The Future of Gaming?
05-09-07 | 01:09 AM
#1
The Future of Gaming?
Updated: Friday, 04 May 2007
THE FUTURE OF GAMING
By Edge
Seeing what’s over the horizon is key to so many businesses that it’s become a career: the futurologist. There’s never been more investment, more interest or more anxiety focused on what happens next. Here, we take a turn at futurology and map out the key issues that will shape the development of games.
1. Incremental Hardware
There’s still no fixed gauge of gaming’s maturity. Are we in the seventh generation, or the sixth? Should we adopt comics’ use of Golden, Silver and Modern Age? Does Phil Harrison’s Game 3.0 stand a chance of catching on? What’s clear, however, is that discriminating between generations is only going to get harder as hardware becomes more modular and improvements more incremental.
For all that most of us are comfortable seeing PS2, Xbox and GameCube as a family, and Wii, 360 and PS3 a new generation, it’s harder to predict if there’ll be another crop of siblings in another five years. We’re becoming more used to hardware revisions – from the late-in-the-day reinventions of the PSOne and PSTwo, to the overdue-from-the-off DS Lite. Microsoft’s approach is even more aggressively modular, with the 360’s optional and upgradeable hardware, its pragmatic approach to the HD-DVD (and perhaps ultimately Blu-ray) drive, and now confirmation of the 360 Elite (see p26). And, as software becomes as key a component as any of the hardware, firmware revisions may well become as significant as hardware re-releases. A PS3 with Home, expanded backwards compatibility and the ability to record TV, say, would be a very different device from the one which went on sale in March.
Nokia, in its efforts to resuscitate the N-Gage brand, is taking it one step further by adopting a pure software platform which can be implemented in a range of handsets. The closeness of the relationship between gaming and technology means that hardware cycles will never truly go away, but it does seem certain that their impact is going to lessen.
2. Ageing Gamers
When CNN recently revisited the story of three boys who beat a homeless man to death and described the experience as reminiscent of the buzz of a violent videogame, it wasn’t a surprise that it sparked Penny Arcade’s Mike Krahulik into a heartfelt rant about the failings of the children’s parents. What was a surprise was that one of his long-time readers turned out to be one boy’s de facto stepmother, who wrote back with a tearingly honest account of the family’s efforts to deal with the troubled child.
It was a watershed moment – the tragic circumstances notwithstanding, because it so clearly demonstrated that the gaming generation is now becoming the parenting generation, the policing generation, the governing generation. It has been a slow process, as the teens who were attracted by gaming’s commercial growth in the ‘70s hit the peak of their responsibilities in their 50s.
But whereas that trend has been a slow shift, what comes next is a steadily increasing torrent. The percentage of teenagers who own a console or game-capable device is growing inexorably close to 100. And so, in a decade, we have an adult society which has truly grown up with gaming, with its culture and its technology. That is not something the industry has experienced before. While it’s certainly true that some people wouldn’t be comfortable terming many of these occasional, casual players ‘gamers’, the fact remains that the centre of gravity is about to shift, and the impact of that shift may be the most significant change in the next decade.
3. User Generated Content
The announcement of PS3’s Home environment – complete with media streaming, customisable avatars and socialising capabilities – may mark a departure from Sony’s resolutely hands-off approach to the online life of its consoles, but it also marks the moment at which gamers cease to be consumers and start to be contributors.
While there’s little to justify the ‘Second Life in PS3’ tag with which it was quickly labelled (Second Life’s user freedoms, creative control and independent economy mark it out as a very different proposition), it shows an understanding of how user expectations have changed. From custom soundtracks to editable wallpapers, we now want interaction to start the second the machine powers on, and we want that interaction to reflect more of our lives outside the game.
But expectations have also changed on the other side of the screen. The content creation crisis remains a very real problem (Final Fantasy XII’s team mentioned in their GDC post-mortem that the work that went into the game was 70 per cent artwork and only 15 per cent game design), and the idea that games like Spore, with their user-created worlds and creatures, can solve that imbalance is likely to be tested to breaking point over coming years.
But it won’t necessarily stop there: gamers’ time and creativity won’t just be harvested for asset creation. Projects like Google Image Labeller (based on The ESP Game, it uses a simple co-operative online game to improve image tagging) show how corporations can take advantage of tens of thousands of free man hours just by harnessing the power of game mechanics. And game developers themselves can take advantage of the same process: The Restaurant Game Project, run by the MIT Media Lab, aims to algorithmically combine the experiences of thousands of gamer volunteers in order to design an entirely new game. You’ll be able to judge its success, and the future implications of user-created content, at next year’s Independent Game Festival.
