Illustration by Joe Kessler

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.