Future Gamer

Transcription

What does the future look like for the world of games? Let's look into the crystal ball. Wait a second. Where is my Nostradamus hat? There we go. This week we're looking at The Future, along with a bunch of other PBS Digital Studio's channels in an amazing collaboration. The future of games is important not just because we look forward to new games, I know we all do. But because games have served as a research and development arm for the rest of the wider world. Games often predict popular technologies before they actually take root. For example it was games, not movies or TV, that pioneered the use of real time 3D graphics. While some of you have a Kinect that's just gathering dust in the corner, there are other people who are doing amazing things with it. Like using it for physical rehab. And the Oculus Rift, which was originally just used for games, has now found applications in all kinds of amazing places, like watching nature documentaries in 360 degrees, voiced by David Attenborough no less. Or you can just hang out with your virtual friends on Facebook. Since games are so varied it's such a big universe and there's a lot that's going on, we decided to dust off the old Delorean and take a look at the future 5, 10, and 15 years down the road. So come on, let's go for a drive! The first prediction I'm really excited about is that all players will be spectators. And vice versa. The explosion of streaming on Twitch is only going to increase in the coming years. But it's going to morph in ways that I don't think we can expect. I mean, yes, there's still gonna be let's play videos, and live streaming of competitive matches, but that line between spectator and player is going to continue to blur. There will be people playing games, and then other people watching those people play games, and then hybrid people who will be both playing and watching at the same time. I know, it's all very very confusing. But Twitch plays Pokemon was only the unbridled beginning. Since then, Twitch has already started funding games that allow the crowd to participate in a more organized fashion, like the crowd- controlled Choice Chamber. There's also the upcoming horror game Daylight which is said to let audience members control the scares, which is a feature I am not looking forward to for Game/Show. Don't click it. Don't click it. Great. Now I'm not gonna be able to sleep. Thanks a lot. Next up: I predict that music videogames will produce an actual pop star. Games and music together have a long and intimate history. But unlike just, you know, tapping along on a plastic controller in Guitar Hero to an amazing song like Hot for Teacher, Man, I really love that song! there's a new school of music videogames like Fract and Fantasia that actually let you participate in the creation of new sounds. Not to mention there's already software like Ableton Live which adds a performative element to electronic music. But there's also input devices like the Monome which already looks like a giant videogame controller. So since we have chiptune super stars, it's not that much of a stretch to think that someone will actually use videogames someday to become bigger than Skrillex. People have been using Mario Paint to do covers of songs for years. Not that it's particularly listenable but it's adorable. I'll give you that. Ok so those predictions were pretty easy. They don't really test my prognosticating powers. Yes, that's a word. You can look it up. So let's jump 10 years in future and see what that looks like. People have been fascinated with the idea of a machine that could mimic human communication for quite some time. I mean look at Joseph Weizenbaum's experiment with the ELIZA chat program in the 60s, which was designed to replace human psychotherapists. So my prediction for 2024 is that videogames will finally get there. NPCs will be totally indistinguishable from their human counterparts. If you've seen Spike Jonz's Her, then that will give you an idea of what our communication with NPCs might look like in the future. I mean, I guess we could actually fall in love with them someday. I think that's the case because of an advancement in AI that's known as deep learning, that's where computers attempt to mirror our neural networks. And deep learning has been very effective with game AI. There are some researchers in London who have been doing an experiment by teaching a computer how to learn from its mistakes when it plays the Atari 2600 and it turns out the computer actually gets better. It's still in its infancy, but AI-controlled characters may actually learn to play games the same way that we do. Which is totally crazy. I mean that means that some day computer allies could actually cast a healing spell when we need them to in Persona 3 or give us some real cover in a game like Call of Duty, instead of just running around and doing whatever it is they do. This isn't all good news per say. I mean, think about a game like Dark Souls. If the bosses could adapt to your strategies on the fly... the game's hard enough as it is. Another thing that I'm banking on in 10 years is that the next big esports star will totally be a household name. 20 years ago, esports were nothing more than glorified LAN parties. Which are great. LAN parties are awesome. I mean, I love LAN parties. But it's not the same as it is now, with more than 70 million people watching worldwide. Esports is a big thing. Just like Chris Moneymaker gave a name and a face to poker, which then kicked off this revolution of poker players over the last decade, someone like that is going to emerge from League of Legends or Starcraft or Dota. And I know for a lot of you that person has already arrived. Obviously one big challenge still is how to get non-fans to watch esports as spectators. I mean, if you look at online poker, nobody watched it until they added a camera to the down cards to add that layer of suspense. Early football games didn't even have the score on it. So until esports gets those types of technologies, that will set the stage for the next big superstar. Okay, now I'm going to stretch my psychic powers to the max and look 15 years into the future. This one is unfortunate, but I believe a real war will be won or lost using technology that originated in the