The games industry has in recent years been praised for it's cinematic presentation, dollar earning potential but above all it's ability to bring top class entertainment interactively. If you take a look at the past year and consider what players have actually experienced then it is quite astounding. For me personally I have killed mob bosses, lost a princess, sunk a city, become a world class defense attorney and died in my fair share of world wars; all in the space of 12 months. Where else can someone do that in a couple of hours after work? Film and books offer escapism but you are always a passive observer to the action that plays out in front of you. You never get to pull that trigger, make that tackle, run that guy off the road or jump for that last available ledge to save you from peril. Video games are the only bastion available to people who wish to experience something that would be unlikely to happen to them in the real world. Yet has the medium reached a boundary in which to deliver interactive entertainment?

I'm not talking about graphics, photorealism isn't anywhere near but will be attained at some point in the future and the current standard is more than enough to produce convincing worlds. Sound is achievable depending on how much money you want to spend on a surround sound system and display technology will always improve. So that leaves us with two barriers which we need to overcome; input device and game play. Nintendo has given us a remote in which to accurately recreate the most simple of gestures but lacks any advanced level of recognition. The rest of the field are content to leave us with something familiar, comfortable and a working solution for what is currently on offer. So where should we be looking for controls to take us in the future? A holodeck like experience is something I doubt will exist until the latter part of this century and whilst the ultimate goal, it is still just a pipe dream at best. I shall instead focus on the next 10 to 15 years worth of what will probably be a game experience very similar to the current one. i.e. couch, big T.V and controller.

Touch is my main bet for the next control revolution, haptic feedback to simulate push, weight and even temperature would be something to look for. I imagine this all to be contained in a controller that consists of two parts, one for each hand. Imagine playing a new Gears of War; pull a trigger to lift a shield and cover your face, feel it push its weight back against you, the bottom of your hand gets cold as you hold it's metal structure and in your other hand you feel the controller pull away as your fire off some rounds from your pistol. These are physical sensations that can all be felt without having to point a remote at a screen or wave you hands about in random motions. We already have simple applications of such ideas being used today. You pull a trigger to fire a gun, you can use a stick to change gears and you press buttons to interact with keypads. Simple yet often overlooked things that add to the immersion, in fact they are often overlooked because they mimic it so well. It will be these small physical interactions that take the realism presented on the screen to realism in your hands.

Next is game play, where can that go? Well first stop is a truly open world, say my overall objective is to kill a target. Mr X lives in a busy area of town and in a very expensive apartment, he runs a multinational crime organization and is a very hard man to reach. GTA follows something similar but it can only be tackled in one way, you work your way through various associates, related groups and family members until you reach a main guy. Now this plays into the theme of the games themselves and thus wouldn't be a strange approach to take given the situation. However what if I could go and gather enough wealth and buy an apartment in the same block, kill the guy in his sleep. Take a job as a caterer and take my chances at his daughters wedding. I could become friends with a bus driver whom drives along the same route Mr X takes everyday, we go out one night and get totally wasted which then causes our friend to be incompetent at the wheel resulting in him t-boning Mr X in his car the following morning . I may also decide to reach a peak of physical fitness, grab some guns and take my chances walking straight in through the front door. How about starting my own crime syndicate and become rivals which results in a city wide gang war as I get my henchmen to do my dirty work. The possibilities are endless, I could even decide i don't care about retribution and simply work my 9-5 down the local supermarket have a family and let Mr X die of old age. Now some of those ideas are more enticing than the others but you can't argue that being given such freedom would be to the detriment of the game playing experience. Now all of those ideas would increase game development time exponentially and be both impractical and near impossible when you consider technological limitations, man power and quite simply financial backing. You can however safely say that if something was to come along that could offer such freedom then it would be the pinnacle of interactive entertainment as we know it.

Currently the industry is trying to emulate film with it's big games. Deep worlds that have established characters, places and rules of the world they exist within. We are limited by story, context and whilst this is a compelling side of games it is linear by nature. The interactivity is limited only by the path that is set out before you. I'm not suggesting the abolishment of these sort of games, they themselves are still evolving and will reach a point of excellence themselves and maybe that is something I shall focus on in another post. However if you think of recent games that have tried to emphasize an open world; Fallout 3, Fable 2, Assassins Creed, Mass Effect and GTA IV you realize they truly lack that open ended nature. If you could apply but a few of the ideas mentioned above then imagine how deep, interesting and real your experience could be. Combined with a control scheme that engages you in these activities and you begin to reach a level of realism that visual presentation cannot not substitute.

I look forward to seeing where developers take their next steps in bringing the medium to the height that it can achieve. I shall enjoy the ride we take to get there and I can't begin to image the ideas that people of greater creativity than I will be able to come up with, I hope you all enjoy it to.

Lazlow out.