PRINTWhat’s next?
The future brings more interactive gaming
Courtesy of Electronic Arts, Inc.
Examples of creatures you can create on the EA game, Spore.
July 24, 2008 | 12:00 a.m. CST
Since the first home video game console, Magnavox Odyssey, was introduced in 1972, product developers have been pumping out systems like mad. Visuals are becoming more complex and lifelike with each new system. But the question remains as to what the future will provide in the realm of gaming.
“As humans are social, games are social,” says Kwangsu Cho, assistant professor in MU’s School of Information Science & Learning Technologies. Video games have always been this way, but the public is just now seeing that trend, especially because people no longer have to leave the comfort of their own homes in order to do so, says Paul Dziuba, Game Over columnist for the Columbia Daily Tribune. “It’s equally important to remember where video games got their start: bowling alleys, pizzerias and eventually arcades,” Dziuba says. “These were by no means secluded areas where people went to play alone.”
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Mass multi-player online games currently hold 16 million subscriptions worldwide, according to mmogchart.com (a Web site dedicated to “charting the future of the MMO industry”). This is definitely a jump from the approximately 1.5 million in 2000. With World of Warcraft on the PC and Microsoft creating Xbox Live, it’s not difficult to understand the popularity. “It’s more fun to play against/with actual human beings,” gamer Sam Terrazas says. “A person will never react the same way exactly twice, whereas a computer gets easy to figure out.” This seems to be the same mindset of many gamers, as well as product developers.
Sony is set to release Home for PS3 in the fall. According to a Sony press release, Home is a “meeting place for PS3 users from around the world, where they can interact, communicate, join online games, shop, share content and even build and show off their own personal spaces.” Players will get the opportunity to invent an avatar and personally customize every feature to represent what they wish. “People really get into Sims and like it because it’s like having an alter ego,” Terrazas says. “Home looks like Sims … on crack.”
This September, Will Wright, creator of The Sims, is also introducing a new creation, Spore, which is aiming to become the master of all evolution simulation games. In the game, a player gets to create his or her own universe from “Microscopic to Macrocosmic,” according to Spore’s Web site. Users can even trade spawn with other users, truly adding a new twist on evolution gaming. “Spore is probably going to be it in terms of next-generation play,” Game Crazy manager Adam Garnett says. “The only problem with stuff like that is a lot of people don’t have a PC powerful enough to run something like that yet.”
Both Home and Spore show that the future of gaming is heading in a more interactive direction. However, where gaming will go in five years remains a bit unclear. Dziuba says gaming is going in two directions. “On one hand, Nintendo is leading the Apple-ization of gaming, creating hardware and software that cater to a wider audience than games ever have,” Dziuba says. “The hardcore mindset will be the other direction of gaming.” For these hardcore gamers, games will become more immersive and pull the player deeper into the virtual world with insanely real graphics and beautiful story lines. Yet developers will also be providing games that allow everyone to play — teenagers, their grandmas and grandpas, little sisters, you name it.
The 1990s brought fighting games such as Street Fighter 2, the end of the decade specialized in RPGs including Final Fantasy VII, and now Guitar Hero and Rock Band have taken the stage. The future looks promising for diverse social gaming but what will the next obsession be? “The trend in video games, much like in every other industry, is the simple credo of ride it until it dies,” Dziuba says.
