Editor’s Note: On Nov. 15, 2012, Western News celebrated its 40th anniversary with a special edition asking 40 Western researchers to share the 40 THINGS WE NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE NEXT 40 YEARS. This is one of those entries. To view the entire anniversary issue, visit the Western News archives.
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(The late) Neil Armstrong has been quoted as saying, “People expect too much in one year and not enough in 10 years.”
This is certainly true of video games. While everyone waits (impatiently) for Nintendo’s Wii U and the next generation offerings from rivals Sony and Microsoft that are coming in the next year or so, it’s almost impossible to look out 10 years, let alone 40.
Let’s look backwards for some perspective.
Forty years ago, video games were in their infancy. (So was I, for that matter …) Pong was just emerging on the scene, and took the world by storm with its blocky, monochromatic take on table tennis. That was the state of the art in 1972, and people fell in love with it.
It’s so hard to believe how far things have come since then – rich, vibrant worlds rendered in lush 3D, deep and immersive stories with interesting and believable characters, natural interactions through voice, gestures and motion, and expansive experiences that, in some cases, have no end to them.
Forty years ago, there’d have been no way to predict the state of gaming today. Technology that is commonplace today simply didn’t exist back then. Our abilities to compute, interact and present information have come so far, it’s absolutely mind-boggling. (The typical smartphone carried around in your pocket can out-perform the top supercomputer from back then, using substantially less power, space and money.)
The relatively brief history of video games has shown time and time again that change and, at times, rapid,drastic,unforeseen change is the norm. One constant since the beginning of things, however, is their ability to immerse, engage and entertain.
Simply put, they’ve been fun to play, regardless of how primitive or advanced the technology has been.
So, 40 years out, we can expect technology vastly more powerful than what we have today, as well as technology not yet to be envisioned. This technology will allow the creation of games capable of doing much more than they can now, in ways we can’t even begin to imagine.
No matter how much the technology evolves though, our games will still be fun. (And if this, then octogenarian, is wrong, he’ll be going back to Pong.)
Mike Katchabaw is a Computer Science professor in the Faculty of Science.