Raising the Game

Within only 24 hours of its release in September last year, GrandTheft Auto V made more than $800 million in sales. Three days later it had passed a billion dollars, helping cement the game’s place as the fastest-selling entertainment product in history.

Twitch is a live video streaming service that lets viewers watch other players as they battle it out on a variety of video games. In May this year, YouTube was strongly rumoured to be buying Twitch for
$1 billion. Despite being only three years old, the service boasts 43million users a month. While the deal had yet to be finalised at the time of going to press, backing from Google, the owner of YouTube, would make those impressive figures sky-rocket even further.

Highly immersive tech can have a profound effect on your ability to absorb information, form opinions, overcome anxieties and even feel pain

Then there’s the latest generation of consoles that has just landed.You’d have to travel a long way, and explore several caves, to find someone who hadn’t heard about the arrival of the Xbox One or the PlayStation 4. The two pillars of console gaming, Microsoft and Sony,both released new machines at the end of last year, heralding in the latest era of video gaming and raising the bar on the capabilities of home game machines.

However these are all big, headline-grabbing stories. It’s what’s happening at the fringes of the video game industry that’s really interesting; the developers, scientists and artists experimenting with the fundamentals of the video game format. So what are the new technological, cultural and artistic breakthroughs that will shape the video game landscape of tomorrow? Here we present some of the most dynamic trends that will influence what we play, how we play and, perhaps most interestingly, why we play.

Virtual Reality

Regardless of the 1080p resolution or 60-frames-per second animations a game may have, a player’s immersion is broken as soon as they glance to the side and see the living room wall behind the screen. No amount of realistic graphics or dynamic surround sound can completely make you forget that you’re sitting on your sofa, curtains drawn, half-empty pizza box beside you.

Or at least that was the case before a Kickstarter project for ahead-mounted virtual reality unit reached its target of $250,000in just four hours. Oculus Rift, with its ability to project an all-encompassing 3D environment into its wearer’s field of vision, has enormous potential to enhance video games.

I believe that as video games become more pervasive as an expressive art form, we will see an evolution of the subjects they address

This isn’t the failed VR of the nineties. Now we have the technology to bring to life the kind of 360o worlds that game designers have been dreaming about for over 20 years. “The 3D in these new VR displays is much closer to reality,” says Jonathan Tustain of interaction design studio Inition. “When you build a universe from scratch and feel like you are in it, there really is a never-ending set of doors that this technology opens up.” The potential for devices like the OculusRift, or its closest competitor, Project Morpheus (Sony’s foray into VR headset technology, currently in development) is huge – both for gaming and other, less recreational, applications.

Matt Sonic, founder of VirtualReality.io, an online Oculus Rift software library, explains that immersion VR can do far more than just entertain us. “Highly immersive tech can have a profound effect on your ability to absorb information, form opinions, overcome anxieties and even feel pain.” Dress some of these beneficial effects up with an entertaining game mechanic and you have a product that’s not only powerfully immersive but also potentially therapeutic. Sonic cites Diplopia, a game used to treat amblyopia (lazy eye) as an example. By streaming different images to each eye, the VR headset helps strengthen the underperforming eye. “Imagine being born with a weak eye and never having depth perception. Then, one day after playing a VR game, you can see the world in 3D for the first time.”

Empathy Games

As video games seep further and further into the mainstream consciousness, the issues they touch upon broaden. Games no longer just deal with the somewhat-hard-to-relate to plight of Earth’s last super-soldier or goomba-stomping plumbers. We’re seeing an increasing number of games that deal with real-world issues: political, emotional and social.

Pawel Miechowski of Polish developer 11 Bit Studios is responsible for the game This War of Mine. The game makes the unconventional choice of not casting the player as a gruff-voice, battle-hardened soldier; instead, he or she is responsible for the well–being of a family struggling to survive as a war escalates around them. Miechowski explains that games like this are “not just entertainment, but trying to speak about important things in a mature way. [We’re] a generation of people who grew up with games and see them as a form of art... they can be about fun, adrenaline, competition,but also about compassion, love, understanding or freedom.”

The surge in games that deal intelligently with more mature topics suggests not just that the games industry is growing up, but also that people’s attitudes to games are developing. “I believe that
as video games become more pervasive as an expressive art form, we will see an evolution of the subjects they address,” says Robin Hunicke, co–founder and CEO of independent game studio Funomena. Expanding the emotions a game can tap into or the subjects it cancover is blowing open the doors of what games can do. Take, for example, Papers, Please, a game where players take on the role of a customs official on the border of the fictional nation of Arstotzka. It’s their job to ascertain the validity of the claims of people trying to get into the country. The game touches on all manner of emotive topics, including immigration policies, terrorism and the treatment of refugees – but still has a strong gameplay mechanic at its heart. LucasPope, the creator of Papers, Please feels games like this will become more prolific. “As games become a more ubiquitous form of media, it doesn’t surprise me to see them branching out into these kinds of political or personal topics,” he says.

