Better than life
games will be the new crack
08 December, 2004 by IT Reviews Staff
Fast forward ten years and games are now very big business. The 'sim' legacy lives on in the shape of The Sims, while Doom 3 has only recently appeared. Has anything really changed?
Oh yes. The quality of the engines underlying such games is improving dramatically, based on real-world physics equations. Graphics quality has improved by several orders of magnitude; squint at a new game and you could mistake it for television. In a few years' time you won't even have to squint. And there's now 3D sound, too.
It's getting to the point where computer games are more involving than television (I know; that wouldn't be hard) or films. People play them for many hours at a time, revelling in the depth of characterisation, the fantastic locations and backdrops, the beautiful graphics. And the fun of blowing the crap out of alien monsters, obviously.
Some people might argue that the existence of large development houses and publishers has squeezed out innovation and gameplay, but the massive success of titles like Halo 2, Half Life 2 and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas shows otherwise. People are getting what they want.
Fast forward another decade and what will we see? I'd expect games to start to feature mind control, by which I mean that the player will control the game's characters using some kind of headset that picks up brain waves. It'll only be experimental at this point, but it will happen.
Even now, at the end of 2004, neuroscientists have developed techniques for disabled people to control mechanical limbs using their brain. At the moment these rely on implanted electrodes, but a non-invasive version is technically feasible. So you won't need a keyboard, mouse or joypad controller. Your character will react at the speed of thought.
Fast forward another ten years, to 2024, and I think it's likely that the first displays to directly stimulate the optic nerve will be on the market. Right now these are being developed to allow blind people to see, and they are at a very early stage with just a few blocks of pixels. But that will change quickly, and high resolution optic nerve implants for non-medical purposes are likely to become available.
So, a quick recap. By this point we could have computer games that appear completely real, because the action is happening in front of your eyes, not on a computer screen. The action will be controlled by your thought, so you'll feel even more involved. The graphics and sound will be perfect.
Hmm, what else? Well, we could add in some direct stimulation of the brain's reward and pain centres, for a start. It's been done with rats for years, so how about a game that boosts your serotonin system when you complete a level, or cuts it back when you lose a life? A little drop of ecstasy when you win, a little chunk of depression when you lose.
Psychoactive drugs like ecstasy, cocaine, caffeine, heroin, cannabis, nicotine, psilocybin and alcohol are crude in their effects. Even if you get the right dose and purity, it's pot luck (pardon the pun) as to the level of effect you get. Direct brain stimulation by computer could be far more accurate and even relatively safe.
Which brings me to the title of this article (with apologies to the Red Dwarf creators). If you could live in a world that was far more interesting, varied and attractive than the real one, if you could forget completely about the troubles of normal life and immerse yourself totally in an artificial world, with your feelings linked directly to that virtual world, would you?
Many thousands of people take legal and illicit mind-altering drugs on a regular basis, simply because their lives are better under the influence of such drugs than they are without them. It seems likely to me that fully-immersive computer games will be successful for exactly the same reason.
