A Glance into the WORLD OF TOMORROW

The future! Forget 2012, the Nuclear Apocalypse, Robot Uprisings, the Zombie Apocalypse and the ever-watching Totalitarian Governments for a moment- I, Jack Shandy, Gentleman Journalist, have a list of reasons the future is going to be juuuuuust fine. Well, for video games, at least. For better or worse, games and gamers are going to look a lot different in a decade or so: Hit the jump for 6 educated guesses at the shape the future’s going to take.

1. OLD PEOPLE WILL BE TECH-SAVVY

Strange to think about, but easy to predict: no more than a couple of decades from now, the vast majority of gamers are going to start getting old. That fairly recent stereotype of old grandma being confused and slightly frightened of the crazy technology the kids are using these days? It’s only going to last a generation. Tomorrows young gamers will grow up fighting Grandpa for time on their space-box 720’s, and trying to stop Nanna from maxing out the future internet download limits. Ol’ Tycho and Gabe from Penny Arcade will be penning comics from the nursery home. Mario will continue on, an ever-cheerful smile on his ever-youthful face, but those who make and play his games will slowly start to die. The ever-aging Solid Snake, not Mario, will become the mascot of this generation, his accelerated old age suddenly given new relevance.

Hey, growing old will probably suck, but growing old and tech-savvy will suck decidedly less! No longer will the elderly feel isolated and abandoned, with no-one to talk to: the vast, comforting social network of the Internet will be their refuge. They might not be able to play sports any longer, but all you need to play video games are two working hands and a brain. A major complaint against video games is that waste the lives of young people, making them sit around on a couch all day when they could be out in the sunshine. Make those young people into old people, though, and video games become the best thing since sliced bread- they make sitting around on a couch all day fun! Video games will keep the new generation of old folk entertained and tuned in to the world around them, not feeling bewildered about the . Nothing like pwning n00bs to distract yourself from the inevitable stagnation and decay that destroys all things in their time!

Rock on, you crazy granny! May your death be as painless as a 50 note streak.

Another easy prediction – at some point, graphics are going to hit a wall. There’s only so realistic you can make graphics before they actually become indistinguishable from real life-and it’ll happen pretty soon, in fact, judging by the good looking games of today. So, what happens when the pixels hit the fan?

Well, first of all, graphics will most probably start to downgrade. When you gain the processing power to render each and every individual pore on a human body, you start to realise that rendering each and every individual pore on a human body is REALLY time consuming- and when everyone can do it, it’ll stop being impressive. Once everyone can easily make things photorealistic, they’ll stop trying to prove themselves all the time. There’ll probably be an increase in the amount of stylized or un-realistic styles, and a focus on the art direction instead of the programming huevos.

That said, there’ll still, as always, be a big focus on the size of your programming dick. Instead of graphics, though, the focus will shift developing processing power and, joyfully, making smarter A.I. There’ll still be the big marketing buzz about the next new innovations Ultrakill ZX is going to bring to the table, but instead of being about how much new pixels they’ve managed to cram into the screen, it’ll be about how smart and dynamic the game actually PLAYS. Who knows, the first steps at artificial intelligence could even come out of the video games we play!

The question is: Who will be playing Whom?

With the passing away of that old war-horse, the graphics race, comes the next prediction: They’ll have to stop bringing out a new console for everyone to buy every few years. Sure, the big names will still keep bringing out consoles for a while after the graphics race finishes- ones featuring improvements in memory, processing power, peripherals, and the rest- but without a clear, easily identifiable improvement in what the games look like, there just won’t be as much interest as there is now. It’s harder to get excited about a bunch of specifications than it is about a marked improvement in the overall shininess factor. This means that, eventually, they’ll just stop making new ones- eventually reaching the peak of what they can physically do with it. With the result that grandpa’s old ’72 Spacebox Deluxe will become a family heirloom like an old chess-set, passed down through successive generations who’ll each blow the dust off the old girls Cpu and set down to playing whatever game is newest off the shelves.

The console wars will end, and different consoles will just become like different brands of phone. The idea that certain games could only be played on certain consoles will, hopefully, come to seem like a ridiculous notion- like having certain songs that could only be played on a Sony brand Mp3 player! In the far future, perhaps, a console will be just like a chess set- Just the boring, block-of-wood base for the real show: the game.

4. MINITURIZATION WILL SPEED UP, AND FINALLY STOP

Just a small prediction here, again: Once consoles reach their full potential, they’re going to start becoming smaller. Eventually, they’ll fit into your pocket, or even on a USB. With the huge power of the future, you could download a console off the internet to put on your memory stick- yet another thing that’ll turn them into a chessboard-style device. You’ll carry it around in your pocket, and plug it into a TV when you want to play. Portable consoles will just be palm-screens with buttons that the console plugs into the back of.

Eventually, though, when the consoles get thin enough to slit your wrists, everyone will get tired of breaking them every time they sit down on it. They’ll become stuffed with artificial padding until they fill out a nice, comfortable shape.

The problem here, as I’m sure you can guess, is piracy: people will be able to pirate not only games, but full-blown consoles with ease- the download will take hardly any time at all. So, either security will go through the roof, or no-one will make any money from games. You thought SecuROM was bad? Wait till you see a future where you can download any game around in five minutes.

5. MIND CONTROL VR SIMULATION ARENAS

Yeah, I think this one’s pretty self-explanatory. Let’s move on to the last point.

6. GAMES WILL BECOME MORE LOW-KEY

Games right now are in a ridiculous huge frenzy of hype, previews, reviews, exclusive blockbuster premieres, game shows and much, much more. Every year, it seems like people can’t possibly go into such a hype frenzy again- and every year, they do, getting into a huge frothing-at-the-mouth frenzy about the latest game. Not even blockbuster movies reach the neon-glow hype-explosion froth heights of a really anticipated game. Blockbuster! Ha!

But, with the finish-line of the graphics race and the ceasefire of the console wars will come the slow, dwindling twilight of the games industry. Consoles will stop coming out. Graphics will stop getting better. Games will start toning it down. Looking back at our time now, we’ll see it as a huge, extravagant, ridiculously unsustainable boom that came before the inevitable, slow, bust. Think of this as the ridiculous high spike on the graph, before it settles down to flatten out into a comfortable plateau.

I’ve heard a guy claim that this will be an end to games, but that’s ridiculous. Games will still be made, and people are still going to play them- there’s a reason chess has been around for a few hundred years. We’ve got a precedent here. What it will hopefully mean, however, is a huge decrease in hype and expectations. Games will probably lose some of their outlying audience. They’ll become smaller, and more low-key- more similar to indie games now. But- and this is the important thing- they’ll never, ever, get worse. The technology will change, the hype may change, everything will change about games – except that the people who make them will remain as brilliant as ever. And as long as they are, I’ll still be playing them.

So I’m pretty optimistic about the future, really.

-Jack Shandy, puppeteer at large.

(As a side-note, apparently we’ve been featured as the top game-design blog on this little wordpress community! Which leaves me slightly confused, to be honest. Do they know we’re just a bunch of kids? Well, everybody, keep pretending you know what you’re talking about- it’s obviously working.)

(Maybe I shouldn’t have said that last bit.Shh. Don’t tell anyone.)