technology

[Omar]

what do you think in 20 years our technology is going to be like? do you think its going to be like, you looking down on the XBOX and PS2 games and saying, wow such crapy graphics, back then you had to to put in the disc. its just a thought.

[AtmaWeapon]

I don't forsee games getting much more realistic. I think we have reached a point where if the games get more realistic people will start to reject them. There was a study done recently on this. It found that in computer-generated characters, people are more likely to identify positively with a character that is obviously computer-generated than a character that is very realistic. The hypothesis is that as the image approaches a more realistic portrayal of the human form, we come to expect it to model the actions of a human more perfectly. When a cartoonish character clips through the edge of a table our mind doesn't see much of a problem, since it was easy to see the character was not real. When a near-perfect person skips a frame in their walk animation, our brain sets off alarms that something isn't right and it bothers us.

I'm hoping that as the hardware outruns the willingness of programmers to push that hardware to its limit, we once again focus on gameplay and let the graphics take a back seat. Already, the industry is complaining about how much more time is spent on graphical presentation than on gameplay, so hopefully they will resolve this internally.

I don't think I'll ever look back on the Gamecube or XBox and mock the graphics. I still believe some of the SNES and Genesis games have better graphics than most of our modern games, so I'll base my opinion on whether the graphics make sense. I probably will still revile the PS2's underachievement, though, as two of the cardinal sins of 3d graphics to me are low-quality textures and poor antialiasing.

Other than that, I think processing power will have moved to a utility. Everyone will have the equivalent of a dumb terminal with personal storage space, and you will connect to some central source of processing power. As you perform heavier tasks (like gaming), you will consume more processing power and therefore pay more money. The logistics of implementing this seem a little farther off than 20 years, but I wouldn't be surprised if we were close.

The PC is becoming more and more important, and Microsoft is making sure to try and make it the centerpiece of your entertainment center. The first person to come up with a way to securely provide wireless video at a speed that allows you to play games will be a rich man, indeed, as Microsoft will pay dearly to gobble that up. At that point, you don't have to worry about making the PC silent (as is the current problem with an HTPC) since you can shove it in a closet and let it serve every TV in your house (so long as you use the Microsoft streaming format on Microsoft-certified receivers, of course). Hopefully someone will beat Microsoft to it, though it will probably be Sony and we'll end up in just as bad of a boat.

[DsS Game]

The only future I see in gaming are the sequels. Tekken might go on for a long time and maybe Final Fantasy. I don't see how much companies can create. Seems like everything has been done.

[Glitch]

What do I predict for the future of gaming? Silent Hill 24. You think they woulda learned their lesson after Silent Hill 2.....

[Goat]

How 'bout a system that gives blow jobs. Think about it, you can win teh world series, beat the shit out of an entire stree gang, and then get a blow job. Sounds exciting!

[{DSG}DarkRaven]

I predict gaming will become more realistic, Atma, but not in ways that we expect. Graphically, things actually can get a whole lot better, but only in subtle ways. For example, lots of people think Doom3 looks great, but John Carmack (the main programmer, FYI) thinks it looks downright terrible at times. Being able to realistically render light in real time still has a long way to go before it's "there".

To clarify a bit more, graphics are "there", because even though you can still spot the seams on a high poly human model, but when it's moving and interacting, it's much harder to see. The textures, the geometry, it's all there. But light... The models in Doom 3 look like ceramic dolls, because the light doesn't interact with them properly. The models don't cast shadows on each other. The textures don't refract light like they should. And most importantly, as Carmack himself noted, light doesn't interact with skin properly.

As I recall, he claimed that this was the next step in realistic lighting. The skin is composed of many layers, and light doesn't just bounce off the top, but actually goes through them, creating a kind of refractive transulcency that can't be done quite yet. This is one of the biggest reasons why human characters work best in sci-fi games: shiny metal suits (read: Halo).

The other way games will advance will be more subtle, as I mentioned before. Realistic physics will be present in almost every game out there, even RPG's. As you may or may not know, some physics existed in Metal Gear Solid 2, while they were cut from MGS3 because the PS2 simply wasn't powerful enough to handle them on top of everything else. This is clearly going to change in the future.

Other subtle things will also change. Little, teeny things, like realistic hair, shoelaces, that sort of thing. Crap you won't even realize most of the time. I don't think they'll ever look "real", to be quite honest. We're already aproaching the point of graphical overdose inside the industry. But as the available power increases, as the core stays the same, little things, I say, will be the future. Like... stray cats, or rendered clouds.

