The Future of Video Games

[Plothole]

I posted this (in a slightly different form) at another forum, then figured I might get some input here as well...

Decades ago shifting a line across a TV screen using a little dial was considered "state of the art." Today we play our sophisticated 2D and 3D games using mouses, analog sticks, pressure buttons, touch screens, and even motion sensors. Now the question is, where will it go from here?

Personally I believe voice recognition will be a big thing come next console generation. From what I've been reading, the technology has become much more reliable in recent years. I also think that within 30 years, the physical controller will all but disappear... supplanted by non-tactical methods such as face/eye tracking, gesture recognition, and of course the voice recognition.

Okay, that's my view on things. What I'm asking of course is what do you think our gaming devices and games will be like five, ten, even twenty plus years from now?

[Rkolter]

I selected Gesture because we already have the Wii, it wouldn't be a stretch to see improvements in motor control.

[Spriteville]

Yeah I'm with kolter on that. This would be a big hurdle and have a lot of issues but I don't think it's impossible for one of the next big things to be little detectors you put on your body at major points. Probably not as many as full motion capture, but enough to move around a bit and control body positions. Since running around will never be viable due to playroom constraints for a home console, you'd probably still run around with a control device, and that would probably work similar to the wii's controls.

[IVstudios]

I've been seeing some promising looking stuff with the use of reading brain-waves and such. Just strap a sweatband like thing to your forehead and it can be used to make objects on a screen move. It looks like is still has a ways to go, but if it gets advanced far enough it would be awesome.

If done right it would be great for games like warcraft where you want to control large numbers of characters. Instead of having t click on each one with a mouse you just think of the your little peon, they a burrow and he'll go off and build it.

[Thinking]
Okay, Hunters pull back and attack those flying units
Warstomp
Grunts go in
Wyvrens circle around behind
Upgrade that armor
You two peons to the burrow
You repair
Summon wolves
Build 3 more hunters
Grunt 3 pull back and heal
[/Thinking]
Time-lapse: 2.3 seconds

Just thinking about it is making me geek-out.

[Montyandwoolley]

i selected 3d, because games like half life 2 would be funny (I jump enough with 5.1 surround, imagine 3D with full enclosure sound :S)

[Sortelli]

Other: Porn.

[Grabmygoblin]

I've been seeing some promising looking stuff with the use of reading brain-waves and such. Just strap a sweatband like thing to your forehead and it can be used to make objects on a screen move. It looks like is still has a ways to go, but if it gets advanced far enough it would be awesome.

...and creepy...

I think we may see "holosuite"-style set ups within 50 years. in hollywood they already use motion-capture for special effects, once the tech becomes cheap enough, I can imagine being given a pair of goggles and maybe something like those velcroed ping-pong balls on joints, maybe not (it'd be a hard sell).

[Killbert-Robby]

I'm pretty sure at the rate we're going, in 10 years we'll have full immersion VR

Also, yeah, brain reading is coming along nicely. I mean, come on, ten years ago they made a game where you balance a guy on a tight rope by focusing your left or right half of the brain. The technology has to be WAY better by now. One thing I know exists is a focus builder - You have to focus on a specific symbol to move onto the next one. If brain reading can already determine which symbols we're thinking of, it wont be long before we're thinking of soldiers and buildings.

[Plothole]

Great responses thus far!

Well, except porn perhaps... but only because I'm pretty sure that already exists in VG form.

I've been seeing some promising looking stuff with the use of reading brain-waves and such. Just strap a sweatband like thing to your forehead and it can be used to make objects on a screen move. It looks like is still has a ways to go, but if it gets advanced far enough it would be awesome.

If done right it would be great for games like warcraft where you want to control large numbers of characters. Instead of having t click on each one with a mouse you just think of the your little peon, they a burrow and he'll go off and build it.

[Thinking]
*example*
[/Thinking]
Time-lapse: 2.3 seconds

Just thinking about it is making me geek-out.

Wow, that would be intense.

[Vorticus]

Holograms and gestures in conjunction. Imagine playing a truely 3d version of Katamari Damacy using hand motions to move the Katamari.