4. Casual Sensibilities
It’s already an old gaming truism that the biggest game in the world isn’t Halo or Zelda or Final Fantasy, but Windows’ Solitaire or Nokia’s Snake. But the next few years will see the weight of that enormous demographic brought to bear. The obvious face of the influx is the Wii, but a similar trend is underway on the other main gaming platforms – as Bejewelled and Sudoku continue their campaign for world domination across 360 and PS3.
However, this advance is likely to be matched by two contrasting trends. The first is that mainstream games are starting to learn from their casual cousins. The mantra which populist game designers have long relied on – clear visuals, gentle learning curves, short play times and simple mechanics are starting to impinge on game designers ever more aware of how many dedicated gamers drift away from traditional games frustrated and bored. Shorter action sequences, optional level skips, adaptive difficulty and objective reminders which once would have been decried as crutches are now becoming key aspects of modern game design.
And the opposite trend is also increasingly apparent, as casual games become more sophisticated in their adoption of more elaborate play mechanics. PopCap’s Bookworm Adventures and Mystery Solitaire blend, respectively, RPG and adventure game mechanics with casual stalwarts wordsearch and patience. Current word-of-mouth darling Infinite Interactive’s Puzzle Quest (a free PC demo is available, but the game is for PSP and DS) blends a very traditional RPG story structure with a strategy-heavy version of a classic match-three gem-buster. What’s clear is that once these two traditions have had more time to experiment with which dynamics and styles mix best, the divisions between casual and hardcore will become indelibly blurred with sophisticated, compelling, accessible and low-maintenance games.
5. Serious Gaming
The serious game movement has been blue in the face for so long it’s hard to remember it ever looked any different, but it’s still too early for it to stop its heated insistence that we should take serious games more seriously. So, how about this? Square Enix takes it seriously enough to have established an entire new partnership to produce educative games.
The One Laptop Per Child project, which hopes to ship its first ten million machines this year, sees gaming as the crucial missing link in its software line-up. Surgeons, soldiers and 17-year-old learner drivers are trained through games. Political parties, religious organisations and pressure groups are using them to make their cases. In every walk of life, the idea of games that do more than entertain is about to become an inescapable one.
In some respects, what the rise of serious gaming represents is the real birth of a new medium. Games have been struggling to lose their ‘toy’ stigma for generations, but the truth is that there’s little in the shops today that can’t be mapped onto Ralph Baer’s original concepts for the Magnavox Odyssey.
Although we think of games as a medium, up until now they’ve only been a part of one. Saying you like games isn’t like saying you like books; it’s like saying you like novels. Now, the growth of serious games, alongside developments in interactive fiction and art gaming, mean that we’re finally getting close to being a real, transparent and0 adaptable medium, which runs the entire gamut from worthy to disposable, lavish to functional, fiction to documentary, entertainment to illumination.
6. The Independent Approach
Two years ago, GDC’s Game Design Challenge tasked Peter Molyneux, Will Wright and Clint Hocking with designing a game around Emily Dickinson’s poetry. Then, it seemed like a wilfully ridiculous idea. But the tide is already turning. While for many years games with pretensions to artistic merit, social significance or aesthetic adventure were destined to sink without trace, the rise of direct distribution and the wider penetration of varied gaming platforms is creating a situation where these more niche titles can flourish.
Those indie sensibilities, represented by games like Introversion’s philosophical and ethereal Darwinia, currently run peripheral to the main games industry. While they now have a better chance than ever of finding a sound financial footing, the bigger question is if they’ll cross-pollinate with massmarket game design. But the signs are encouraging, and coming from surprisingly commercial angles. Alongside the likes of Katamari Damacy and LocoRoco come bold aesthetic choices like Ubisoft’s recent lunatic take on Rayman. And, the indie influence isn’t just coming from gaming. As the wider world grows increasingly interested in what interactive entertainment has to offer, licences like Adult Swim’s iconoclastic cartoon Aqua Teen Hunger Force bring their own fresh thinking (in this case a combat-golf-kart-racer) onto mainstream shelves.
