Wow!
The future of gaming has eight legs, a tide-pool phase and owes a debt to Star Trek. Are you ready?
The Oxford English Dictionary defines fantasy as ‘the imagining of the improbable or impossible’, or ‘an idea with no basis in reality’. Conversely, reality is defined as ‘the state of things as they actually exist’ and ‘a thing that is actually experienced or seen’. But with gaming already doing such an effective job of blurring the line between these two apparently contradictory states, how long will it be before these definitions cease to have any meaning in that realm? For some gamers, not soon enough.
“The future of software development is user-created content,” states David Fleck of Linden Labs, the makers of Second Life. Second Life now has around five million users, who have created an avatar, or online persona, which interacts with other avatars in the virtual community. You can buy coffee, go to a museum, have sex or end up in prison – just like in your real life. Home, for PlayStation3 – cited as an example of Game 2.0 – will provide a 3D environment where 3D avatars can hang out in each other’s home spaces, watch movies, go shopping – all in as many dimensions as we do.
The success of such games raises the question: what is virtual about the virtual world, now that it even has estate agents and costs real money to “live” there?
The answer is in the avatars – the true fantasy element. They are us, reinvented, refined or utterly transformed. It is the transporting power of these games that will drive the next stage of user-created content. Will Wright, the man behind SimCity and The Sims, has developed a new game called Spore. Wittily mapped out in evolutionary phases (beginning with ‘Tide Pool’), this allows the user not just to adapt a template identity, but to generate something truly unique.
The executive producer of Spore, Lucy Bradshaw, explains: “We have actually written code that has trained the computer to animate anything that a player can imagine bringing to life. It could have two legs, it could have eight legs. It [the computer] knows how to make each of those creatures walk.” The limits of how we are able to see and represent ourselves in gaming are being pushed back in true evolutionary style.
However, there still exists a division between the physical and virtual realm: our imaginations roam freely, but our bodies are left behind. But they’re working on that. The desire now is to fully experience the generated ‘reality’. In Star Trek: The Next Generation, considerable time is given over to the Holodeck, with crew members popping out for a virtual reality fix as often as we might for a cup of tea. It’s a plausible vision of what the future could hold – an opportunity for us to enter a created reality, rather than sending on an animated emissary. In fact, the Holodeck is so efficient that many crew members often have difficulty telling reality from fantasy.
The idea that a virtual environment could one day be indistinguishable from the time and place it seeks to imitate is not nearly as far-fetched as it might sound. After all, if someone had told you 30 years ago that Pong, the simple tennis-simulator game with the distinctive ‘bip’ sound, would mutate only a couple of decades later into something as sophisticated as Pro Evolution Soccer, most of us would have raised an eyebrow. So, how far away are we?
Technology and games journalist Emory Rowland puts it this way: “In movie chronology, we are somewhere between Lawnmower Man and Spielberg’s AI.” The power of computers, and therefore of gaming, has increased exponentially since the advent of microprocessors. What is commonly known as Moore’s Law (Gordon E. Moore is the co-founder of Intel) states that processor power will double every two years. If this is still in effect in 10 years’ time, Rowland says, “we’ll be gaming on systems with speeds well over 10,000 Ghz.” In other words, they’ll be about 5,000 times more powerful than today’s best home computer.
‘Rumblefx’ headphones (which, the manufacturers claim, enable gamers not only to “hear where the action is coming from, they also feel it”) aim to heighten the sense of place through sound. The delivery, however, is still conventional and – to a point – questionable. Though it’s not inconceivable soundwaves could be manipulated to deliver all-over-body sensation, do we really want to feel an explosion? The sensation of a loud noise is, as with the feeling of real pain, theoretically possible but not necessarily desirable.
In this case, visual realism will be the area that sees the next steps taken. The hope is that electronic gaming will make a quantum leap when a new type of display device is invented to replace the monitor/TV screen. The Holodeck, essentially, will replace the ‘games room’ in every house big enough to have one. It will surely be at this point that games will utterly eclipse films as the primary mode of visual entertainment. After all, why sit back and passively watch Die Hard when you can be Bruce Willis yourself?
In Star Trek, the consequences of immersing yourself in an utterly convincing virtual world are frequently near-apocalyptic. In the real world, it’s safe to assume that the consequences will be both good and bad. The retreat from the real is something that has always troubled social commentators, but the popularity of avatar-based games suggests that we want to create other selves and experience a variation of ‘real life’ as them. And it’s a lot cheaper than plastic surgery.
What’s more, the educational possibilities of such environments promise to be almost endless. Imagine, for instance, being able to travel back to ancient Rome as a classics student, or swim in the bloodstream of a person, Innerspace-style, as a biology undergraduate. The future could be where our wildest dreams are realised – and it’s coming soon…
Story by Anna Richards