The incredible secret future of videogames

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Ray Kurzweil believes that "games are the harbinger of everything." The noted inventor and futurologist, who believes in technological immortality and transhuman ascension via artificial intelligence, made this statement at last year's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. He argued that videogames were where the future manifested itself. "Ultimately," he said, "they're going to be competitive with real reality." A bold claim indeed.

Futurologists and science fiction writers have long been predicting the role of technology, either speculatively in futurological texts, or simply as entertainment in science fiction films, books, and comics. But they've only recently begun to take videogames seriously as a major part of our future. And they are a major part: driven in equal parts by technological progress and cultural expressions. Games are a hybrid thing: a fusion of art and science. As both disciplines push onward, so they push games ahead of them. And further ahead of these are the people who deal in the future. Writers, designers, prophets.

One such writer, a man who is regularly questioned about the future, is Charles Stross. He is the author of a number of books set in the near future. "The book which, I think, is the reason I get invited to talk at computer games conferences and similar, is Halting State," Stross says. "It's a book about skulduggery in the computer games industry, and in particular about the future of MMOs." Halting State doesn't sound all that fanciful when you consider the kinds of scams and gold-farming exercises that already take place in the real world. Stross's book sees a crime inside a futuristic virtual reality MMO linked to real world espionage and crime. That could almost be a PC Gamer news headline.

For Stross, the catalyst of his imagination is the current trajectory of technology. Right now he's excited about the implications of rapidly ballooning bandwidth. "If you go back just a few years, WiFi hotspots were rare and data on a mobile phone cost extortionate amounts of money," Stross says. "Nowadays it's got much cheaper, and this trend is accelerating. We're seeing the roll-out of 4G, with which we can expect very high data rates, which means we can expect to see mobile devices which have the equivalent bandwidth of full-bore WiFi wherever we go. And it's going to go a lot further." Already, as we pointed out in PCG 201, you can play Left 4 Dead via mobile broadband. That is only going to become easier, faster, and cheaper.

But Stross sees another trend too, a blurring of real and game worlds. He argues that the sea-change will come with "ubiquitous location services." Those systems that can pinpoint our mobile phone down to a single street. "We haven't quite gotten our heads around the idea of having devices on our person that always know where we are," says Stross. "This is less obviously gaming related, until you start thinking about augmented reality, or live-action roleplay. You can play games in the real world without having arranged to meet. If you're in the same area as another player of one of these games, for example, your phone could steer you towards each other, so that you could interact."

Game developers are already working with this idea. London-based Mudlark are making a mobile phone game in which players use GPS to try and walk rings around each other in the real world. Which means a player stuck at his desk might really get in trouble.

This kind of stuff is little more than an augmentation of the existing strata of gaming technology, as Stross observes: "It's not going to render the tiers of gaming we already see obsolete. What it will do is allow for a greater number of games to be possible: live action roleplay, spatial location games, MMO's accessed from your mobile. These won't replace high end PCs or consoles, but they may tie into them, or act as alternatives when you're on the move." The future of games, according to Stross, is mobile, connected and multitudinous.

If Ray Kurzweil's speech is to be believed, then potentially we face not simply expanded connectivity, but a billionfold increase in computer power in the next ten years. This has astonishing implications for the way games are going to be rendered and delivered. Combine this leap in power with Stross's observations about bandwidth and we suddenly get a very clear glimpse of the immediate future: games rendered remotely and then streamed to your PC, your laptop, or even your phone. It's something we touch on elsewhere in this very issue, and it's already happening.

The idea is simple: it makes more sense for the steady increase in processing power to be centralised, in huge banks of professionally maintained servers, than for us to be continually fiddling with processors, graphics cards and drivers. If services like the game-streaming OnLive are to be believed - and their claims are matched by the claims of futurologists - then the system you use to browse the net on will be all you need. As long as the bandwidth is there and your setup can decode high-res video, it'll be all you need to play the increasingly sophisticated, ultra-high-fidelity games of the near future.