7. Direct Distribution
Talk to any Live Arcade developer – or, more to the point, any wannabe Live Arcade developer – and there will soon come a point in the conversation when their eyes go glassy, their cheeks develop a flush, and they’ll say in a tone of near-religious amazement: “And then there’s the conversion rates…” It was early convert PomPom that first spoke out about the radical differential between trying to market an indie game in the wilds of the internet and from within Microsoft’s ready-commercialised walled garden. A year or two on, and similar tales are told from those represented on Valve’s Steam service.
With PlayStation Network joining the fray, there’s never been a better time to take your product direct to the consumer. Whether it’s a populist online-only product like Runescape or Dofus, or a breakout hit like Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved, direct marketing can be the difference between viability and failure. Nor does it only encourage new development: old projects which are successful within the traditional economic model can also be restored: Turner’s GameTap recently became the exclusive outlet for Myst Online: Uru Live, a reworking of the original version of Uru Live, which struggled to make it out of beta testing in 2003. Without the fervour of the game’s fans, and an avenue for direct distribution, it’s unlikely Uru Live would have been seen as a commercial possibility.
And the impact of this method of distribution only becomes more potent when married with an episodic approach to game releases. Pioneers like the Bone adventures have proven that the audience is there for episodic content, if it is well suited to the subject matter. And now, with the rise of aggregators of directly distributed games, like Kongregate and Greg Costykian’s Manifesto Games, a secondary industry is growing up to ensure the success of the first.
8. Legislation
A recent move by the mayor of Rome to ban Rule Of Rose, which resulted in the game’s withdrawal, was triggered by a wider campaign against mature-content videogames led by European Justice Commissioner Franco Frattini. In Germany, legislation banning the manufacture, sale and even use of violent games was proposed following suggestions that a love of Counter-Strike had been one of the motivations behind a school shooting at Emsdetten. And, for much of the last two years, we’ve been reporting on continually unsuccessful state-level bills in the US aimed at criminalising the sale of mature-rated games to minors.
But, while the industry is largely holding its own against these morality-based attacks, new fronts are opening up. The growth of online gaming has brought much wider awareness of the problems of game addiction, and while research largely shows that gaming is no different from a number of activities that can prove addictive, anecdotal evidence is mounting of the damage games can cause. Another new issue is seen in the findings of a report published in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, later endorsed by UK driving school BSM, suggesting that players of racing games are more likely to be dangerous drivers. While it’s easy to dismiss many of these claims as ill-informed, sensationalist reports, there’s no doubt that should governments decide to take sweeping action, the results could be devastating for the games industry: many gambling companies are still reeling from last year’s shock US legislation banning the processing of payments to online gambling sites last year, which effectively shut down their industry.
http://www.next-gen.biz/index2.php?o...2&pop=1&page=2
THE FUTURE OF GAMING
By Edge
Seeing what’s over the horizon is key to so many businesses that it’s become a career: the futurologist. There’s never been more investment, more interest or more anxiety focused on what happens next. Here, we take a turn at futurology and map out the key issues that will shape the development of games.
1. Incremental Hardware
There’s still no fixed gauge of gaming’s maturity. Are we in the seventh generation, or the sixth? Should we adopt comics’ use of Golden, Silver and Modern Age? Does Phil Harrison’s Game 3.0 stand a chance of catching on? What’s clear, however, is that discriminating between generations is only going to get harder as hardware becomes more modular and improvements more incremental.
For all that most of us are comfortable seeing PS2, Xbox and GameCube as a family, and Wii, 360 and PS3 a new generation, it’s harder to predict if there’ll be another crop of siblings in another five years. We’re becoming more used to hardware revisions – from the late-in-the-day reinventions of the PSOne and PSTwo, to the overdue-from-the-off DS Lite. Microsoft’s approach is even more aggressively modular, with the 360’s optional and upgradeable hardware, its pragmatic approach to the HD-DVD (and perhaps ultimately Blu-ray) drive, and now confirmation of the 360 Elite (see p26). And, as software becomes as key a component as any of the hardware, firmware revisions may well become as significant as hardware re-releases. A PS3 with Home, expanded backwards compatibility and the ability to record TV, say, would be a very different device from the one which went on sale in March.
Nokia, in its efforts to resuscitate the N-Gage brand, is taking it one step further by adopting a pure software platform which can be implemented in a range of handsets. The closeness of the relationship between gaming and technology means that hardware cycles will never truly go away, but it does seem certain that their impact is going to lessen.
