Senior Designer: http://www.see3.com/senior-designer
Web Project Manager: http://www.see3.com/web-project-manager
Web Project Coordinator: http://www.see3.com/web-project-coordinator
Administrative Coordinator: http://www.see3.com/administrative-coordinator
More info: http://www.see3.com/careers
All kinds of internships at Disney Interactive. Check it out…
We are looking for a talented, creative person to join our Palo Alto Art Team as an Art Intern. We are a very busy studio working on multiple projects and would love to have an enthusiastic person join to help us create beautiful art and design for our games.
More info and how to apply here.
WB Games seeks an Associate Producer to be responsible for overseeing specific aspects of development on one or more projects as determined by the Senior Producer. This position supports producers and assists the team by managing and executing a variety of tasks related to the development of assigned projects or functional groups, from concept to release. Typical tasks include: leading a small strike team, scheduling and tracking team member tasks and assets, reporting status, identifying and reporting risks, assisting in ensuring adherence to schedules, coordinating with resources throughout the organization and/or third party vendors to ensure successful completion of assigned projects, working within production budget. Understands how own work fits into and impacts the project cycle. Contributes and shares ideas / competitive practices.
For more info and how to apply go here.
gravitytank is looking for an Interaction Designer who is passionate about creating the next generation of interactive product and service experiences.
Interaction designers define and shape design concepts using tools like storyboarding and wireframing to develop next generation interfaces and create future scenarios for the expanding world of digital and device experiences. But that’s only part of the story. At gravitytank, we place a premium on a designer’s ability to bring concepts to life for our clients with digital prototypes and tangible tools.
As an interaction designer at gravitytank, you will: create and rapidly iterate interaction design concepts; work collaboratively with communications designers and product designers to create holistic solutions between UI, product and experience concepts; work creatively in an integrated team environment with strategists, researchers and other designers to create meaningful, viable design solutions for our clients’ businesses and the needs of their users.
For more info, and to apply, go here.
As part of the Exhibitions Media and Interactives team, the Assistant Media Producer will design and create media experiences for permanent and temporary exhibitions.
Responsibilities include:
I.A.M. alumnus Will McShane (Class of 2011) is the inspiration behind a new fund for entrepreneurs. “The William McShane Fund” is an award of $25,000 created by the Buckyballs toy company and the Brookstone retail chain. Buckyballs are magnetic toys, and McShane was the first person ever to purchase the product. Twelve ideas were selected and are currently open for voting on KickStarter.
For more information and to vote, visit TheWilliamMcshaneFund.com.
Job Description: Outstanding opportunity for tech-oriented bike enthusiast interested in gaining marketing and hands-on social network and online community management experience at The Chainlink (www.thechainlink.org).
Organization Name: The Chainlink Community
Tasks:
Qualifications:
IDEAL SKILLS
Application Instructions: Email the following to: columbiainternship@thechainlink.org.
Include “Columbia Internship” in subject line.
Job Functions May Include:
Character Viz @ Rotofugi
Last week, students in Dave Pasciuto’s Character Visualization for Games class took part in a judged pop-up exhibition at Rotofugi gallery. Four students won prizes, including a special “Rotofugi’s Choice Award.” Congratulations to all of the artists!
Here’s the list of our winners:
All images by Roger J. Yuen.
A current theory that describes our technological process is Moore’s Law; the number of transistors existing in computer processors will double approximately every year. Its effects are obvious: computers and their parts are becoming faster and more powerful for the same price over time. Processors are a part of every electrical device in our world, including the gaming consoles, controllers, televisions, even advanced sound systems. Today, the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3 are packed with technological components that outperform NASA’s computers from the 1960s.
As the gaming industry looks for new ways to surround players in a virtual space and immerse them into a fictional reality, new technological accessories will become available to the public. Plenty of new tools are being researched, innovated, and developed today (mostly by companies and the military) to allow the users to accomplish more tasks, increasing efficiency and productivity. Eventually, as technology becomes cheaper every year, these professional office tools will become household toys for use with gaming systems. The players in the future will be more in tune with the machines than ever before by using tools that would stimulate as many senses as possible. Players might wear a special suit in a large room specifically designed for gaming, for instance. A decade from now, a player will be able to experience a virtual world in such detail that he/she loses a grasp on physical reality. However, it will not affect gaming as an expensive, isolationist and gender-neutral activity.
