I was doing something similar to the "TedTalk Tuesday" threads I do here in PA's "Games and Technology" forum- I think it was called "Attack of the..." over there.
Anyway.
Several years back, I did one of those called "Attack of the Golden Age" (don't bother doing a search; 'of', 'the', and 'age' are below the four-letter limit in searches). It was about pretty much what your poll advances- that there was, in fact, a "Golden Age" of gaming. At the time, I suggested we were currently
in it.
It was.... enlightening.
I came to agree with the overall point of the majority of responders: the nature of the medium in which this wonderful art is produced is inherently dependent upon technological development. What we see and do in computer (or console) games depends wholly on the hardware we have available to us at any given time.
Here's an example. Until today, games have been played, for the most part, on slightly curved or flat screens that can only display a series of two-dimensional frames. We have virtually mastered the ability to display color on those screens- modern computer monitors, for example, already have the capability to display more colors than our eyes can see- and all we can do now is refine that ad infinitum; the images, on the other hand, remain two-dimensional.
Samsung has recently debuted a new technology in their newest sets that has a built-in ability to display stereoscopic images. A pair of polarized glasses enables a reasonably accurate three-dimensional display, given the material was filmed in that manner in the first place.
On the gaming side of the equation, Nvidia
has a product that does the same thing for games. My understanding of
their system is that it does something to existing games that allows "true" 3D depth to be added. I took a look at the
list of supported games and was pretty impressed with what they've accomplished.
With the advent of
OLEDs, the game- pun intended- changes. OLEDs allow for displays
like the one at the first Nvidia link above, but can be
bent and curved, which enables a display covering one's entire field of vision (or a wall, or as a lightstrip near the ceiling). While still
very expensive and thus fairly rare, OLEDs, like any new and useful technology, are expected to rapidly
drop in price as newer and more efficient manufacturing methods are developed. OLEDs will- not may, but IMO
will- replace the LEDs in use today: they consume far less power, are thinner and lighter, do not require a backlight (OLEDs
emit their own light, and how cool is
that), and are in general just a better idea.
A next step after that would be true virtual reality or holographic technology. Until now and into the near future, these have been staples of science fiction. It is very hard for us today to imagine clearing off the coffee table so we can project a game of Command and Conquer 8 onto it in three dimensions, such that all objects look like solid, toy models. However, if these ideas seem fanciful to anyone reading, please try to remember what it was like when you first played Super Mario Brothers on your brand-new NES. Could you possibly have imagined how far we would come in the following ten years? The next fifteen? Two decades hence? Nearly a quarter-century?
The Video Game Golden Age is, therefore, in my opinion an ongoing and evolving thing. It depends directly on the hardware available and the abilities and imaginations of game developers, artists, coders, and so on to take advantage of the capabilities of the hardware. I will go out on a limb here and say that storytelling is one crucial aspect of gaming that is and has until now often been severely lacking (although there are very old games that are in fact quite well-written). However, I think even that is subject to the lack of immersion we feel when playing games in the way most people do today: on a flat, two-dimensional screen that pretends to show you "3D".
The next major advance, in my opinion, is going to be related to how the graphics themselves are presented, and I think that advance is going to involve moving from faked 3D-on-a-2D-screen to faked-3D-using-a-3D-display. This will be a milestone, a watershed moment preceding true holography, and we will in future times speak of it in the same reverential, hushed tones we use when describing the advent of the first 3D accelerator, or multicore CPUs, or SLI, or.......
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