The game will be 'played' on a rented machine at a secure location, and even cheap laptops will be transformed into awesome gaming PCs.
But it's not just power and bandwidth that will define the future. Like every other rapid progression of technology, processing power won't develop in isolation: there are also such things as nanotechnology, bioengineering and materials science to consider. When taking these into account, Kurzweil's predictions become even more outlandish than those of science fiction writers.

Kurzweil argues that the progress of the computer is a progress inwards. It's going to become increasingly part of our biology, of what it is, fundamentally, to be human. Continuing the 'smooth curve' of our integration with such things as mobile phones (which basically render us telepathic, able to communicate mind-to-mind over huge distances) or even wrist watches (which firmly position us in time) the future will deliver more and more technology into the body. Within a couple of decades nanobots will be in our blood, says Kurzweil. These will allow us to experience games in 'first person', where our eyes themselves are the screen we carry around and use. Reality, he says, could be reduced to a window in one corner of our specially augmented consciousness.

And we won't be alone in this. By 2029, claims Kurzweil, AI will surpass the human brain. Artificial intelligences will be joining us, will have already joined us, in game worlds and in the real world. Even before that happens, near-human intelligences will be making all aspects of our lives easier, and our time in games more enjoyable. They will almost certainly be the stars, or even the co-creators, of the future generations of gaming entertainment.

"It's the holy grail of much of game development," says Stross, when I ask him about artificial life. "Character development is even harder than building environments. What you need to be able to do is not necessarily recreate human intelligence, but simply to convince players that what they're interacting with is interesting." If it moves and barks like a dog, people will treat it like a dog, even if it's on a screen. The same is going to be true of people.

"People are interested in people, at least when they're not shooting them," says Stross. "MMOs are popular for this reason, they become more interesting the more you play them, not because the game gets more interesting, but because your relationships with other players becomes more interesting. It generates incredible loyalty."

But, as savant game designer Eskil Steenberg points out, AI can also be asked do a lot of things that people cannot, or will not. "You can't get people to play all the boring parts in a game, like guard #324," says Steenberg. "But what you can do is to have the game makers record what the guard should do on the game disk. The obvious problem with this is that the recorded actions of the guard can't react to anything the player does. The solution is to program an artificial intelligence, which can control the guard and that can react to what the player does. The smarter the program is, and the more things it takes in to account, the better the experience will be for the player." Artificial intelligence, and not pure power/bandwidth muscle, is where the true germ of our gaming future will lie.

This seems obvious: elements of artificial intelligence are popping up everywhere in games, from your enemies in Halo to your neighbours in The Sims. But Steenberg, currently working independently on an MMO titled Love, takes it further. If artificial intelligence can bring characters to life, why can't it start bringing the rest of the game to life? "If we look at other things in games, like story, levels, characters, events, cinematics, conversations, they are all provided on the disc," says Steenberg. "They have the same limitations of the guard with the recorded actions, they can't react to what the players do. The two solutions would be to either have people making all the content while you are playing the game (something that is impossible to do fast enough), or just like in the case of the guard, you write a little program that does it for you." To a small degree, we're already seeing that happen with Left 4 Dead's AI 'director'. In the sequel, it will even change the layouts of the levels.

"Procedural content is not random content," Steenberg says. "Just like the AI actions on the AI guard aren't random. It follows a set of carefully set up rules that governs its actions. The more things you take in to account the better the content gets. We are seeing some nudging in this direction: destructible environments, ragdolls, physics, and AI directors. All these technologies remove the need for canned content and replace it with a bit of code." Eventually games will be building games ahead of us, responding to us with intelligence, with creativity. They won't be static, nor any more predictable than the real world.

"Ultimately," Steenberg says, "we can replace more and more of our game content with code, and we will get more and more flexible games that can react to the player in entirely new ways." For this far-sighted Swedish developer, what is exciting is not new hardware, but software solutions devised for the hardware we already have. "I would argue that technology has digressed gaming," says Steenberg. "The higher you put the bar, especially for graphics, the more you sacrifice in gameplay. In a 2D block-based game like Super Mario Bros, implementing destructibility is easy, while in a modern 3D game it is hard, so most people don't bother. Another example is AI.