The current gamer requires several ingredients before he/she is able to enjoy a video game: the console with a game and controller, a television, and enough space to allow for movement and relaxation positions. This is summed up by society’s semi-universal image of a living room: a couch about ten feet away from a wall-mounted flatscreen television, with a small coffee table in the middle. The player holds a wireless controller that vibrates every now and then, and hears sounds from the virtual world coming from the television speakers. Technology allows for gamers to experience the virtual space by relying on their eyes, ears the second, and hands the least. A bigger, more colorful screen and a dynamic-range speaker system can allow for higher quality sights and sounds to resonate within the player’s mind. Movement as a new tool for input is a new idea that has limited uses, further keeping the player from experiencing a machine-generated reality. However, smells and tastes can’t be processed, and only a limited sense of touch is being communicated to the player during today’s game.
In 2006, the consumer magazine Popular Science published an article about a piece of machinery that would produce smells when triggered by a computer, allowing for users to smell a particular scent when navigating a computer generated space. In “The Smell of War,” James Vlahos goes on to describe how the second-generation prototype smell collar allowed him to grasp an army simulation with a different level of detail and immersion than with other simulators without the smells. Today, while a smell collar isn’t being sold commercially, it isn’t hard to believe that such a device is in use throughout the training camps today. It is a piece of technology that could be implemented in video games to play upon a gamer’s nose to give more information about the virtual space.
Recently, Google has started work on a project that would allow for a heads-up display in real life. Code-named “Google Glass,” a promotional video shows that a small eyeglass apparatus would link the user to both the GPS the Internet, allowing for realtime news streams, navigational information, and social updates. While it doesn’t show an ability to map its data over the real life terrain, other products do. Augmented reality programs and simulations are being developed and shown off by plenty of dedicated programmers, college students, and other non-commercial groups. While a computer-generated spider crawling around a real desk may not be considered as high-tech, it shows the potential of how a virtual world can be created in realtime.
These last tools are used to stimulate the human’s inputs. In order to immerse with the world, the player must experience with all his senses, but also to interact and change the virtual space with more methods than just a controller stick movement and a button press. However, engineers are finding ways to incorporate other inputs to games. The Nintendo Wii and the Xbox Kinect are the latest innovations that will allow for motion and sound to command the game character and environments. The Wii is a pioneer for motion input – Metroid Prime 3: Corruption implemented an excellent idea of using the Wiimote to aim the onscreen gun. While it wasn’t able to fully immerse me into the virtual space, I felt a sense of control that was nonexistent in Halo: Reach, one of today’s most popular and graphically advanced games. The Xbox Kinect allows for motion input, but also a voice input. I watched a friend play Mass Effect 2 and use his voice to command his game-controlled squadmates. By aiming his gun at a target and speaking “Garrus, shotgun” out loud, the support character Garrus would attack the target with a shotgun, whether he was on screen or not. The voice commands were very specific, so my conversation over the game wasn’t disrupting his gameplay. It allowed for an advanced level of control than standard gaming today, and could possibly allow for full conversations with computer-controlled characters tomorrow.
Using these examples, futuristic gaming would have a very different setup and implementation than today. Instead of a TV and a console, a gamer might need a room with a full screen on each wall, a scent machine, hidden speakers in the wall (which are available today), and glass floors and ceilings with projections of the game world on each. Instead of a game controller with a weak vibrator, the player would wear a suit with several vibrators with would go off depending on where the player got shot. The eyepiece would display diegetic information, while the walls paint the spatial representation of the virtual space. An earpiece would provide character dialog that would respond to the player’s actions. Each component would have small computer processors that would be cheap and powerful enough to handle realtime monitoring of the gamer’s movements, body positioning, even cranial activity, and respond by updating the entire virtual space, sound, scent, and feel in less than a 60th of a second. In ten years, gaming will be akin to the Parlour Rooms described by Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451.
