A game is defined as a structured activity that is undertaken for enjoyment & pleasure. So follows the definition, a video game is a game that involves interaction with a user interface to generate visual feedback on a video device for enjoyment and fun. Video games have always been an integral part of the lives, of those of us born in the 80’s and beyond. The games ranged from those, played on single game handheld consoles to the very latest PS3’s and Xbox’s. Video games have evolved and transformed with time. The uses they have been put to have not only ranged from entertainment to amusement, but to help train soldiers in combat & high end ultra realistic simulations for pilots.
The Past
One of the first games to become really popular was Pong, a take on table tennis. This was just the advent of people finding entertainment on a visual console. In the mid to late 80’s the 8 bit - 16 bit consoles became popular due to the low cost and easy availability. Games like Bomber Man, Contra, and Super Mario Bros were the greatest hit’s that these consoles featured. Prominently these consoles had games where players could shoot aliens and other weird shaped creatures. The audio that accompanied these games were sounds like ping, pong, boom, and other sounds, which mobiles in the early – mid 90’s used to make. An achievement worth a laurel then was rescuing Princess Peach in Super Mario Bros. Friends and supporters used to gather around to cheer and celebrate the point of reaching end and completing the game.
The princess that was rescued in Mario was more like a white patch on the screen, with an orange tuft on the top portion of the white patch (the head & the body). The color patches put together looked vaguely like a character which was supposed to resemble a human.
Game developers tried their best to avoided humans in their games. Designing human like characters required a lot of work & extreme programming skills. Every game made had to be made from scratch. Game engines were science fiction then. Reusability between games was a herculean task. That’s the reason game developers satisfied themselves with aliens as the villains and white blots on the screen representing space ships that could shoot the aliens as the playable character.
So what’s the difference between the games of then and that of today? What will be the difference between the games of today & that of games released 7 – 10 years from now?
The biggest difference between the games that we play on the 7th Generation consoles (XBOX, PS3 Wii) vs. the 8\16bit console is the Graphics that are rendered in the game. This Comparison would equate to comparing the horseless carriages of 18th century with the Ferrari.
What is similar? To get to this answer, we have to understand what games truly are. Games ideally are a problem set. A gamer solves the set of problem with a defined set of rules to progress further & finally complete it. This brings out the obvious answer on the similarity; it’s the game play.
The Interlude between the Past and the Present
John Carmack, the developer of Doom, one of the most popular FPS game in the history of gaming created the Doom Game Engine. This existence of game engines saw the advent of a new era of game development. Game developers knew what the new tool they had, they would trigger a revolution in the way games would look, feel & experience.
Time passed with better games greeting gamers every time. Games in this stage of evolution slowly witnessed the PC as great means to play games in addition to the existing consoles. Sony was lucky to have a man named Ken Kutaragi as an employee. He persuaded Sony to fund his research of the Super NES CD, which evolved into the first ever PlayStation. This was a revolution in the hardware that was needed to play games. The release of the PlayStation in the Mid 90’s triggered a fierce competition between Sony, Nintendo & Atari, each trying to prove that their gaming hardware was better. Incidentally Ken is known as the father of the Play Station.
With dedicated gaming consoles where the graphics rendering capability was increased several folds further evolved the face of the gaming industry. Human characters were the central focus in the games being developed. It was times when we had a human hero fighting of battles against evil alien invaders and finally protecting dear old earth.
Gamers loved what these games had to offer, but want for more resulted in another breathtaking feature in the world of gaming. Quake was one the first FPS game to incorporate this feature. Most Games today have this as definite feature. Guesses on what are we talking about?
The Multiplayer element! This is the most additive option in a game. Game’s which incorporate multiplayer option has always sold more & better than games which do not incorporate it. The obvious question arises as to Why? No matter how good is the AI in the game, the intelligence exhibited by a human is way superior. Competing against this form of intelligence in the game gives a different sense of challenge and satisfaction to a gamer. A human and not a CPU, is what’s competing against us. The fun factor in a Multiplayer mode is on completely different scale. Games like Quake & Halo where Multiplayer is the essence of the game; have not just followers but cults which portray what the game means to them.
The Japanese had monopolized the game market with Atari, Sony, and Nintendo becoming household brands when it came to gaming. Microsoft sensing opportunity decided to enter this space. The XBOX, being backed by the mighty financial power of Microsoft, had a space reserved for it in the future as a Console which would have a huge customer base.
The Present
We have seen the game play has pretty much remained the same. So what does the present showcase gaming as? Gaming is now evolved into a multi-billion dollar industry. Games of every possible genre have made its way to the gaming market.
Motion picture studios believe that a huge untapped market exists in transforming movies into games. Huge multinational organizations have started to realize that games are the fastest and most cost effective ways to train staff on complicated methods that are required to perform their work.
With the advancement in the Hardware for games, how have the games evolved? The games got more and more complex, no matter how advanced the hardware got, the game always needed more computing power.
The insatiable thirst for powerful graphics processing hardware was a boon for companies like Nvidia, AMD (ATI), IBM (Cell). These organizations made and are still making huge profits, selling graphic cards, and gaming CPU’s to both the Console and the PC based game populace.
Today there are awesome games. Games that take you into a completely new world, where things look so real, that the gamer is so much in unity with the game which he or she is playing. But the question is, are the games “Really that Real”?
The answer is No; this answer reverberates in the minds of most the game publishers including EA, Ubisoft, RockStar, Gathering of Developers, Take Two and all the other big gaming giants. So why is it not so real? The graphics look so real, the skin tones of the character is amazing, so much like mine. The clothes that the character put on are also so strikingly real. So what then is the problem here?
The Future
The future of gaming would address not just the problems faced in the present, but a whole new set of features that would blend the real and the virtual worlds together.
Revisiting the problem that was mentioned in the previous section; there is nothing called realistic emotions on the Characters face. The lack of emotions makes game characters look so plastic, so zombie like. The Holy Grail that all game developers are looking at now is to introduce true emotion in the characters. Emotions just like what a human would exhibit. That’s what would be the Future. That’s what the next generation games & game developers are expected to deliver. This would be the next huge chunk of development in the next generation game engines, where emotions would of central focus.
Surprisingly there is an industry that’s already perfected this art of portraying realistic emotions on artificial animated characters. The industry is the Animation & Cartoon industry. Companies like Disney, DreamWorks, and Pixar etc. The presumption as to why they can do it is because they have such huge computing power & memory to spare when developing these cartoons. The animation being pre-rendered and processed does not require specialized hardware to display it on the visual interface. Transmitting this is a very easy task. This of course is quite different with games. The rendering power that a developer has is the rendering power that the console has. This results in Console manufacturer researching and finding out how best they can incorporate the mechanisms that the animation industry is using into their hardware.
The next big thing that games in the future would have is involving a lot of the real world into the virtual world. This would involve game characters being able to shop on the net in game. This would be something like connecting to e-commerce sites to probably buy music or movies that can be watched or listened to as in game movies or music. The other use would be using VOIP or Internet Telephony within the game (Skype, Yahoo messenger), such that the character within the game can talk to another character in the same game on a different console within a network.
The future would have games played in specialized enclosure where, the environment would ambiently change with the game. These enclosures would have the lighting, temperature, wind speed, sound levels change with the game.
Conclusion
We traveled through how games have made it through time & what would possibly be in store for the future. But for now happy gaming with the what’s in the present
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Copyright © Dennis D Maliekal 2009
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