[LibertyCabbage]

Pac Man MMO

[Spriteville]

Pac Man MMO

http://pacmanhattan.com/

[War]

Holographic televisions will never take off for gaming. Considering the requirements, the payoff just isn't good enough. Something like a virtual retinal display using lasers would be the better route.
Mind controllers, and mind feedback could be interesting. The tricky part of mind controlling is isolating the mind from the rest of the body, and developing new methods of control.
Feedback is easier, but I imagine the finer you want the feedback the harder it'll be. It'll be easy to induce pain, harder to induce the feeling that someone just shot you in the foot. Though you wouldn't go that far, a virtual shot in the foot would put you in shock just like a real one.

[Thinking]
Okay, Hunters pull back and attack those flying units
Warstomp
Grunts go in
Wyvrens circle around behind
Upgrade that armor
You two peons to the burrow
You repair
Summon wolves
Build 3 more hunters
Grunt 3 pull back and heal
[/Thinking]
Time-lapse: 2.3 seconds

This isn't a very good example. A real time strategy game has little room for improvement on the control system. They're designed for point and click type control. To speed up control there you've given everything a far greater degree of autonomy than they currently have. You've moved to mind control, but made the controller far more redundant in the process.

[KWill]

Eye-tracking. It's got too much potential for subliminal messaging and product placement not to make money. Whether it will directly impact gameplay is another question, though...

[ShineDog]

I assume that balance disruption will be the first kind of mental feedback, since thats already working quite well through electronic stimulation, to the point where they can guide a blindfolded man around a maze as he attempts to compensate for a perceived loss of balance.


Imagine that with ace combat, you are upside down now fucker!


*vomit*


In reality, i think these are probably a little further away than you guys think. The wii is great fun, but its motion control is still pretty rudimentary, and we cant nail voice control all that well, never mind mind control.

Personally, im much more interested in where game design is headed. Games today are so polished and well presented, that stilted animation and art isnt a barrier to emotional attachment anymore. Some people like to criticise games for being derivative but i see a genre that is starting to really shine artistically (sure, its happening slowly, but hey.) and i find that the most exciting part, Bioshock was a good game but when i was playing it my real thought was that this game was really frigging important, but from an artistic point of view, rather than a gameplay one.

[IVstudios]

This isn't a very good example. A real time strategy game has little room for improvement on the control system. They're designed for point and click type control. To speed up control there you've given everything a far greater degree of autonomy than they currently have. You've moved to mind control, but made the controller far more redundant in the process.

I don't quite get what you mean. The way I was thinking of using it, you wouldn't be changing the way the game acts, just the way you tell it what to do. Instead of taking the time to try and click on on an individual unit (or select a specific group of units) in a large chaotic battle, you just think of the guy you want and it selects it for you. Then instead of toggling through all his options, you think of the action you want and he dose it. (or more plausibly, you wouldn't be thinking of the action, per-say, but the portion of the screen you would like to "click". Sort of like a touch screen, only instead of a stylus, you use your mind.) It would allow for a much better level of micro management of units. Sort of like when you are playing against the computer, the computer can give each individual units commands much faster than a human, in part because the computer doesn't have to move a mouse, click a button, move the mouse, click a button again to control the units. It just "thinks" about which unit it wants.

One of the most frustrating things in that game is trying to get your units to act as anything but a single group, simply because selecting individuals is time consuming.

[War]

This isn't a very good example. A real time strategy game has little room for improvement on the control system. They're designed for point and click type control. To speed up control there you've given everything a far greater degree of autonomy than they currently have. You've moved to mind control, but made the controller far more redundant in the process.

I don't quite get what you mean. The way I was thinking of using it, you wouldn't be changing the way the game acts, just the way you tell it what to do. Instead of taking the time to try and click on on an individual unit (or select a specific group of units) in a large chaotic battle, you just think of the guy you want and it selects it for you. Then instead of toggling through all his options, you think of the action you want and he dose it. It would allow for a much better level of micro management of units. Sort of like when you are playing against the computer, the computer can give each individual units commands much faster than a human, in part because the computer doesn't have to move a mouse, click a button, move the mouse, click a button again to control the units. It just "thinks" about which unit it wants.