Within Bradbury’s book, characters spend too much time in these Parlours, escaping from reality so often that they rarely interact with other humans in a truly social manner. Future gamers would also have that problem, wanting to immerse themselves in the virtual world frequently and in an obsessive manner to a point where the player would lose his grip on the physical space around him, and go insane. This has happened multiple times: the kids who played too much Dungeons and Dragons in the 80’s, the murderer who learned from Manhunt, and lately, the people who left the 3D movie Avatar feeling depressed because the virtual hyper-reality made the real world look dreary and boring. While technology allowed for greater levels of immersion into alternate realities, only a small amount of people immerse themselves to an extent that they go insane. It is a human personality trait, and it will not change a decade from now.
Nor will the isolation and social behaviors that gamers deal with. Today, games provide for singleplayer campaigns and multiplayer competitions, as well as sandboxes and other game types. Players have the choice to either play alone in a room to themselves, or to share a co-op mission in the same space, or to even play with others online. The future will merely make the physical game space larger, as opposed to totally isolating gamers from society. The isolationist persona will enjoy the space to themselves, while the socially active players will either share the large space with others, or continue to link with others with electronic in-game communication.
However, technology wouldn’t change gaming as a activity in society. While the consoles we have today are roughly two hundred dollars, the gaming gear for the future will cost around the same price – a quarter of a rent or a mortgage payment. Players would have a room to themselves to interact with non-real characters and enemies, keeping the isolationist behaviors we see today alive in the future. Society would still view gaming as a hobby that more than half of the population enjoy. People will build these rooms to serve as both advanced gaming rigs and as theatres. A cinematic experience that worked to stimulate all human senses would be developed first, and quickly adopted to a game system that would work to alter a storyline in real time.
As technology progresses to allow game designers to create more detailed simulations, both in visual appearances and artificial intelligence, the player is increasingly immersed in the virtual world. This immersion extends past the visual sense; the player must be able to mentally construct the virtual world. The believability of this mental construct is solely based on the details the player is given from the game designer. As this mental construct becomes larger in tandem with the ever-increasing processing power of computers, so must the medium of video game’s ability to immerse the player and elicit empathy.
As immersion, detail, and scope of the video game medium increase, the variety of content will widen, as it has in previous media. With this, over the next decade, the intended effect of a video game on the player will greatly change. Through abjection, the player will be faced with a myriad of issues that will require introspection on a level that has yet to be seen in the medium.
The word abjection was originally defined to describe the state and treatment of a minority or marginalized groups (“the state of being cast off”). In the 1980’s, philosopher Julia Kristeva, in her essay “The Powers of Horror” redefined the word within the context of psychoanalytical theory to describe the crisis in boundaries between an object and a non-object, and the traumatic experience that comes when forced to question ones own state of being (object/non-object). It is a cognitive and physical dissonance created when a sign signifies a message that goes against the inherent understanding of what it means to be alive. An example would be the natural revulsion to the sight of a corpse. The sign (corpse) signifies to the viewer that what was once a non-object has become an object, which unavoidably will happen to the viewer, and goes against their will to live. The idea of abjection applies itself to any situation in which a viewer observes a dissonance in what they believe they are (alive, sentient) and a sign that signals the opposite (bodily fluids, meaninglessness); the border between being a non-object and an object.
Art often utilizes abjection. It is through art that we may come to assimilate what was abject and sublimate it’s threat. As a medium becomes readily available to consumers and creators alike, new ideas are interjected into the understood scope of the medium, creating single oddities and entire genres. It is through this evolution that the boundaries of what the artist can expect the viewer to tolerate are skewed, and abject elements are introduced. The Momento Mori art movement is a culmination of the desire to seek a means of assimilating the state of decay we will all enter through depictions of human skulls and remains in juxtaposition to symbols of time and life.
The history of abjection in cinema and television is as old as the medium itself. Depictions of war, murder, accidents and manslaughter are commonplace. The first filmed execution was “The Hanging of William Carr”. It was produced and filmed by Frederick Guth on December 17, 1897. The first dramatic depiction of death to be filmed occurred in 1895, when Thomas Edison’s production company recreated a scene from “Trilby”, the 1894 novel by George du Maurier. This has continued throughout the twentieth and twenty-first century, with entire genres devoted to death and gore as gratification and entertainment. This trend extends to video games as well.
