Future of video games

 Posted by on 9 June 2009  Modern Life
Jun 092009
 

I’m not much of a video gamer.  I know I have a Sega Genesis in the front room and rumour has it that there’s a GameCube in the house, too.  But that’s it.  We don’t have any Playstations or XBoxes or Wiis or whatever the big platform of the day is.  That doesn’t mean I’m not fascinated by the technology.

Recently at E3, Microsoft released a demonstration video of the next level of gaming.  It’s something else.  In addition to voice and face recognition to identify players, absolutely no controller is needed.  A motion-capture device is used to translate movement in the real world into the game.  It is the stuff of science fiction.

Beyond the physical interactivity, which is undeniably a step above and beyond what currently exists, the jaw-dropping innovations come from the next piece — the one-on-one interactions an individual can have with a video game character.  Some aspects of it are, though exceedingly cool, somewhat unsettling (notice the use of the ideas of “life” and “living” in the next video).  It is truly the stuff of science fiction and is not that far from our living rooms.

T. Keith Edmunds

  • http://www.absurdintellectual.com/ Grant Hamilton

    Do any of these designers understand how games are played in the real world? Let’s see that body recognition work when the gamer is wearing a black shirt in a dark basement. Or the voice recognition when he’s got an accent. Or the movement trying to distinguish between me on the couch and my friend who’s trying to fuck me up by waving his hands beside me. Or just a regular social gathering going on in the background. This presumes that the game is front-and-centre and is the only thing that matters. In my experience, video games are generally just one of a half-dozen things that are ongoing at any time.

    And, frankly, part of the appeal to video games is that you can play them sitting down, on a screen in a small space — I don’t want to be kicking and jumping in my living room. Suddenly, you’re going to have to make sure that you don’t have glass vases in that room.

    Flipping through a “cover flow” knockoff of all those DVDs looked cool, too — but it would piss me off if I had 1,300 movies downloaded, and half of them didn’t come with cover art, and they were all labeled differently (this may happen even if they’re downloaded legally — some from iTunes, some from a studio website, and some from XBox). No thanks.

    Oh, and I don’t feel like I want to interact with a needy little avatar just to “wander over” to the game site. I hate loading screens already, no need to make me convince some prissy jerk that it’s time for me to play a game.

    Dear game designers: I know that this is the centre of your life. But games are peripheral entertainment to the rest of us. Please make them as entertaining as possible, but don’t waste your time thinking that a “media hub” is going to bring us “convergence” and we’ll suddenly use our XBox 1080s for video-conferencing and shopping.

    • http://pennywise-books.blogspot.com/ T. Keith Edmunds

      Wow. Mr. Negativity. But, points taken.

      Nonetheless, you can’t deny the cool factor in the technology.

  • Colin Corneau

    Pretty minor quibbles, G.

    I guarantee any spazzy kids are going to settle right down when they see the cool factor with this concept. I think one of the reasons it’s called ‘game changing’ is that it could well re-define how people use video games…after all, nobody knows what a video arcade is anymore, so why would the current way of using video games be assumed to be the standard into the future?

    As to leafing through movie selections, anyone with half a brain is going to incorporate a quicker selection option for amounts over, say, 30 or 50 or whatever. It could go by genre, you could thumb through letters of the alphabet to narrow it down…whatevs.

    I’m not a gamer, either but this is pretty amazing stuff. Like taking the Wii concept and taking it way further. I think that format of interaction is the future.

  • Trent

    I consider myself a gamer but I’m uncertain about this. I already much prefer Sony and Microsoft controllers to the Wiimote so I’ll be happy if these developments take a while to get to the market. Also, my arms would be unable to literally swing Kratos’s blades for the hours I already can … sitting down.

  • Colin Corneau

    It could go a long way to changing impressions of gamers as….umm, shall we say, less than athletic.