ダニエルの冒険

We had some interesting talks last Thursday from a couple of guys. More after the jump.

The first was Gary, from the Gathering in town. He spoke about the variety of roles open to us in the industry, which seems to have sparked some thinking in a lot of people in the course. He also offered to provide our lecturer with a list of contacts in the games industry, and added “though I’m sure your university has a better list for you than I can come up with”. Everyone laughed at the remark. If he knew about the co-op experiences a lot of the class had he would have laughed too.

The second talk, by a Ph.D. student, John, was also interesting. He comes from an English-teaching background and doesn’t seem to have any technical experience at all. He made lots of points which might cause debate. He pointed out that he knew this about the points he was making, but I felt like many of the points were simply uninformed. The lack of experience in gaming and technology became obvious when he spoke about wanting to achieve things is games which were not technically possible with current technology (such as a natural language AI interface with NPCs).

He spoke of the “Kutaragi effect”, a term he used to describe designing software for future generation hardware. I think this is generally being done though. If you look at the likes of the Unreal and Crytek engines, each iteration is released into a market where very few consumer hardware can run them at first. Eventually hardware catches up to the game technology and it becomes playable fully-featured. I was interested when he spoke about plans to implement a game based on this observed “Kutaragi effect”. I think all but the very best games programmers would be hard-pushed to come up with an implementation which could be described as being more advanced than the supporting hardware.

Sorry if I sound very negative about the talk, but I felt frustrated when hearing comments about the end of console gaming and the end of first person shooters. I don’t think that the appeal of combat games is ever going to go away, no matter how much John dislikes the genre. It’s a fundamental element of human nature they appeal to and even the most culturally and biologically “advanced” humans are going to enjoy that gameplay.

And consoles are getting much more attention than PCs in the gaming world recently. Blizzard and Bethesda seem to be the only ones preferring it, and Blizzard’s the only one of those two that’s exclusively on PC. MMORPGs seem to be the only genres left as PC-exclusive. Large-scale RPGs such as Oblivion moved over to consoles about the same time as FPS games did. Emerging popularity of cloud computing was offered as an argument for the death of the console. First of all, cloud computing doesn’t exclude consoles. Even if a console is only a thin client to a server-hosted game, the enjoyment of playing your cloud game in the sitting room in front of the TV as opposed to at the computer desk in front of your 17″ monitor is going to keep consoles in some form. Secondly (and most importantly), infrastructure at the current level of technology (and I’m going to pick a random number and say for the next 15-20 years) isn’t going to support real-time interaction with a high enough quality to support a thin game client, unless you’re simply going to make it like Second Life where game data is downloaded displayed on a client which is far from thin. There have been numerous attempts at streaming game video which is being generated on a remote machine and none have been effective yet. I lived with a developer of software aiming to do just that and he explained many of the problems he was having, from the lack of an adequate codec, to lack of bandwidth, to lack of low-latency infrastructure.

A point I did agree with was the common storytelling elements used in many films and games. When John presented a summary of short story he had written, I immediately thought it was exactly the same as Sliders and very similar to Quantum Leap. That’s why it’s interesting that he brought up Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero With a Thousand Faces“. The book describes how many popular stories are based on the same few plot devices, Sliders and Quantum Leap included. I recommend checking out the wikipedia article and seeing how many movies you can apply it to. All my favourites, from The Matrix to Labyrinth, are covered.