Graphic depictions of death in video games arose with the deployment of arcade units. The first arcade game to incite protest due to its depiction of human death was Exidy’s Death Race in 1976. The controversy around the game instigated a rise in arcade development, helping the then fledgling medium establish itself. At the end of 1976, 53 new titles were published, nearly a 100% increase on the previous two years combined. In 1986, one of the most violently graphic and sadistic games of all time was released; the arcade light-gun game Chiller. Through four scenes filled with objects the player interacted with by shooting them, players are rewarded points for maiming and torturing humans. In 1989, Capcom released Sweet Home for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Released in conjunction with the movie of the same name, the game spawned a genre called survival horror. The material of a survival horror game is based in horror fiction, presenting the player with heavy atmosphere and elements intended to shock and disgust. The genre is still a popular one.
Currently, popular intellectual properties like the Resident Evil series and Mortal Kombat carry on the tradition of gore saturation in video games. But abjection can present itself without a focus on those elements. Any scenario that requires the observer to consider his or her own life and death can trigger abjection, without gore and violence. Video games like Every Day the Same Dream and Passage present abjectionist material with less interest in shocking the player, but to trigger existential introspection and create a dialog about where art and video games meet.
Within the next 10 years, these two principals will converge. With an increase in graphical detail, we will see more detailed violence and gore, but also, the avatars involved will elicit more empathy from us due to their distance out of the uncanny valley, the artificial intelligence’s ability to pass the Turning test, and grander, more detailed narrative elements. This is in line with Masahiro Mori’s concepts of the observer and their level of empathy in regards to the uncanny valley.
The increase in abjectionist games will create a unique responsibility for the game designer. Because the elements of gore and empathy together create abjection, the game will have the potential to have a profound psychological effect on the player. That effect may be a reflection of what doomsayers of violent video games have said all along, that video games will increase violent tendencies and tap into an instinctual bloodlust in the player. Along with abjection and increase in the resolution of violence and death, there is also mortality salience, the awareness in an individual of his or her death. Having players reflect on their own death may create unexpected consequences within our culture.
In contrast to this, there may be a level of therapy and catharsis to be found in facing abjectionist material. The player may react to such material with disgust and anguish, but the end result can be one of assimilating this material into a form of acceptance and control over any stress or terror that was once caused by it. Game designers will have a choice in either guiding this process by showing a resolution within their work, or leaving this entirely to the player to facilitate on their own.
Violence and games
Violence In video games has been a big hot spot for many years. Some would say it’s harmful to children and causes them to act out the scenes in the video games. Others have said it can be a healthy outlet for aggression and stress. Threw protesting and cases with problem children, one of the more common things said by the parents is it’s from playing violent video games on his Xbox. I doubt there will ever be a true answer to this problem, but it is even less likely that people will stop making games with violence in them. But who know maybe in a few years from now, oh let’s just say ten years, they might just have the answer to that question. And if in ten years they decide it’s true, violent games are what causes violence in children, that they find a way to properly regulate them, not remove them.
But before me move into the future I thought a brief look into the past would be helpful and informative. One of the first video games to cause a large scale argument was developed in 1976, titled “Death Race.” In which the player drove a car and attempted to hit gremlins with his car, once hit they would turn into little grave markers showing that they were in fact dead. The game caused such uproar that it was not only pulled from the shelves but in a sense started the long winded debate today about violence in video games. In the early 1980s a man named Ronnie Lamm, who was president of a PTA, pushed for legislation pushed for arcades to be restricted on how close they were allowed to be to schools, also saying that the arcades and their games caused children to want to fight. One of the next big hitters to come along was a game made by a company called Rock star, Grand Theft Auto. Grand Theft Auto 3 is now one of if not the biggest example of a video game with intense scenes of violence, drug use, and sexual activities. But not only is there heavy talk about the violent gameplay, but also for supposedly encouraging racist hate crimes. The game is said to involve a gang war between some Haitians and Cuban refugees. The player’s character gets involved in the war and supposedly encourages the hate crime related violence. Most of the story plot is true but I doubt the game makers thought of it as hate crimes, and I know they didn’t do it to encourage hate crimes in children. On the flip side, however small it is there has been some research in favor of violent video games defense. Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl K. Olson are researchers and authors. They have claimed that violent behavior is not increase or caused by violent video games. The two researchers studies show that children that do not play any video games at all, violent or not, are more likely to show signs of violent behavior. While it seems like the evidence is against us gamers the more time goes by the more positive reinforcement seems to come out. So I feel there is still hope for violent video games.