But you seem to be overlooking the mechanics of the situation. Let's say you want to select one unit in a group of twenty, how would you go about it? You could assign the unit a name, but that means you'd need a unique identifier for all 20 units, and if you have 200 units it's just impossible. A computer has no problem individually identifying 200 units, we're not so good at it.
Another option is identification by location, but again we're not so good at that. There are several ways it can be done.
Contextual location: "Select troop to the left of the group of raiders with 6 units beside the big tree. No, the troop next to that one."
Or you can do it by coordinates, which we're not good at, and would require the battlefield to be labeled in some way. But an alternate way of doing this is to assign some kind of pointer on the field, so you can select troops by their proximity to this pointer, which you move through the field via thought. And now we're back at a control system just like a mouse.

The big advantage the computer has is that it's faster than you are. It can do multiple things at the same time, and see the whole map at once. The computer doesn't care about immersion, it's all just numbers to it. We care about immersion and having something pretty to look at, and that limits how we can play the game.

Certain aspects can be sped up, but they're things that can already be sped up with traditional control methods. The bit where you descibe telling the computer to build something, that's a macro. It's a macro that goes: select hunter factory, build 3 hunters. Macros exist in current games, though rarely in real time strategys. The main limitation here is keyboard combinations, and remembering the combinations. It would be easier remembering the activation commands for macros if they were in the kind of language we're used to.

[IVstudios]

It would depend on the level of integration you can get between your brain and the computer system. If a substantial enough connection could be made controlling the computer could become like controlling your own body. There are dozens of movable parts on the human body that can move in hundreds or different ways, but we hardly have to think to use them because well, we just do it.

Granted, this kind of interface would make learning a new game akin to learning to walk for the first time. But once you got use to it you could move your units the same way you move your fingers.

A more plausible (at least in our lifetime) solution would be to simply make a mind controlled "mouse" type deal Like you suggested. (I had added a part about that to my previous post, after you already read it i guess, because I realized a full mind/computer Matrix style integration is a little far fetched. At least for the current technology)

or more plausibly, you wouldn't be thinking of the action, per-say, but the portion of the screen you would like to "click". Sort of like a touch screen, only instead of a stylus, you use your mind..

Which I think can be done (heck, it already has been done, Though the controls are still clumsy) If done properly could greatly ease controlling simply because it would cut the

Code: Select all

screen > brain > hand > moues/keabord > screen

interface down to

Code: Select all

 screen > brain > screen

Afterthought: I know is seems the same as simply using the already existing mouse, but I think that if the connection can be made well enough the cursor would become more like part of our body, instead of just an extension of a tool we hold in our hand, which could allow for much faster, more dexterous "clicking." And then from there could continue to evolve into increasingly complex ways moving toward total mind/computer integration

[Killbert-Robby]

I thought of something that is fundimentally wrong with mind control - indecisiveness. When I play C&C for example, I'm usually like "ooooh I'll buy a GI, they're useful, but ah in 100 more dollars I can buy a tank... or should I build an airport?"

I would NOT want that thought pattern to result in the simultaneous construction of a GI, tank and airport, just because I thought of those objects. The alternative is that I have to focus on ONE thing for a longer amount of time, which, lets face it, would take about as long as a mouse click.

[LibertyCabbage]

As an ex-WC3 player, I don't think that mind control would be beneficial for RTS games. The current system of micromanagement via a physical interface rewards skilled players for their abilities to rapidly and accurately manage multiple units simultaneously. The top WC3 players generally average above 300 actions per minute, and their ability to do this is one reason that they're the best. Since taking out the physical aspect of management would make the micro a lot quicker and easier, I think this would especially hurt games like WC3 which is based at least 75% on micro. Basically, the easier a game is, the less skill is rewarded and the game loses appeal. It also seems kind of pointless to design an RTS with something as expensive and experimental as mind control because it wouldn't really enhance gameplay, as the quality of your micro only matters in relation to your opponent's. If you and your opponent are made equally better at micro then you're exactly where you were before all the fancy technology. The exception would be if the person with the higher intelligence benefited more, but I don't think video games would be as fun if they were based entirely on pure intelligence.

And, IV, I think you're seriously underestimating the impact that keyboards have in RTS games. You say that a mouse is an insufficient tool for micromanagement, but all serious players rely heavily on their keyboards in addition to their mice and it allows people to be a lot more competent than you seem to be implying. Managing a bunch of units at once isn't as intimidating when you have all your units and key buildings bound to various hotkeys and even though it's still difficult the person who can do it better will have an advantage which is how a game should be.