» Burritos and Weighted Vertices
Wednesday, April 30th, 2008
We went to La Hacienda today in celebration of Treinta de Abril, and enjoyed fine Mexican cuisine along with mariachi music. Our discussion was particularly interesting, as we covered such topics as the evolution of gaming hardware and the shortcomings of today’s popular operating systems (Vista).
It was our unanimous conclusion that the gaming industry should take a break, at least for a while, from focusing almost exclusively on pushing the graphics envelope. Instead, some effort should be devoted to AI development and storytelling aspects of gameplay, which haven’t seen real revolutionary changes in the last several years. Nintendo, above all with Wii, has proved that graphics alone do not sell consoles, and FPS fans alone do not buy them.
My idea was that the open source community (or an enterprising group of local developers…) should put together an extensible artificial intelligence library that could be “plugged in” to some of the already amazing graphics engines out there. By unifying a lot of people efforts on a project like that, it may open the way for a new wave of “independent gaming” culture, and get us out of the corporate rut we’re in… if only for the people who really value the art form as much as the simple gratification of video gaming. (Paradox?)
“No small task, that,” I hear you say. AI is immensely complicated and custom-tailored to each game you encounter. Behavioral science dictates, however, that the archetypes we encounter in the virtual reality are just as constant as those in true reality, and the experiment itself would be at least worth a shot for the sake of education.
Random folly from a non-game developer aside, we’re curious to hear what our 5 visitors think about the direction gaming should take in the not-too-distant future. Did Nintendo get it right going after a new demographic? Will variations on user input bring on the rise of an all new round of Pac-Man and Galaga-style games (zero depth of gameplay) with the gimmick of an accelerometer-packed magic wand to sate the hunger of pop-culture zombies? Will storytelling prevail over lens flares and 20-pass antialiasing of partical-based ambience effects? Think about it! Better yet, spout off about it in comments!