Designing games isn't child's play. The electronic gaming industry has traditionally pushed the limits of computing hardware and led the way in many software advances. From yesterday's Commodore 64 to today's 700MHz Athlon machine, we marvel at what our computers can do, then wonder what games we can play on them.
Alex Garden, CEO of Relic Entertainment and creator of Homeworld, a real-time strategy game, says that games will continue to drive technology. "It's likely that the growth of gaming in the new millennium will be more singularly responsible for the development and public adoption of new technology than any other influence," he says.
What will faster, more powerful PCs mean for future games? Will we be able to virtually sing with Puff Daddy or explore Middle Earth with digital hobbits? Or will we simply play graphically stunning but nonetheless stale versions of Tomb Raider?
The Next Level
The latest line of 3D video cards and the gaming interface DirectX give some indication of what's in store. Graphics-card technology has improved faster than any other segment of the computing industry. In only a few years we've gone from watching the pixelated, jagged images of Doom and Doom 2 to the photorealistic aliens and marines of Half-Life. While newer games look better than their predecessors, they're still as mindless as Galaxian was in 1979.
In the future, graphics cards will do most of the lower-level game processing, letting the CPU focus on intensive work, such as controlling objects' behaviour (as opposed to just describing their shapes), says Peter Glaskowsky, senior analyst for 3D graphics and multimedia at Cahners MicroDesign Resources.
Consequently, the behaviour of objects
will mimic reality more accurately. For example, if lightning struck a tree in a game, the trunk would splinter and the branches and leaves would sway realistically as the weight of gravity took the tree down.
Such effects won't be limited to PCs. Sony is touting the powerful Emotion Engine CPU in next year's PlayStation 2, which dedicates more processing power to artificial intelligence and to object behaviour than to graphics. As a result, we would see more games like the revolutionary (though flawed) Trespasser, whose dinosaurs act out of fear, hunger or anger instead of following scripted programming. Imagine a game of Quake in which your bot opponents anticipate your moves, rather than just react to them. Though games won't truly imitate life for many years to come, within five or 10 years improvements in hardware and Internet broadband may allow designers to create games that not only entertain us but also challenge us intellectually and emotionally.
Relic Entertainment's Garden sees virtual reality as part of those games. "The next really big immersive leap will happen when a low-cost, high-resolution head-mounted display system emerges. This will remove the final 2D screen barrier that we fight against every day," he says.
In this scenario, we'll fight intelligent, 3D enemies that seem as alive as we are. We'll run, jump, hear, and see, not with joysticks and gamepads, but with the ultimate gaming peripherals - our limbs, our eyes, our ears, and most of all, our minds.
