Task 4

Blimey time rushes past. In class, we're on our final few days of working on a 3D Wheely Bin model. Who'd have thought such a simple thing could be so infinitely, madly, disturbingly, stress-inducingly bananas-difficult. On the other hand, we're learning in a pretty extreme way (Involving getting thrown in and the deep end). I want to say right here and now that I'm no good at this 3D business, or rather I'm no good at this mapping and texturing business (Because I don't understand it, but that's not the point), so that I can come back and look at this in three years' time and laugh and my inability.

Laugh well, future me, but know I'll catch you up sooner or later... But now for some lines.

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This week's task is to look at the future of videogames. By this week's task, I mean last week's task. Everyone's really slow at this, including me.

The games industry is clearly getting pretty huge, as massive, heeooge amounts of money are being spent on videogames at present. I remember my jaw hitting the floor when I saw in the Guinness Book of Records that Shenmue cost $20,000,000, and just as I'd finished cranking it back up and into my skull, it dropped again as soon as I played it.

$20 million is quite a lot to spend on a game, but Shenmue was divine - everyone I speak to thinks so (That does include myself). Clearly the cash had been well spent, and why not, because the cost of making high-end graphics and producing all that high-quality audio
was always going to be pretty huge. It all added to a big immersive Japanese revenge experience, with excessive use of the words "I see..." I don't even want to know how much Shenmue 2 cost...

This isn't to say that Yu Suzuki's masterpieces were the most expensive games of all time, as there have been more excessive since (Or at least it seemed to in a graph I saw in the lab a few days ago). Any ideas?

Our 3D modelling tutor, Joel, runs an outsourcing company called Outso. Before coming here I had no idea what outsourcing is, but it's where you get people in foreign countries to make 3D models for your company for a fraction of the price that it'd cost to pay someone local. I'm sure that's useful, but it just sounds cheeky to me. In any case, many companies are doing it now, which makes the games industry a much more world-spanning thing than it used to be.

There are serious gamers and there are casual gamers. Casual gamers glide on the airwaves of peace and connect using metaphors and the poetic flow of life. Serious gamers have fifteen level 60 characters. Somewhere beyond my far-out stereotyping lies truth, but we won't find it today. Games can be tailored for one group or the other, or try to cater for both. If you look at something like Dance Dance Revolution or Chu Chu Rocket, they're games you can just pick up, and it might take a few minutes of hilarious button-bashing before you're done, then you can go again. Meanwhile on World of Warcraft, the higher-level raids can go on for 5-6 hours at a time, and are extremely complex, relying on Ventrilo or Teamspeak. I dread to think how complex EVE Online can become, but I've read stories. Stories I tells ya!

Both of my 'serious gamer' game examples were MMOs, it reflects how I feel about 'em. MMORPGs are really taking off all over the place, and the complexity of the aforementioned shows where these kinds of games could be going in the future. That is, into a big tangled mass with dramatic music. Single player games generally don't have that level of complexity - no need to grind, find specific items and get the best gear because - well, who's going to know? Who's going to care? There isn't really that 'showoff sense' like you get online. Deathmatch style gaming aside, if you're a serious player, you'll know what the best sword in the game is, and you'll spend hours and hours, days, weeks and even months to get it, thus proving you're a more serious and powerful gamer than the others. Plus you'll be able to whack others with it. This sort of mentality applies to so many players, all of whom keep going and going...

Perhaps in the future we'll see genres of games that are more focused on escapism, giving a more realistic other-life experience using all our new technology.

Larger amounts of staff are being drafted into companies to beef up graphics mainly. I really hope the gameplay improves into the future.

And on the subject of the future...

To pluck a figure out of my head, I'd say about 9/10 people in my generation (That are game or story-minded at least) have their own detailed ideas for games in their head, they've thought out entire character casts, settings, places, storyline, gameplay quirks, engines and music. Pretty much all of my friends have, and I certainly have too. The creative spark IS here in my generation and I love to hear these game-ideas, because so many of them really are exciting.

We're the future. The old men currently creating all these videogames often strike me as really running out of ideas. One day we'll be in that position, and you'd better believe that'd be a golden age. It'll be the first age where the kids who grew up on some of the best games of all time turned around and produced some of their own, and judging by the power of consoles at the moment, we'll have incredible power to do it as well.

When that day comes, you'll know what kind of games we'd like to play; you'll be playing them too.