While todays violent games do a pretty decent job of showing off its realistic kills and explosions, I can only imagine what they will look like in ten years. Why just ten years ago we were looking at super Nintendo graphics and gameplay, and now….well its almost unbelievable how much progress we have made in almost no time at all. In the very soon future we will no doubt be entering the game with a sort of literal sense. This brings many exciting and fearful thoughts to my mind alone. In about 5 years I say we would be at the level of technology that was displayed in a game and animated TV series call dot hack. In the show you put on a virtual head set, and unless it was for added effect of the game and show you somewhat mind link with it. For the characters constantly showed appropriate facial expression as well as body language. But from what I understand all you had was a headset with a built in visor/screen and a controller. One of my fears about this possible entering the digital world future is also related to this game and show. The whole basis of the game is that a virus is leaked into the game and begins to attack and effect people. Since part of them in actually connected to the computer wouldn’t it be possible for something in the computer to connect to them? What if in ten years your whole body is entered in to the digital world and then a malfunction of the game causes your character or one of the other characters to override you. Or even worse another person to hack into you and take possession of you. This could in a sense cause all kinds of chaos, violence, and panic. If a character from a game like, Gears of War, was placed into a living body, who’s to say he would know the difference in a human being or not. There really aren’t a lot of them in the game. And if a person’s mind can be hacked, well to heck with their credit card you have something way more valuable.
If the digital space is going to become our new playground then can’t it also become our new lab, battlefield and testing ground? The insane and chaotic weapons we use in some of these video games can’t be too farfetched or people wouldn’t have put them in the game in the first place. If a digital world can learn how gravity works and how other advanced parts of the world and beyond work, then it’s very likely that instead of paper theories it will become digital theories. I’m sure there is already some form of this happening today, but when you can enter a space where your body is no longer “real” then the sky is the limit. Say you’re thinking of mixing two dangerous chemicals. In the real world there’s a 50/50 chance this will explode and kill you. In the digital world the odds are the same but no one dies. This will no doubt advance medicines but also the creation of weapons and the ways we can go to war with each other. Heck maybe we’ll all get lucky and wars will be fought in the digital world so no one actually dies and the world doesn’t become polluted with radiation and chemicals. Honestly in my eyes that’s an excellent answer. I doubt war will ever be over but if we could move it to a digital space, that provides everything they would have had in the real world, and then maybe things would actually improve in the world. A violent digital game space could be a very positive or negative thing depending on how it’s used but I have no doubt it will be created some day and used.
As for violence its self, I highly doubt it well ever go away. And even if they do ban violent game they will either have to ban games themselves or it will find a way to come back. If in ten years we are aloud free range to do as we please in these digital spaces, then I have no doubt it will at some point turn into something “violent” either by design or threw random chance it will happen. People love and seem to live for violence, one way or another. I personally hate anything violent that comes from me or is aimed towards me, but if it’s in a video game, I can’t get enough of it. Action movies murder mystery books table top games and even some board games show and involve a large amount of violence and people just eat it up. Violence in media whatever form it comes in has always been popular. So why one medium would cut it out but not the others doesn’t make any sense to me. I honestly can’t say if violence in games will stay or at least as the games main theme, but I do know it will be some time before is gone. And even if the USA manages to get the support to ban it that doesn’t mean other countries will.
So if you were wondering if we will have violent games in the future I can honestly say yes. The only way violent video games could possibly be stopped is if videogames themselves where stopped. Violence and media are best friends, it’s nearly impossible with get one without the other these days. And as more and more studies show up stating that violent video games are not responsible for violent behavior in kids it becomes less likely that we will be seeing an end to this type of gaming, and I personally couldn’t be happier about that. Now if you’ll excuse me I’m going to go blow something up, but only in a video game.