[theplustwo]

The only future I see in gaming are the sequels. Tekken might go on for a long time and maybe Final Fantasy. I don't see how much companies can create. Seems like everything has been done.People like to say this about anything that involves creativity, including music, movies, novels, and games, but it isn't true. It's a cop out. There are still tons of new and exciting games being developed all the time, and some of them aren't even by Nintendo (like Katamari Damacy).
I don't forsee games getting much more realistic. I think we have reached a point where if the games get more realistic people will start to reject them. There was a study done recently on this. It found that in computer-generated characters, people are more likely to identify positively with a character that is obviously computer-generated than a character that is very realistic.I agree. I think this is why Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within and Polar Express were flops while other movies featuring more cartoonish humans, like The Incredibles, were successes. Realistically rendered humans tend to look creepy, and making incredibly realistic looking computer animated characters doesn't take advantage of the possibilities of the medium. If you're going to make photorealistic people, why not just use actors? It's insanely cheaper, and will always be more engaging than animation where realism is concerned. A lot of people critisize Walt Disney's realistic animation style in Snow White (among others) for this reason. Why not just use real actors?
I probably will still revile the PS2's underachievement, though, as two of the cardinal sins of 3d graphics to me are low-quality textures and poor antialiasing.I agree. This is what I hate about the origional PlayStation's graphics as well, everything looks muddy, jaggy, and the walls in many of the games have a weird warbly effect when the camera gets close to them. People chastise the GameCube for having bright colors, which makes absolutely no sense to me. The real world is not dominated by brown, blurry surfaces.

Another problem I have with the move towards more photo-realistic graphics applies more specifically to games. In his book Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud detailed how people tend to identify more closely with simply drawn characters (ultimately with a smiley face) than with realistically drawn ones. Anyone can see themselves in the pain on Charlie Brown's face after he misses the football, but you can't really feel for Superman when he gets hit with cryptonite. This is because the mental picture you have of your own expression is fairly vague, you don't know exactly what face you are making at a given time, but you know generally that you are smiling, and raising your eyebrows, or whatever.

Where this comes into play in games is that when you play a game, you become the character much more than when watching a movie. If the character you are controlling on the screen is obviously some one entirely else, it becomes harder to get into the game. Which is why the protaganists of most games don't do a lot of talking. When you play A Link to the Past, you are Link. Since he is essentially a crudely drawn figure with no real personality, you are free to assign your own specific look to him in your mind, and imagine your voice as his, etc. In a game with more realistic graphics, you are more or less controlling someone who is not yourself, and voice acting for your character particularly ruins the illusion.

At any rate, I think graphics will continue to improve, but only AAA games will take advantage of them, which means that in Madden 2025 you will be able to zoom in on any random bystander in the crowd and know if they were pleased by the tackle you just made, but the more creative games will use a form of graphics that is either more cartoony, either with cel-shading or just simpler, like with Animal Crossing.

[Coder GT]

I don't know. Maybe CDs won't be used anymore or anti-scratch CDs will have come out. Your console will be a computer as well. Smellovision will have finally come out.

[{DSG}DarkRaven]

I don't know. Maybe CDs won't be used anymore or anti-scratch CDs will have come out. Your console will be a computer as well. Smellovision will have finally come out.


CD's will always scratch, just like razors will always get dull. Making a product too good digs into profit margins. As for smellovision, that might eventually happen, because you'd constantly need to be refilling the scent goop in the TV.


+2, I have to disagree with you on why FF:SW bombed. The characters were real, but not real enough, and fell into the area I have appropriately dubbed, the soulless void. The Incredibles was not just 3d people, but 3d cartoon people, which is something I can't exactly define, but the point I'm sure you can realize is that they weren't meant to be real humans. As you stated, they were cartoony, and that gave them a little something that the people from FF:SW didn't have. Some of the things I mentioned before, about skin translucency and realist hair rendering, once that technology is available, I think we'll see a lot more digital actors, and once the medium is accepted, the movies won't bomb so much.

It'll take time, however, because things like hair rendering are still being developed. For instance, in The Incredibles, there was only one character to have a head of hair that was completely rendered, and not manipulated polygonally- Violet. It's noticeable in some of the half-finished scenes on the DVD; Violet looks like a bald doll, because it would have been a waste of effort to render her hair for the scenes. Other hair isn't entirely complete, but the basic model is there. Someday, almost all characters (or at least most of the ones with large amounts of screen time) will have fully rendered hair. And... when consoles can finally do that dynamically... oh my. :D