world of videogames. Look at the evidence. The military recruits gamers to fly drones. Some of them even use PlayStation controllers. And Darpa is building these creepy walking robots, that are controlled with a keyboard and mouse. Does that sound familiar at all? Unless we magically eliminate war someday, we're looking at an Ender's Game scenario. Which is really depressing. Now for a more upbeat, but still bold prediction. I think that consoles will be totally extinct in the next 15 years. In fact, it might happen before that. That means no PS9s, Xbox 2160s, or Wii A- E-I-O-Us, or whatever it'll be called. My theory works like this. Game consoles have become these big, cost-prohibitive structures. So that means they only get changed every six or seven years. Meanwhile phones and tablets, those get swapped out every other year. In 15 years they'll easily leapfrog consoles. So we'll just carry around a phone or a tablet and hook that up to a monitor. And that's just with the technology we know about today. Just a couple of years ago, nobody had heard of the Oculus Rift. So in the future we'll totally be playing games, but who knows what devices we'll even be playing them on. And finally, LARPing will become cool. I mean, just look at the popularity of Quidditch on college campuses. Probably some of you play that game right now. But in the future with new technologies like Google Glass, augmented reality, or this crazy thing called the Sulon Cortex, which reads your surroundings and then projection maps some other universe over top of them, you won't need to use your imagination or dress up like another character. That will just be part of your world. It'll be awesome. Okay, I couldn't end without making one super far-flung prediction. 100 years from now, Nintendo will still be making Mario, and Zelda, and Iwata will be cryogenically frozen and still delivering those Nintendo Directs. I mean, who am I kidding. That's probably happening right now in a lab somewhere in Kyoto near Nintendo's headquarters. So what do you think? How will games change 5, 10, 25 years from now? Be creative, and hash it out in the comments. If you like what you saw, please subscribe. I will see you all next week....and in the Future! Last week we asked whether or not all games should be free to play. Let's see what you had to say. Nicholas Maddalena pointed to Steam Sales and Humble Bundles as proof that games are in fact getting cheaper. Yes that's only limited to PC Games, but it also doesn't take into account the high cost of entry that's still associated with playing these games in the first place. But yes, you're right. There are some cheaper options now that are available and that's a wonderful wonderful thing. Chris Williams points to the grand equalizing force the browser, as a potential leveler of the playing field of the world of games. That sounds very triumphant doesn't it? The browser to the rescue! But you don't need a fancy high-end PC or console. You could just use the computer at the library, if those are still around 20 years from now. Jesse Harris takes issue with the idea that games are inaccessible due to price. He says you probably already own a PC, smart phone, and or high speed internet access. He also says you can get a lower end PC that plays lower res graphics and all this can be had for the low low price of $800. Okay, let's take a step back here. A lot of you echoed this in the comments, specifically around the prices of a PC. Some of you said it was $800, some of you said it was $1000. Whatever it might be, look at the big picture here. The average median household income in the United States is $51,000. A household is defined as a family of four people. It's lower in other parts of the world. Spending $800, $1000, $1200 on top of what you're already spending in terms of other pieces of technology, high speed internet, is not an insignificant amount of money. It just isn't. Compared to other mediums, for example if you wanted to listen to unlimited music you could buy a streaming service for $10-15 a month. If you want to watch a lot of movies you can buy an unlimited streaming services for $10-15 a month. Those are low barriers to entry for people who want to participate in those respective media communities and I'm asking the fundamental question of whether or not this should be a presumption that you have to spend $1000 to participate in games in the first place. So think about that. Qpmkro, I hope I'm pronouncing that right, points out as many of you did, that free-to-play games often require you to spend more money over the long term. I think one thing that's important to note is that there's free to play as an existing economic model versus free to play, which just means literally free to play. I was talking about free to play literally free to play, not about the economic system necessarily that leverages your weakness for spending money in Candy Crush Saga. I think if you start from the perspective that all games should be free, that opens the doors for new forms of experimentation and the possibility that there are other ways to do free to play other than the way it is currently being enacted. Cataholic left me a strongly worded note disagreeing with me about a lot of different things. I mentioned the barrier to entry for PC price a little earlier, but the other part of Cataholic's critique is this idea that making games more accessible or more mainstream is a good thing. He doesn't necessarily think that's the case. And I think that that's what undergirds this whole conversation about income inequality in games. I think we all need to ask ourselves whether we do want games to be these gated communities that are only for the privileged few or whether games are a right that all people should essentially have. That's a question you really need to ask yourself, and if you have the perspective that adding more people to the club harms the thing that you love deeply, I think you need to question what that thing that you love is in the first place. Is it games or is it something else? Penguin wants to know why my hair is so wonderful and what's my secret. Well I have a confession for you all. Sometimes when a black man loves a Mexican woman so much as my parents did.... ...and that's how mixed raced babies are born.