Within the upcoming decade video games will no longer be referred to as games, but as interactive films. As resolution increases, soundtracks become more like movie scores, and storytelling becomes a focal point, games will become a respected art form just as film is. As a result, the video game and film industry will converge to have the same directors, screenwriters, and cinematographers working on blockbuster films and AAA game titles.
In 1980, the arcade hit PacMan introduced cut scenes to the video game world. In between levels a pre-made, non-interactive video would play, serving as comical entertainment set within the game world. By 1981, Donkey Kong had taken this concept and built on it, using cut scenes to further develop a narrative throughout the game. Two years later, full-motion video with voice acting would be introduced and regularly used between game stages as a means of storytelling.
These cuts scenes have developed into a core part of any story-driven game, sometimes coming close to feature-movie length. Director Steven Spielberg has said that cut scenes break the flow of game play and has acknowledged the difficulty developers face to include meaningful story in a game without the use of cut scenes. Some games today are blurring the lines between game play and FMV with interactive cut scenes. Games like Resident Evil 4 and God of War use this method, allowing the player to interact with their environment at pre-determined intervals during cut scenes.
In the end though, the story takes precedent over the method by which it is presented and modern games are slowly becoming more and more story-driven. In this way, screenplay writers, as well as directors, have the opportunity to work on video games, but approach them as films. Take for example Resident Evil: Degeneration, a feature-length animated movie (cut scene) based on the game series. The film was made in part by Capcom Studios with cooperation from Sony Pictures. Though obviously CG animation and non-interactive, the collaboration between game and film studio has paved the way for others. The opportunity for the two industries to work together has been around for years, but as video games become bigger in every sense of the word, developers will soon need to rely on the film industry to accomplish their goals and continue to improve.
Video games already have cinematic directors and sound designers, but these are game developers, not film directors or composers. As technology rapidly increases, the capabilities that video games have are becoming equal to that of film. Audio for games can be mixed not only for computer speakers and headphones, but for 5.1, 7.1, and 9.1 surround sound mixes. A game like Battlefield: Bad Company 2 has incredible sound design and mixing, but lacks any emotional story content which is where a film screenwriter and director could greatly enhance the final product.
Consumers watch movies and play games for most of the same reasons; to be entertained and to escape reality. Films though, rely much more on their story, and games on game play. When the spectacle of video games can match that of film and can be seamlessly combined, games can be marketed to a much wider audience and presented no longer as a childish, pointless endeavor, but rather as an interactive media that all consumers can appreciate.
As the two industries converge to work together, the price of viewing or playing an interactive film will be substantially lesser than that of currently purchasing a game or paying to see a movie at a theater. Currently a AAA video game’s budget may range from eighteen to thirty million dollars and a blockbuster film’s may easily exceed $150 million dollars. When these amounts of money get combined, not only will studios and developers share a larger budget, but the cost of producing will be less. In an interview with 1UP.com Capcom producer Hiroyuki Kobayashi for Resident Evil: Degeneration stated that, “With live action, you want to do some wild scenes. The thing is that when you do something in live action, it costs so much more. In doing similar things with CGI, we had a much lower budget.” In this way both producers and consumers will benefit. Producers will experience higher profit margins due to lower production costs and consumers will experience lower prices because the product can be sold at lower prices due to lower production costs, therefore increasing consumption.
These interactive films will still be sold Gamestop and Best Buy and will still be viewed at theaters, though they will become more of a social experience meant to be had with the company of others rather than on one’s own. Though some may enjoy watching a friend play through a full video game, most will find the experience boring, as there is not enough worthwhile story present in the game to keep their attention as they watch a friend hack and slash for hours. Once the story becomes a focal point, the game play simply becomes the action in a given film scene, and the person with a controller interacting becomes essentially invisible to all other viewers.