2. Ageing Gamers
When CNN recently revisited the story of three boys who beat a homeless man to death and described the experience as reminiscent of the buzz of a violent videogame, it wasn’t a surprise that it sparked Penny Arcade’s Mike Krahulik into a heartfelt rant about the failings of the children’s parents. What was a surprise was that one of his long-time readers turned out to be one boy’s de facto stepmother, who wrote back with a tearingly honest account of the family’s efforts to deal with the troubled child.
It was a watershed moment – the tragic circumstances notwithstanding, because it so clearly demonstrated that the gaming generation is now becoming the parenting generation, the policing generation, the governing generation. It has been a slow process, as the teens who were attracted by gaming’s commercial growth in the ‘70s hit the peak of their responsibilities in their 50s.
But whereas that trend has been a slow shift, what comes next is a steadily increasing torrent. The percentage of teenagers who own a console or game-capable device is growing inexorably close to 100. And so, in a decade, we have an adult society which has truly grown up with gaming, with its culture and its technology. That is not something the industry has experienced before. While it’s certainly true that some people wouldn’t be comfortable terming many of these occasional, casual players ‘gamers’, the fact remains that the centre of gravity is about to shift, and the impact of that shift may be the most significant change in the next decade.
3. User Generated Content
The announcement of PS3’s Home environment – complete with media streaming, customisable avatars and socialising capabilities – may mark a departure from Sony’s resolutely hands-off approach to the online life of its consoles, but it also marks the moment at which gamers cease to be consumers and start to be contributors.
While there’s little to justify the ‘Second Life in PS3’ tag with which it was quickly labelled (Second Life’s user freedoms, creative control and independent economy mark it out as a very different proposition), it shows an understanding of how user expectations have changed. From custom soundtracks to editable wallpapers, we now want interaction to start the second the machine powers on, and we want that interaction to reflect more of our lives outside the game.
But expectations have also changed on the other side of the screen. The content creation crisis remains a very real problem (Final Fantasy XII’s team mentioned in their GDC post-mortem that the work that went into the game was 70 per cent artwork and only 15 per cent game design), and the idea that games like Spore, with their user-created worlds and creatures, can solve that imbalance is likely to be tested to breaking point over coming years.
But it won’t necessarily stop there: gamers’ time and creativity won’t just be harvested for asset creation. Projects like Google Image Labeller (based on The ESP Game, it uses a simple co-operative online game to improve image tagging) show how corporations can take advantage of tens of thousands of free man hours just by harnessing the power of game mechanics. And game developers themselves can take advantage of the same process: The Restaurant Game Project, run by the MIT Media Lab, aims to algorithmically combine the experiences of thousands of gamer volunteers in order to design an entirely new game. You’ll be able to judge its success, and the future implications of user-created content, at next year’s Independent Game Festival.
4. Casual Sensibilities
It’s already an old gaming truism that the biggest game in the world isn’t Halo or Zelda or Final Fantasy, but Windows’ Solitaire or Nokia’s Snake. But the next few years will see the weight of that enormous demographic brought to bear. The obvious face of the influx is the Wii, but a similar trend is underway on the other main gaming platforms – as Bejewelled and Sudoku continue their campaign for world domination across 360 and PS3.
However, this advance is likely to be matched by two contrasting trends. The first is that mainstream games are starting to learn from their casual cousins. The mantra which populist game designers have long relied on – clear visuals, gentle learning curves, short play times and simple mechanics are starting to impinge on game designers ever more aware of how many dedicated gamers drift away from traditional games frustrated and bored. Shorter action sequences, optional level skips, adaptive difficulty and objective reminders which once would have been decried as crutches are now becoming key aspects of modern game design.
And the opposite trend is also increasingly apparent, as casual games become more sophisticated in their adoption of more elaborate play mechanics. PopCap’s Bookworm Adventures and Mystery Solitaire blend, respectively, RPG and adventure game mechanics with casual stalwarts wordsearch and patience. Current word-of-mouth darling Infinite Interactive’s Puzzle Quest (a free PC demo is available, but the game is for PSP and DS) blends a very traditional RPG story structure with a strategy-heavy version of a classic match-three gem-buster. What’s clear is that once these two traditions have had more time to experiment with which dynamics and styles mix best, the divisions between casual and hardcore will become indelibly blurred with sophisticated, compelling, accessible and low-maintenance games.
5. Serious Gaming
The serious game movement has been blue in the face for so long it’s hard to remember it ever looked any different, but it’s still too early for it to stop its heated insistence that we should take serious games more seriously. So, how about this? Square Enix takes it seriously enough to have established an entire new partnership to produce educative games.
