Wednesday, October 10, 2007 :::
 

Come out and play














Gaaaaaaaames....

David Wong est un journaliste assez barré (voir son site Pointless Waste of Time) mais aussi un théoricien du jeu vidéo. Vous vous souvenez sans doute d'articles comme The Ultimate War Simulation (Because I don't have cold-sweat flashbacks about Starcraft), The Gamers' Manifesto (20 demands for the videogames industry), A World of Warcraft World (10 ways online gaming will change the future. Probably not for the best) ou The 12 Awesomest Games of 2010 (we hope, anyway), avec à chaque fois tout plein d'idées complètement dingues ou totalement géniales, souvent même les deux à la fois.

Récemment il a sorti un nouvel article sur la question du futur du jeu vidéo, article intitulé The Next 25 Years of Video Games. Pour vous mettre l'eau à la bouche, voici le premier chapitre de l'article :
2008: Neverending Games.

Spore's Infinite Universe

Anything we say about the future of gaming has to start with Spore, a game from Will Wright (The Sims, Sim City) that no one would have even believed possible if they hadn't actually seen it in action. In Spore, you start out as a single-celled organism:

... and evolve into a creature of your own design:

... then form tribes:

... then cities:

... then planets:

... then interplanetary travel:

... which lets you visit other planets teeming with infinite varieties of alien life. Yes, guys, you can then build warships and wipe them out.

This sounds like a ridiculous crack fantasy to any gamer who's ever dropped $60 on a game and blown through all 12 levels in eight hours. How the hell do you fit an “infinite” number of planets and aliens on a few DVD’s worth of data?

The answer is a technique called procedural generation, which just means the game doesn’t have to store millions of creatures, it just stores the methods by which they can be built. You, the gamer, make the creatures.

Your malformed abominations, along with all the civilization and technologies that spring from your deranged imagination, are automatically uploaded online where they become part of the Spore universe. Those other planets you get to travel to? They're all created by other gamers.

They're planning on half a million stars with millions of planets orbiting. When we say "infinite," we mean it. We're talking about a game you could literally spend the rest of your natural life exploring without ever reaching the end.

Whether or not this particular game becomes a hit, this method of game creation is the inevitable future. A whole lot of what sucks about games right now--specifically, the huge art budgets that force publishers to cash in with shitty licensed games--will go by the wayside. Game makers won't have to construct a whole digital universe; they can simply provide the blueprint and distribute the creation process to millions of people like you and me.


Pour 2015 Wong prédit : "Your eyeball becomes the monitor".
Cette phrase me rappelle, indirectement (dans la série, le monde virtuel et le monde réel ne font qu'un, ce n'est donc pas tout à fait la même chose), un épisode de Serial Experiments Lain : les serveurs d'un Quake-like appelé Phantoma se retrouvent confondus à ceux d'un monde de jeux pour enfants style Kindergarten. Cet accident (qui n'en est pas un) donne lieu à des scènes perturbantes où un homme terrifié tente de fuir une enfant qui, elle, joue innocemment à un-deux-trois soleil. On voit aussi un ado abattre une fillette en pleine rue.

Pour finir, deux citations sur 2033 :
"If trends continue as they have been, what we're calling supercomputers could be made as small as a speck of dust. You could paint them on your walls. "

"More information than your parents absorbed in a lifetime could come firing into your brain in the blink of an eye."

Labels: Jeu vidéo

::: posted by Tranxenne at 12:30 PM

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