Games & Gaming: The Past, The Present & The Future.

The first video games that I used to play as a kid were on an 8 bit console by a Chinese manufacturer called the Dendy. The console had games where I could shoot aliens & it made all these jazzy sounds like a ping, pong, boom, and various other sounds, which mobiles in the early 90’s used to make. Games like BomberMan, Contra & Mario were my all time favorites. In fact the first time that I could finish Mario was a day of celebration. My friends were all there to cheer me, when I rescued the princess in the final level.
So what’s the difference between the games of then and that of today? And what will be the difference between the games of today & that of games released 7 – 10 years from now???

The biggest difference between the games that I play on my 6th & 7th Generation consoles vs. the 8bit console is the Graphics that are rendered in the game. The princess that I saved in Mario was more like a white patch on the screen with an orange tuft on the top portion of the white patch (the head & the body). Both the color patches put together looked vaguely like a character which was supposed to resemble a human. Compare it to the graphics that is delivered by the XBOX, PS3 or the Wii. This Comparison is like trying to compare the horseless carriages of 18th century & the Ferrari.

Game developers then avoided humans in their games. Designing human like characters required a lot of work & extreme programming skills. Game engines were science fiction then. That’s the reason game developers satisfied themselves with aliens as the villains and space ships that could shoot the aliens.

John Carmack, the developer of Doom, came up with the Doom Game Engine. This triggered a revolution. Id software’s Doom was a phenomenal success with it being a simply awesome first person shooter in that era of game development.Time flew by with game developers getting better at their programming skills & with better game engines coming into the pictures. Games in this stage of evolution had the PC as the primary market. Ken Kutaragi persuaded Sony to fund his research of the Super NES CD, which evolved into the PlayStation. This was a revolution in the hardware that was needed to play games. The release of the PlayStation in the Mid 90’s triggered a fierce competition between Sony, Nintendo & Atari, each trying to prove that their gaming hardware was better.

With dedicated gaming consoles where the graphics rendering capability was increased several folds further evolved the face of the gaming industry. Human characters were the central focus in the games being developed. It was times when we had a human hero fighting of battles against evil alien invaders & finally protecting dear old earth.

Gamers loved what these games had to offer, but want for more resulted in another breathtaking feature in the world of gaming. Quake was one the first FPS game to incorporate this feature. Games of today have this as an integral part of their structure. What are we talking about? The Multiplayer feature.
The multiplayer option is like a narcotic. Game’s which incorporate multiplayer option has always sold more & better than games which do not incorporate multiplayer. This is an addiction that game developers use to keep people hooked to their games. Why multiplayer? The simple reason, you’re competing against intelligence in the game, a human; unlike a CPU fighting against you. The fun’s so much different when playing against a human. Modern day game engines like Renderware, RAGE have great AI capabilities, but they still do not come anywhere close to what a fellow human offers. Games like Quake & Halo have not just followers, but cults which portray what the game means to them.

Microsoft sensing opportunity decided to enter this space. With the Japanese ruling the game market the entry of the American corporation was a relaxing break. With the XBOX, being backed by the mighty financial power of Microsoft, it was just a matter of time before it rose to really high pedestal of fame.

With the advancement in the Hardware for games, how have the games evolved? The games got more and more complex, no matter how advanced the hardware got, the game always needed more computing power. This was a boom for companies like Nvidia, AMD (ATI) they made & are making huge revenue selling graphic cards to the PC based game populace.

Today there are awesome games. Games that take you into a completely new world, where things look so real, that the gamer is so much in unity with the game which he or she is playing. But the question is, are the games “Really that Real”?
I would say definitely NO. So do the big folks form EA, Ubisoft, RockStar and all the other big gaming giants. So why is it not so real? The graphics look so real, the skin tones of the character is amazing, so much like mine. The clothes that the character put on are also so strikingly real.

So what then is the problem here?

There is nothing called a realistic emotion on the Characters face. The problem is something that everyone knows and it’s only a matter of time before the solution is out.

The lack of emotions makes game characters look so plastic, so zombie like. The Holy Grail that all game developers are looking at now is to introduce true emotion in the characters. Emotions just like what a human would exhibit. That’s what would be the Future. That’s what the next generation games & game developers are expected to deliver. This would be the next huge chunk of development in the next generation game engines, where emotions would of central focus.

There is an industry that’s already perfected this art of portraying realistic emotions on artificial animated characters. The industry is the Animation & Cartoon industry. Companies like Disney & Dreamworks.

The presumption as to why they can do it is because they have such huge computing power & memory to spare when developing these cartoons. Since they are pre rendered & does not require processing hardware at the display end it’s a easy task transmitting them (Processing as in computing & rendering the graphics). This of course is quite different with games. The rendering power that a developer has is the rendering power that the console has. This results in Console manufacturer researching and finding out how best they can incorporate the mechanisms that the animation industry is using into their hardware.

The next big thing that games in the future would have is involving a lot of the real world into the virtual world. This would involve game characters being able to shop on the net in game. This would be something like connecting to e-commerce sites to probably buy music or movies that can be watched or listened to as in game movies or music. The other use would be using VOIP or Internet Telephony within the game (Skype, Yahoo messenger), such that the character within the game can talk to another character in the same game on a different console within a network.

What we have been seeing now with consoles is the same thing that was implemented in the past but better. Look at the PS3 or the XBOX 360, they just do what their predecessors did better. Only the Wii seems to be different. Developers have to be innovative & come out with something new, not just the same thing better.
We traveled through how games have made it through time & what would possibly be in store for the future. But for now happy gaming with the what’s in the present :-).

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