To start with, I don't play online games. That doesn't deny me the right to imagine. I was just yawning & stretching myself when a thought struck me - perhaps the future of gaming is not in the players but in the game itself. What I mean is that today gaming is focussed so much on player skills which leads to rapid familiarity with the constraints & then inevitable boredom. What really is required is a means to modify the game by each players behaviour & creating character traits out of each player's choices & moves. Thus the game ends up creating constraints which are lifelike. Soon the game can partly continue purely on the strength of your "character" with choices made as you would have made them, making you live with your choices. So the game continues even when you are not playing because your character has your "character" & effectively "you" are living parallel lives. Of course, you can review the "day" of your character & make different moves/choices/decisions (within the constraints of your "character") but the game lives on, creating alternate worlds & alternate lives to what you live in. In the world you meet people not necessarily out of choice. It is like life, but manipulated by all the players' "characters" & some randomness. So, this is not Second Life. This is an environment which creates "life" for you & you get to live through it. Hence, the ask for the emphasis to shift from player prowess to game's intelligence & ability to create something like this.
Sounds like The Sims. You create characters that live in houses and interact with others, and it has semi AI - they learn and adapt and grow based on how you make them interact.
ReplyDeleteOr, it sounds like Pleo, the robot dinosaur (I've ordered one), which also learns and develops a personality based on how you interact with it.
When the player has zero personality, hope all doesn't collapse to a hang. Otherwise a nugget of a post. Gamers may be better advisors or responders :-) to the content of this post.
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