Soon after the introduction of truly interactive films, production companies will start to realize the potential the films have to be a huge hit within a group of people. Not only will they market the film as being a social experience, but they will incorporate the ability for all watching to be interacting, or playing at the same time. Essentially a story-driven multiplayer game, the possibilities would be nothing less than ground-breaking. Suppose we turned a James Bond film into an interactive multiplayer film. At the start of a film, each participant with a controller is randomly assigned a role or character. One may be Bond, attempting to track down and stop Ernest Blofeld, another player as Blofeld doing the opposite, and another playing as Q with a goal of finding the pieces necessary and then building a gadget required for Bond to complete said mission.
Making the game play equally enjoyable for the person playing Bond as for the person playing Q would be where the art of the game developers would be paramount. In the same way, making the story as exciting and engaging between all players would be the art of the filmmakers. Even at a level as rudimentary as this, the potential for a truly unique experience is there. Consumers will find themselves shelving out another five dollars to play again as the villain, hero, scientist, or news reporter.
The desire for games with better stories is clearly evident in the public’s reaction to games that do put emotional content into them. In the same way, films are becoming too heavily reliant on spectacle and will searching for a new interactive twist as soon as 3D dies out. The first game developers and filmmakers that work together to create an interactive film will be sitting on a gold mine and one that everyone else will soon want a piece of.
Patric Harmon
Game Culture
Paper 2
Video Games 10 Years in the Future
Over recent years procedurally generated content in video games has been growing. More powerful computers and consoles have led to the growth of procedurally generated content. 10 years from now there will be video games that are almost entirely procedurally generated. The landscapes and cities will always adjust and change over time. The story will also be affected by the environment and everything else in the game. These kinds of games will lead to truly unique game play for each player.
Almost every video game in this point in time has its own procedural algorithm for some part of their game. Games like Borderlands and Skyrim uses a program to randomize what weapons and items can be obtained and at what point the player can get them. Those games were created that way so that the player would never quite know what they were going to get. The Left 4 Dead games went a different route and randomized the enemy spawn areas and when the enemies rushed the player. They used that algorithm to create a sense of fear in the players. They wanted players to repeat the same levels over and over. The player would never know what to expect even if they played that campaign many times before. In the future those kinds of randomized weapons and enemy spawn points will be more refined and possibly perfected.
The randomized weapons and enemy spawn points would create a split in difficulty set-ups for games. There would still be the traditional easy, medium, and hard setting for games. The other type of set-up would be balanced by the player and their play style. Games will have a difficulty curve that controls the number of enemies and what weapons the player can obtain. This kind of game difficulty setting will make all players enjoy the games a little better. The die-hard gamers and the more casual players can play through the same game and get the same amount of enjoyment out of the whole experience.
Other games decided to go a more dramatic route for generated content. The Civilization games have been generating their own landscapes and where each player starts off. Those games have been improving the technology with each new game they make. Another Will Wright game that tried to push randomly generated content was Spore. Each creature was randomly chosen for each world. The terrain was different on every planet and there were thousands of planets to visit and explore. Every play through of the game was never the same. Future games will be able to create entire words while still have a very in-depth game play.
Strategy games with completely generated landscapes would change up the set-up for strategy guides. There would be no preplanned strategies for the environment itself. Players would be forced to change their play style to what the game gives them. This kind of gameplay would increase player’s problem solving abilities. Shooter or dungeon crawler games would change as well. Fully generated levels will lead to the removal of linear game play. The definition of Level Designer would either change or disappear, since the levels are made by script instead of by hand. Level designers would either handle the scripting for generating content or the title would change altogether.
The game that shows the greatest amount of potential for procedurally generated content has to be Minecraft. The game isn’t very complex or highly detail, but the entire game is near infinite in scope and exploration. Minecraft showed that it is possible to create a completely computer generated world that has no physical end. Future games will use Minecraft as a template for generated content. These kinds of games will give players a fully unique experience.
The future of procedurally generated games will create games that are large in scope, increasingly long play time, and near infinite replay value. Procedurally generated content will affect all game types’ shooter, racing, strategy, adventure, puzzle, and etc. These kinds of games will give players a form agency, because whatever they see or do in the games will be completely unique. The game experience for one person will be drastically different from another.
