The Future of Games (recycled from 2005)

I was trawling through some old documents and stumbled on this one from just over 10 years ago. The message still rings true, even if the recession has shifted the time frame somewhat compared to what I though then.

Games are getting serious

ID Pearson, August 2005

Games are designed to be fun, but future games might be so much fun that they could start causing big social problems.

Forget the 15 inch monitor most people use today. What we are really talking about for tomorrow’s games is full immersion. Think Star Trek holodeck. Technology by 2020 will allow us to connect our nervous system to our computers, sampling nerve signals and recording every kind of sensation, replaying them in holiday memories, in communications, or in computer games. It will work using active skin, with electronics printed onto the skin, and tiny electronic components painlessly blown into the skin itself using compressed air jets. Some of these devices will link to nerve endings in our skin.

With touch, hearing and vision, computer games will be much more compelling. By 2020, another device that will be routine is the active contact lens, which uses tiny lasers and micro-mirrors to raster scan images straight onto your retina. This will give us a totally immersive 3D display.

Now imagine what people will do with this. With the massive processing and graphics capability of 2020 games machines, people could live all day in a pretty convincing full sensory virtual reality environment., and could live a fantasy life well beyond their real life means. Someone with a lousy real life, but enough pocket money to buy a games console, might effectively drop out of real life apart from eating, drinking, sleeping and going to the loo. And even in those activities, they can have a constant augmented reality overlay to make them more visually appealing.

But in their fantasy worlds, where they can kill everything or have sex with everyone they fancy, their brains might be corrupted to a point where they can no longer easily mix with civilised society. The real world will undoubtedly see more violence and more rape and sexual assaults.

But it doesn’t stop there. By 2030, robotics technology will be much more advanced. Some robots can already walk and dance. Polymer gel muscles and outer coatings will make many future robots look and feel like real people. The androids of science fiction are not long away now.

So how long will it be before the totally inoffensive (but exciting) Robot Wars is replaced by an android version of the Roman gladiator games? We would surely never stoop to using real people again, but why not androids? Even if they do have the latest AI modules with full emotions and self awareness? They are just machines, so who cares?  I really think that line of argument might well hold sway with many people. It is sad, but this century might well see the return of the lowest form of entertainment ever invented by man. Games are getting serious.

Vampires are yesterday, zombies will peak soon, then clouds are coming

Most things that you can imagine have been the subject of sci-fi or fantasy at some point. There is certainly a large fashion element in the decision what to make the next film about and it is fun trying to spot what will come next.

Witches went out of fashion a decade ago even while other sword and sorcery, dungeons and dragons stuff remained stable and recurrent, albeit a niche. Vampires and werewolves accounted for far too many films and became boring, though admittedly, some of them were very good fun, so it’s safe to bury them for a decade or hopefully two.

Zombies are among the current leaders, (as I predicted several years ago, in spite of being laughed at back then). It is still hard to find a computer game that doesn’t have some sort of zombies in it, so they have a good while to go yet. The zombie apocalypse is scientifically and technologically feasible (see https://timeguide.wordpress.com/2012/02/14/zombies-are-coming/) and that makes them far more disturbing than vampires and dragons, though the parasites in Alien are arguably even scarier.

Star Trek and the Terminator series introduced us to shape shifters. Avatar and Star Trek enthused over futuristic Indians. Symbionts and proxies are interesting but that’s really quite a shallow seam, there is really only one idea and it’s been used already. Religion and New Age trash has generally polluted throughout sci-fi and fantasy, but people are getting tired of it – American Indians and Australian Aborigines have been apologised to now. Recent Muslim backlash however suggests that the days are numbered for Star Wars, Dune, Mk 1 Klingons and others tapping into middle eastern stereotypes, so maybe  that will force other exotic cultures into the sci-fi limelight. The Cold War has already been done in overdose. South America has already been fully mined too. It’s a good while since the Chinese and Japanese cultures had a decent turn and I suspect they will come back strongly soon, whereas Africa doesn’t hold enough cultural identification points yet. Homophilia is having recurrent effects from Star Wars to Dr Who, but apart from gender-hopping, there isn’t really very far it can go. You can’t make many films from it.

So if those are the areas that are already showing signs of exhaustion  what comes after zombies? Gay zombies? Chinese zombies? Virtual zombies? Time travel zombies? Yeah, but after that?

Here’s my guess. Clouds.

Clouds are the IT Zeitgeist. They are the mid term future for sci-fi. There are a few possible manifestations and some tap well into other things we are getting to like. Clouds are a deep seam too. Not just one idea there. We have self-organisation, distribution, virtualisation, hybridisation, miniaturisation, self-replication, adaptation and evolution. We have AI, biomimetics, symbiosis, parasitic and commensalistic relationships. We have new kinds of gender, new kinds of intelligence, new physical and electronic forms. We have new kinds of materials, new ways of reproduction, new forms of attack and defense. I could write dozens of sci-fi books based on clouds. So could other people, and some of them will. Books, games, films, lots of them. About clouds.

You heard it here first. Clouds are the future of sci-fi.