Halo 3 had to scale down the AI from Halo 2 because the added graphics made it impossible to have the same number of visibility tests and pathfinding tests. In a text adventure it was easy to let the player chose his or her own name and then have it be pasted into all the dialogue: in a 'modern' game with recorded voice, you simply can't do that."

Steenberg argues that the future of games is one in which software will have to find solutions for the enormous problems introduced by following the curve of increasing hardware sophistication. "The examples of how things that used to be simple have now become hard are numerous. Dwarf Fortress and similar games give a hint of where games would be, if graphics and sounds didn't stand in our way."

So perhaps despite the incredible technology that is coming, and the better visuals, the march towards photorealism and perfectly rendered worlds, is actually a dead end. Perhaps the coming decades of gaming lie down another path, a path of smart AI and communal, multiplayer storytelling where humans and AI mix to make their own gaming experiences.

Charles Stross had his own observations about this: "When you see DC and Marvel comics on the shelf, we don't pick them up expecting them to have made progress towards photorealism, although given computer tech and photoshop tools, they could go for it if they wanted to. What they're looking at is a better way of telling a story. The ability to generate realistic 3D visuals is a red herring in terms of representing progress, at least if we're looking at a changing game experience."

And so we come back to Kurzweil's speech at last year's GDC. "Play is how we principally learn and principally create," Kurzweil told the assembled game developers, and in saying so he points to another reason why the coming decades of gaming might be more about how we interact and how we play than about how hi-tech the platform we use can be. It's the exact reason why the billionfold increase Kurzweil predicts might not be the key factor in our gaming future. The key factor will be our own interest in creativity.

Stross agrees on this point, highlighting the crudest of gaming technologies and their sophisticated results: "The reason pen and paper RPGs don't die is that it's about consensual storytelling. It's about creativity. Most people don't want to be creative, but one in a hundred people want to get involved: they're bored by passive consumption. Consequently, they're willing to pay for more stuff." This is backed up by the revelation that MMO players also buy more singleplayer games than other gamers. How much, indeed, do pen and paper obsessives end up investing in their hobby?

The point is not that games are 'going to be competitive with real reality,' but that games are going enrich 'real reality', and be interwoven with it. 'Virtual reality' was never a good term. As American writer Steven Shaviro points out, it should always have been known as 'prosthetic reality'. Games are going to extend our reality, and they're going to do it by being smarter and more varied.

The future is gaming heading off in all kinds of different directions at once. There will be no single, defining trend other than that of diversity. "The global turnover of the games industry is about $40bn," Stross points out, "which is comparable to Hollywood. And yet we don't think of Hollywood as a single monolith of 'the movie industry' as we can tend to do with 'games industry'. We don't confuse Pixar with slasher horror movies. We wouldn't expect directors and producers from one area to have any knowledge or even familiarity with another area. The same will become true of games."

He continues: "Games have really not been around that long, and it's still possible to be genuinely revolutionary. Imagine, by comparison, being an engineer working for Airbus or Boeing. You'd be shaving percentages off fuel efficiency, and never have a chance to be genuinely creative. That's not true of the games industry, which still has an exciting future ahead of it."

That future might not even involve the hardware changes that the big manufacturers are trying to push on us, if Steenberg is to be believed. "Technology doesn't really matter in my opinion. I would be very surprised if people don't play games with mouse, keyboard, and joypads in 20 years time. Despite the 'one console dream' we are getting more and more platforms that are more diversified then ever. So in conclusion I say that there is no one future, there are lots of them, and to me that sounds very good."

I tell Steenberg about Kurzweil's vision of a super-AI mediated through blood-borne nanobots. "Do I win anything, if I am right and he is wrong in 20 years?" Sure, how about badges with RIGHT and WRONG on them? "StarTrek badges?" asks Steenberg. "I'm assuming we will all be working for the Galactic Federation in 20 years."

Maybe we will be. This much is certain: there will be games on that starship, wherever it goes.

Jim Rossignol