Leading Technologists Predict Game Developers Will Simulate Reality in 3 Years

To put my headline into context, I would like to direct you to Bethesda Softworks' official website for their flagship product, The Elder Scrolls:

Da Link

Go on ahead and watch a few of those video clips (I recommend the first three) and you tell me what daddy thinks.

If those impressive clips are any indication, we are reaching critical mass with computing technology and it'll only be a few scant years before game programmers start delivering us games so life-like and detailed, the only suspension of disbelief will be that every time we try to fully immerse ourselves in the simulation, we knock our faces against our monitors. Ouch! Silly dork, it's just a game!

Is three years enough time for us to recreate Reality(tm)? I may have exaggerated my timeline there by, oh two or three years. Five years is plenty time for computer CPUs to reach stupendous levels of sophistication. Development cycles have accelerated dramatically in the last five years. In 2000, we were using our blazing fast Pentium II-powered PCs. Five years before that, a lot of us were still rocking our 486s. Modern hard drives and memory chips are the cheapest they've ever been. With mass amounts of storage readily available, developers are free to heap mounds of content into their games. Install a game into your PC now and it's not uncommon for the behemoth to quaff 2 - 4 gigabytes of real estate on your hard disk. The latest games are starting to be shipped in DVD format because there's more stuff, more graphics, more sound, more game.

If I was just talking about pure graphical splendor, I don't think I would be quite as optimistic and excited about the future of electronic gaming. I'm already floored by some of the stuff that's on the store shelves now. Take 2004's Half-Life 2. Excellent piece of work, finished it over a month ago. Replay value is pretty limited, but I'll fire it up occasionally and my jaw will still hit the deck at how good it looks. The beauty of it all is it's not just in the visuals. The developers went a step further and programmed in a physics model that is simply amazing. For the first time ever we're seeing virtual objects react to the player and to the simulated environment in an eerily realistic fashion. This is what technology will bring us.

There's just so much interesting stuff being done with games. Besides making games look better, we have another subset of developers who specializein articificial intelligence. Peter Molyneux of Lionhead Studioes is perhaps one of the leading lights in AI and has turned out challenging game concepts that definitely do not fit the mold. On yet another end of the spectrum we have the massively multiplayer role-playing games, where it's not so much about the gee-whiz factor but the focus is on meticulous world-building. Ever talk to a World of Warcraft player? They are in that game to a level that nearly subverts their real lives. A WoW player's commitment to their virtual companions - also other human participants, often strangers - becomes almost equal to their own network of friends and relatives.

You don't even have to go into high fantasy mode to see how far our world-building talents have gone. For chrissakes, even the notorious Grand Theft Auto games have their own fully-developed worlds to draw us into. The cities in San Andreas, the latest installment in the series, are staggering in their size and detail. Sure, a lot of it is redundant (i.e. you still can't just walk into any building and get unique reactions from all the pedestrians milling around), but how long do you think it'll take before our hotrod computers now get even more juiced, giving game developers the world over an even bigger sandbox to play in?

The really sad thing is, everything I've been yapping about has been covered ad nauseam in hobby or industry publications. It really is old-ass news. The only thing Joe Blow learns about this in the mainstream media is... well, that's the thing, they don't talk about this stuff in the evening news cast. Firstly, it's undeniably dorky, and geeky stuff only plays well if there's a wedgie being delivered to a scrawny guy in cokebottle glasses at the end of it. Secondly, news people would much rather investigate why a freely downloadable user modifications (or just, mod) allows players to unlock interactive sex sequences in Grand Theft Auto. Oh snap, those damn video games still up to no good, defiling the minds of our idiotic children. I sure hope Hilary Clinton uses up taxpayer money to launch an full-blown investigation as to how those naughty game developers could let a bug like this slip into the final product. Nevermind the raucous cop-slaying, hooker-mauling action foudn in the rest of the game. We want to know about how boobies and yoni showed up in my Timmy's video game!

Alas, that's the way things work around here. Just remember: there's more to games than killing and explosions. It's about making those killings and explosions look goooood.