So it seems our good friend Ray Kurzweil has recently received support and funding from both Google and NASA for his Singularity University, which has set off a certain signal in me that maybe his ideas might be publicly adopted a lot sooner than expected. Even if given a tiny bit of credentials for his theories, 2030 isn't too far away, the current deadline for total convergence. But enough about that, read my prior blog post that explains all about the Singularity in pretty good detail.
What interested me about the article about the Singularity University was the question of how a generation could possibly prepare for such an event. Trends are definitely useful, but when these trends hit a point where we can no longer accurately predict any future event with any relevance, what's the point of preparing in the first place? The trends suggest that convergence will act in humanity's best interest, but we might not be the end-all be-all of technological progress, especially if we actually do end up designing self-replicating super-human intelligent machines. There's simply no way to predict their motives and developments much in the same way I'm sure mice have no idea what the hell we're up to.
But honestly, I'm not too worried about it.
Speaking of trends, it seems that new technologies are making themselves more efficiently integrated into society increasingly by means of entertainment, (as opposed to military and medicine) later on this year we're going to see an influx of mind-reading games that I'm sure will raise an entirely new strain of general awareness concerning mental/psychological technology that's going to be more exponentially relevant in the coming decades.
Scientists are hoping that by 2019, we'll be able to genetically map every new-born Gattaca style in order to prevent and forewarn genetic defects. Beyond genetics, many new studies are focusing in on reverse-engineering the brain in hopes of grasping the technicalities of how the mind works in far greater detail.
But back to entertainment... yes, entertainment. Entertainment is a fickle industry, what works one year doesn't always work the next. Innovation is one of those fleeting things that we can't really maintain a firm grasp of, but its my hope that an integrated society will present itself with more opportunities for innovation by continuing its current inclusive trends. (See wikipedia, twitter, facebook, etc)
I've spent a lot of time trying to analyze what these trends mean, from the popularity of the Nintendo Wii, to the increasing trends in casual games, I'm seeing a market that's preparing itself for an explosion of some kind, but I can't quite foresee it yet. Games are only a part of the puzzle; Netflix Instant-Watch, iPhone's App Store, Steam-Powered; I don't see these ideas as simply as entertainment going digital, I see it as trends highly favoring an open-market free-exchange instant-access orgy of convergence and integration. It has already consumed the lives of so many, and that number's not going to drop - once production costs go down, once development becomes easier to use, once technology becomes so intuitive that the means of which we access it becomes invisible, then we're going to have an entire planet working together providing services and entertainment to each other to a degree that's simply impossible to keep up with and the ante's are going to raise much higher. (Kind of like how it is now, who can honestly say they can keep up with the entire internet? We can in general terms, but not specifically.)
But the game industry in particular, I find it to be an anomaly. It's a relatively new industry, sure, but it hasn't come even remotely close to being treated as a novel and artistic medium as comparable to other mediums such as film, literature, and music. Granted, it's the youngest, most expensive, and most difficult to produce for, which is why it's so important to help guide trends to solve some of these problems to work out the quirks of the industry. In my humblest of opinions, for lack of a better word, video-games need to go Indie. The stakes need to be made lower so that developers can put more resources into creativity and originality. Big game producers can stay where they're at, there's no problem with having a Hollywood for video-games, but they can't be relied on to push the industry forward, there's simply too much money at stake to take massive risks, which is exactly what the video-game industry is to investors.
Thinking back on it, innovations in games are really far and few between, considering the limitless potential of the dynamic implications of what a video game really is. You need to give the player control over something, you need to introduce a 'game mechanic', and you need a reward system to push the player along. That aside, the means of game-play and the player's relationship to the game could be anything, absolutely anything, and the artistic implications have been largely ignored, save a few exceptions. Largely, arcade games such as Tetris paved the way for many like-minded games up to Bejeweled and its many incarnations. Asteroids largely paved the way for top-down shooters, and while art direction has improved, (See, Ikaruga) the art direction and game-play have absolutely no correlation with each other whatsoever other than giving the player something pretty to look at while he shoots things. Doom becomes Crysis, Mario Bros becomes Metal Slug, Populous becomes Civilization IV, and, well, you get the idea.
The problem is that the experience doesn't match the game-play, the game-play becomes a monotonous and familiar experience with little twists built in that make the experience seem fresh and new again, but this is simply a mask. The challenge of the game is lost, at least as far as challenging the mind to truly allow itself to be immersed into a new and vulnerable experience. Modern games can't do this because the formulas are too thick, the experiences too familiar. The problem lies in the developers not engaging their art-form, and therefore the audience has no hope of engaging the product to a meaningful degree.
Of course none of this surprises me, the video game market is far from broken and as long as people buy into what is currently available, progress for deeper innovations will remain slow. But, what if, just hear me out here, what if there was an insurgence of artistic games, a re-examining of the very fabric of an entertainment experience, a movement, if you will, to revitalize the game industry into something deeply profound, something that got along much better with the way the world is headed in... what if? Its not a dream, really, it's the natural progression of things, it's just a matter of time, a question of when.
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