The Power of Gaming
A guest posting by Jude Gomila, co-founder of Heyzap
Up until the 1980s, TV, Film and magazines were the dominant forms of entertainment. The majority of content was passively consumed from screen to eye; people sat in front of media and took information into their brains in one direction. Games came along and changed everything. For the first time, consumers could actively change the outcome of the story line. They could change their viewpoint or camera angle in real-time and explore alternative plots. They could remove constraints from the content and take more control over what they were engaging in. The consumer had become the director.
But why did content evolve this way? Why did consumers want to affect the outcome of the content they were engaging with? Why were they not happy sitting back and having the content delivered to them on a plate?
Humans are naturally, very creative: they want to be able to control their own realities around them and live out their dreams. Interactive content is a way of achieving this. For most people though, the discovery of this creativity has not been unlocked. Gaming can lower the barrier to entry to creativity by way of making it cheaper to access a metaphorical canvas of some sort. With gaming, people are always craving experiences that are more accessible, fun and realistic. For that reason, the gaming industry is always changing, innovating to create new expectations.
Given the fundamental desire of humans to experience the most exciting things in life, we are moving to a model where physical experiences are being packaged up and mass distributed as virtual experiences.
The first consumer video games started out life on home computers. Given this initial distribution channel, it’s no surprise that the first video games were going to be made by and designed for nerds. But as the distribution channel changed from home-brew computers to consoles, then to Facebook and mobile, a new type of gamer started to appear. The parents of the new generation had been brought up with games. The broad demographic of the new distribution channels such as Facebook and mobile threw games in front of hundreds of millions of mass-market consumers, the majority of whom weren’t traditional gamers. Mobile made it something you did on-the-go, a time-killer rather than a hobby. Gaming became mainstream.
The accessibility and social functionality of Facebook made gaming much more attractive to users who, up until that point, had thought games were only for teenage kids. What was once considered an activity that parents frowned upon became an accepted family activity. By taking a player’s social interactions and using elements of them within a game, another layer of realism can be added. Draw Something is a great example of a game that integrates social interactions while making the user feel close to their friends while playing.
Games have never simulated real-life desires more effectively than today. The dream 100-acre plot of rich green forest has been replicated with Farmville, the excitement of firing a bazooka and controlling a predator drone embodied in Call of Duty. The barriers-to-entry to diverse life experiences have been lowered by gaming. Consumers can now fly a virtual jet fighter, build virtual cities, design the most intricate structures, explore space and express competitiveness on a global scale, all for the price of a $1 mobile game.
The boundary between games and reality is becoming blurry but there are significant barriers to overcome on the technological side to bring the two fields into unison. I see gaming as a version of reality with infinite possibilities which is currently limited by technological constraints. First up, games are limited to being fairly 2D right now. As with film, the transition to 3D has not been an easy one but one expects that just as it took years to convert the film industry across from black and white to color, it will take longer to convert from 2D to 3D.
Missing experiential senses are also a constraint on games becoming the new reality. Smell, taste and touch are required to really allow the experience of a game to merge with reality. Given the current status of sensory experience in the film industry, I don’t expect to see additional senses become a standard in gaming any time soon.
The third major constraint on gaming is interaction. Wii and Kinect have made great progress on how we interact with games; the touch and swipe of mobile games are also natural motions. Interactions with games will become more physics based and the sense of being immersed with your gaming environment will deepen.
So to summarize, gaming:
- Provides a method of fulfilling human desire
- Lowers the barrier to entry to experiences
- Allows humans to exert extended control over their environment and experiences
- Allows experiences at the edges of real-life, deep-seated desires (e.g., making something grow, explode or travel fast)
- The future of gaming is ever more exciting. We've flirted with new capabilities, but have yet to grasp truly immersive experiences - meaning there's still healthy opportunity in the market.
We should work backwards from reality when thinking and designing games of the future. Imagine real life but start removing certain constraints. Take gravity away, for example, I can jump into the sky! Fun, right? A game in its ideal form, is the ability to dream consciously.
Archimedes wanted a lever long enough to move the world. Games are that lever.
You can find out more about what Jude is building at www.heyzap.com, his personal blog at www.judegomila.com and follow him @judegomila