Games will no longer be just about escaping from the real world, they’ll help us understand it better. As Hunicke says, “there are so many topics that video games can explore, and we’ve only scratched the surface of what feelings they are capable of expressing.”

IRL Games

Of course, with the advent of mobile technology, you no longer have to be tethered to your TV set to play games. Sure, Game Boys have been around for a quarter of a century, but the level of technology we all carry around in our pockets every day means the possibilities of innovative gaming are much wider than they were in 1989.

What really excites me about bio–monitoring is the ability for developers to understand how gamers are responding at a deeper level

In October last year Niantic Labs, a mysterious branch of Google, launched a mobile, geo-location-based game called Ingress. It tasks players with travelling to real-world locations, such as landmarks
and public art, where they can use their phones to open and close portals around the globe to help or hinder an invading alien race. To be successful, players have to communicate and coordinate with each other to gain dominance of their surrounding territory. This is perhaps the most ambitious geo-location game to date and its success can be seen in the loyal fan base it has inspired. As our phones become increasingly powerful, it seems only logical that more and more games will break out of the home and use the real world as their canvas, rather than being limited to a TV screen.

At the other end of the spectrum in terms of budget, but similar in how it utilises the “real world” as its backdrop, is a game so minimal that it’s debatable whether it can even be called a game. Developed in 48 hours at the 2014 Global Game Jam, Soulfill dares “players” to interact with strangers on public transport by holding eye contact for as long as they can. The stranger doesn’t know they are part of
a game – in fact, they’re probably wondering why a weirdo keeps staring at them. Soulfill’s creator, Jason Marziani, explains where he thinks the proliferation of games that have both digital and real-world components is heading. “This trend will drive people away from the screen into lightweight play that focuses on the interaction with each other and the environment.”

Biomonitoring

Self-quantifying technology, from fitness monitoring devices to apps that measure sleep patterns, has multiple practical uses, and, in recent years, has been widely adopted by many different industries. This kind of tech can also be used in video games to engineer a more reactive, immersive gaming experience. New hardware that can measure players’ physical responses to the game they’re playing and then adjust the game accordingly has a multitude of applications.

Samuel Matson is the brains behind the Immersion headset, a device that monitors a player’s stress levels as they play and tweaks the difficulty of the game accordingly. To prevent the game becoming impossibly difficult, players must learn to keep their stress levels in check.

“What really excites me about bio-monitoring is the ability for developers to understand how gamers are responding at a deeper level,” says Matson. “That insight is valuable in a test environment like a focus group, but it becomes really incredible when it happens in real time, when the game can adapt in the moment to provide an individualised experience for the gamer.”

Bio-monitoring has the potential to treat health issues – in Immersion’s case, stress levels – but it also could do a lot to enhance games themselves. Imagine a survival horror game that measures your anxiety levels and is able to send a zombie dog bursting through a window at just the right time to cause the most intense scare, or areal-time strategy game that senses when you feel overwhelmed and sends appropriate reinforcements. And, like VR technology, it seems bio-monitoring has serious potential beyond the gaming industry. “I can’t wait to see these technologies break out of the entertainment industry and integrate into healthcare, education and everyday life,”says Matson.

Neurogaming

The idea behind neurogaming, the even more outlandish sci-fi cousin of bio-monitoring, is to let our brains control games directly. The world’s first NeuroGaming Conference in San Francisco, held in 2013, collected some of the leading minds operating on the fringe of gaming. Hardware such as neuro-tech company Emotiv’s Insight headset, a device that monitors your brain waves and translates them into meaningful data, has the potential to completely change how we control games. By effectively turning the brain into a kind of input device, devices like this could not only change the way we play games but also who can play them. A game that can be played with eye movements or even just thoughts could open the door for those with physically debilitating conditions.

As well as making video games even more accessible, neurogaming could make games more emotionally immersive by reacting to the player’s emotional state. Imagine a game that could sense your mood and adjust the virtual weather accordingly, or perhaps could make non-player characters react to you differently, based on how you are feeling. Zack Lynch, founder of the NeuroGaming Conference, describes neurogaming as a collection of technology that incorporates the full nervous system into gameplay, offering unprecedented integration with the player’s mind and body. “You’ll see a lot of integration of gesture control, motion control, neurosensing and facial recognition integrated into new output technologies like virtual reality, augmented reality and haptics,” he predicts.