The One Laptop Per Child project, which hopes to ship its first ten million machines this year, sees gaming as the crucial missing link in its software line-up. Surgeons, soldiers and 17-year-old learner drivers are trained through games. Political parties, religious organisations and pressure groups are using them to make their cases. In every walk of life, the idea of games that do more than entertain is about to become an inescapable one.
In some respects, what the rise of serious gaming represents is the real birth of a new medium. Games have been struggling to lose their ‘toy’ stigma for generations, but the truth is that there’s little in the shops today that can’t be mapped onto Ralph Baer’s original concepts for the Magnavox Odyssey.
Although we think of games as a medium, up until now they’ve only been a part of one. Saying you like games isn’t like saying you like books; it’s like saying you like novels. Now, the growth of serious games, alongside developments in interactive fiction and art gaming, mean that we’re finally getting close to being a real, transparent and0 adaptable medium, which runs the entire gamut from worthy to disposable, lavish to functional, fiction to documentary, entertainment to illumination.
6. The Independent Approach
Two years ago, GDC’s Game Design Challenge tasked Peter Molyneux, Will Wright and Clint Hocking with designing a game around Emily Dickinson’s poetry. Then, it seemed like a wilfully ridiculous idea. But the tide is already turning. While for many years games with pretensions to artistic merit, social significance or aesthetic adventure were destined to sink without trace, the rise of direct distribution and the wider penetration of varied gaming platforms is creating a situation where these more niche titles can flourish.
Those indie sensibilities, represented by games like Introversion’s philosophical and ethereal Darwinia, currently run peripheral to the main games industry. While they now have a better chance than ever of finding a sound financial footing, the bigger question is if they’ll cross-pollinate with massmarket game design. But the signs are encouraging, and coming from surprisingly commercial angles. Alongside the likes of Katamari Damacy and LocoRoco come bold aesthetic choices like Ubisoft’s recent lunatic take on Rayman. And, the indie influence isn’t just coming from gaming. As the wider world grows increasingly interested in what interactive entertainment has to offer, licences like Adult Swim’s iconoclastic cartoon Aqua Teen Hunger Force bring their own fresh thinking (in this case a combat-golf-kart-racer) onto mainstream shelves.
7. Direct Distribution
Talk to any Live Arcade developer – or, more to the point, any wannabe Live Arcade developer – and there will soon come a point in the conversation when their eyes go glassy, their cheeks develop a flush, and they’ll say in a tone of near-religious amazement: “And then there’s the conversion rates…” It was early convert PomPom that first spoke out about the radical differential between trying to market an indie game in the wilds of the internet and from within Microsoft’s ready-commercialised walled garden. A year or two on, and similar tales are told from those represented on Valve’s Steam service.
With PlayStation Network joining the fray, there’s never been a better time to take your product direct to the consumer. Whether it’s a populist online-only product like Runescape or Dofus, or a breakout hit like Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved, direct marketing can be the difference between viability and failure. Nor does it only encourage new development: old projects which are successful within the traditional economic model can also be restored: Turner’s GameTap recently became the exclusive outlet for Myst Online: Uru Live, a reworking of the original version of Uru Live, which struggled to make it out of beta testing in 2003. Without the fervour of the game’s fans, and an avenue for direct distribution, it’s unlikely Uru Live would have been seen as a commercial possibility.
And the impact of this method of distribution only becomes more potent when married with an episodic approach to game releases. Pioneers like the Bone adventures have proven that the audience is there for episodic content, if it is well suited to the subject matter. And now, with the rise of aggregators of directly distributed games, like Kongregate and Greg Costykian’s Manifesto Games, a secondary industry is growing up to ensure the success of the first.
8. Legislation
A recent move by the mayor of Rome to ban Rule Of Rose, which resulted in the game’s withdrawal, was triggered by a wider campaign against mature-content videogames led by European Justice Commissioner Franco Frattini. In Germany, legislation banning the manufacture, sale and even use of violent games was proposed following suggestions that a love of Counter-Strike had been one of the motivations behind a school shooting at Emsdetten. And, for much of the last two years, we’ve been reporting on continually unsuccessful state-level bills in the US aimed at criminalising the sale of mature-rated games to minors.
