unfortunate men to, well, you know (see our anonymously written import review last week).

But reading the old accounts, of curling up with a pad and playing through games using only our suspension of disbelief, it is hard not to feel some nostalgia for this old time of simple escapism. Of using rudimentary graphics and gameplay as a prompt for unlimited, indescribable mental adventures. And of sometimes not wanting to have our points tallied up and our friend’s Skillset Rank compared. Just playing for the sake of play, to share stories and not leader boards. Like toys, virtual escapes, button-powered stories or – in a word – entertainment.

Here’s to 2028 folks, and everything games have been and can be.

Simon Worthington

In the far future the feature I'm looking forward to the most is virtual reality, but there are still lots of improvements I can't wait to see in the next 15 years or so.

Firstly, as computers get more like mobiles and mobiles get more like computers, we’ll start to see the blurring of the boundary between the mobile and PC gaming as well. Soon, we’ll be able to pause our PC game, pick up our mobile tablet and continue playing the same game on the move. With services like OnLive pioneering in this area it won't be too long before this idea becomes a reality.

Speaking of reality, improvements in 3D detection algorithms and hardware will bring about the latest generation of augmented reality games. They’ll do much more than just fill a space with a box, they'll be able to understand the 3D environment they are in and interact with it in novel ways. There is actually research being carried out at Imperial that is investigating this very area, and hopefully it will lead to games that use the environment around the player much more. Imagine Counter-Strike played throughout your house!

More Imperial research is also helping to push forward what is possible for character interaction in games. As computers better understand our meaning and emotions so too will the way we interact with stories and people in video games. Soon, we won’t be pushing buttons to choose pre-scripted conversation options but we’ll instead be conversing with characters naturally through speech and facial expression, as if we were having a real conversation.

All this helps to make games more immersive, and while we are a long way off from virtual reality and total immersion, it looks like the boundaries of realism will slowly edge towards it over years to come!