Destiny of Gaming : The best is yet to come.

It would be difficult to ignore parallels between various art forms. Visual Arts and Music probably came together, somewhere during the Stone Age, and followed a very similar curve of evolution.

Recent arts like Cinema, after only a bit more than a century of existence, are also following a pattern based on the same archetype : an initial spark, a primitive development, a reach of perfection, immediately questioned, and a destruction phase leading to new, or renewed formats.

If we had to write a History of video game, the cavemen paintings of Lascaux would probably be comparable to Spacewar!, developed and running on a newly installed computer at MIT in 1962.

The Venus of Willendorf could be Pong, one of the first game developed for devices dedicated to playing at home, the revolutionary game consoles.

The Greek “invention” of perspective around the 5th century BC could be the first attempt in 3D, like 3D Monster Maze for ZX81 platform in 1981.

The perfection of perspective wanted by the Renaissance, has also been an obsession in gaming from the 90’s, with 3D numbers like Virtua Racing on Sega, or Quake on PC.

Since, video gaming has technologically evolved with faster processors, better graphic displays, online participation, open worlds etc. All contributing to make the experience more “real”.

If we keep the comparison with History of Art, where would it be now? Maybe around the Seicento, when the ultimate goal of Art in Europe was to reach perfection in reproducing reality, leading to an idealistic 19th century’s “Search of Truth”? Similarly, studios around the world keep improving technical performances in gaming, with the perfect illusion of reality as a final destination. We all know we’ll reach this point in more or less the near future.

And then what? Can we expect an equivalent of Expressionism, Fauvism, Pointillism or Suprematism in video games? Will it go towards Dadaism or pure abstract forms of playing?

Graphically speaking, there have been many attempts of disruption in game art, particularly with environments. Prism, Ultra Flow 2, Monument Valley 2 are good examples. Audio-only games like A Blind Legend, where the user can only refer to sounds to progress in the story, reach a Malevich aesthetic, where image is simply absent, or more precisely, the absence of image is the experience.

But the essence of a game is not as much the way it looks than the way it modifies the gamer sensations, even his or her life in some cases.

With the phenomenon of gamification propagating to various domains, including education, corporates, business, defence or health, and the development of serious games, we can expect gaming industry to have a profound impact on our posterity.

Let’s imagine what game designers will do after the perfection of mimicking reality is achieved.

Will we have Impressionist games? Like the 19th century painters tried to differentiate themselves from the new Photography medium by emphasising on their subjectivity, games might try to have much more influence on their audience in their daily life. Will it wake you up at night to adjust your fatigue level if you make a wrong decision? Or force you to run-commute in order to complete a particular level?

Or like watching Cubist artworks, should we expect experiencing a merge of past, present and future events in a same spatial dimension?

And if the technology allows it, we or our descendants might witness Surrealist games, using the mechanics of dream, where the controller will be the automatic psychic functions of the brain. What will happen in the game won’t be the result of our skills and desire to conform to social models like winning, conquering, getting rewards etc., but an expression of the mind in its natural way…

Finally, do we have the capacity to imagine what would be an Abstract game, or a game based on Deconstructionism? A game that would combine emotional intensity and rejection of traditional forms of storyline, rules, settings, characters and controllers?

Once games will have assimilated all the facets of humanity, it might sustain momentum and give human being new values, morals, different life goals and perspectives. Some might find in it a new meaning of life, others a new religion.

Refs :

https://listverse.com/2010/05/11/15-firsts-in-video-game-history/

?Wikipedia

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