But, while the industry is largely holding its own against these morality-based attacks, new fronts are opening up. The growth of online gaming has brought much wider awareness of the problems of game addiction, and while research largely shows that gaming is no different from a number of activities that can prove addictive, anecdotal evidence is mounting of the damage games can cause. Another new issue is seen in the findings of a report published in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, later endorsed by UK driving school BSM, suggesting that players of racing games are more likely to be dangerous drivers. While it’s easy to dismiss many of these claims as ill-informed, sensationalist reports, there’s no doubt that should governments decide to take sweeping action, the results could be devastating for the games industry: many gambling companies are still reeling from last year’s shock US legislation banning the processing of payments to online gambling sites last year, which effectively shut down their industry.
http://www.next-gen.biz/index2.php?o...2&pop=1&page=2
05-09-07 | 09:05 AM
#6
DVD Talk Hall of Fame
Originally Posted by KurrptSenate
these articles, to me, seem like they use a ton of words to say a whole bunch of nothing
05-09-07 | 09:20 AM
#8
Originally Posted by KurrptSenate
idk
these articles, to me, seem like they use a ton of words to say a whole bunch of nothing
:/
these articles, to me, seem like they use a ton of words to say a whole bunch of nothing
:/
05-09-07 | 09:23 AM
#9
DVD Talk Platinum Edition
Joined: Nov 2006
Posts: 3,170
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yea, I mean I wasn't trying to trash your thread or nothing. To me, it seems like it would be a better read for people completely outside of the gaming world.
everyone that is "into" video games basically formulates their own trends. VGers are some of the most opinionated people I've ever met
everyone that is "into" video games basically formulates their own trends. VGers are some of the most opinionated people I've ever met
05-09-07 | 08:01 PM
#11
DVD Talk Legend
This thread would be more interesting if people tried to answer this question instead:
I would say that the breakdown is as follows:
Golden Age
1975 to 1990
The Golden Age of Console Gaming began with the introduction of the home version of PONG (Christmas 1975). For the first time, home video gaming achieved widespread popularity. The style of games evolved but later games from the NES era were clearly descended from earlier styles. Games of this era were usually not complex to approach but extremely unforgiving.
Silver Age
1990 to 1996
This short age began with the introduction of the Super NES. Shortly thereafter Sega would release Sonic the Hedgehog. Developers in this era began to focus more on plot and also experimented with radically new takes on old concepts. Games also became longer and more forgiving, giving gamers more bang for their buck. As a result, many series' best entries were released in this era.
Modern Age
1996 to present
This era didn't begin with the debut of the PlayStation, but its release affected everything that followed. It was the first truly popular 3D console. Developers eventually mastered the additional power available to them, and 3D games as (initially) a sub-industry were cemented with the release of Mario 64 on the Nintendo 64. Innovations like online play were introduced as time went on. Current games have more in common with this era than any other era.
There’s still no fixed gauge of gaming’s maturity. Are we in the seventh generation, or the sixth? Should we adopt comics’ use of Golden, Silver and Modern Age?
Golden Age
1975 to 1990
The Golden Age of Console Gaming began with the introduction of the home version of PONG (Christmas 1975). For the first time, home video gaming achieved widespread popularity. The style of games evolved but later games from the NES era were clearly descended from earlier styles. Games of this era were usually not complex to approach but extremely unforgiving.
Silver Age
1990 to 1996
This short age began with the introduction of the Super NES. Shortly thereafter Sega would release Sonic the Hedgehog. Developers in this era began to focus more on plot and also experimented with radically new takes on old concepts. Games also became longer and more forgiving, giving gamers more bang for their buck. As a result, many series' best entries were released in this era.
Modern Age
1996 to present
This era didn't begin with the debut of the PlayStation, but its release affected everything that followed. It was the first truly popular 3D console. Developers eventually mastered the additional power available to them, and 3D games as (initially) a sub-industry were cemented with the release of Mario 64 on the Nintendo 64. Innovations like online play were introduced as time went on. Current games have more in common with this era than any other era.
Last edited by Breakfast with Girls; 05-09-07 at 08:03 PM.
05-09-07 | 09:13 PM
#12
DVD Talk Godfather
Pretty good. I'd probably keep the golden age to pre-NES, thus putting the Silver Age at 86-96.
05-09-07 | 11:03 PM
#13
"Ages" works better than generations. I think there needs to be a 4th category though because the mainstream online play, move towards HD, and downloadable content all make this "generation" different than the past...especially the expansion of online play and downloadable content. This is huge because it could very well lead to the next console games being non-physical media and online play on 90% of the games (either versus or at least achievements).
So really I'd say the modern age started in 2005 (with the 360).
So really I'd say the modern age started in 2005 (with the 360).
