Miraculous to Commonplace is 3.6 Seconds

So I got up this morning, turned the computer on, only to have it hang shortly after the bios self-test. This was the point my wife pointed out, matter of factly, that it had done the same to her that morning.

I love that about non-geeks. It’s a problem, and we’ll obviously be able to fix it, you know, no big deal.

So after rebooting a few times and getting the same result, I cursed at the machine. Luckily, I had an inkling, went into the bios, reset everything to default and *poof* everything was working again.

The whole thing made me think though. In front of me I have a machine that was pure science fiction not too long ago. Because of a minor fault, a couple of bits getting switched and a minor inconvenience, I decided it was a piece of shit, good for nothing pile of trash. Like Dark Helmet said “Even in the future nothing works!”

I’m using an incredibly sophisticated, complicated machine…and I expect it to work like magic every time I press the on button.

What struck me most about this is how soon the miraculous becomes commonplace. As a race, we get used to things really easily. When something we only dreamt about when we were kids actually makes it into production, we get bored and take it for granted in a very short time span.

For example, I remember growing up and watching episodes of ‘Star Trek’. I remember thinking how cool it would be when we could actually see the person we’re talking to as we’re talking to them. Today, I can do that on Skype with a couple of mouse clicks…and it doesn’t seem nearly as amazing as I thought it would.

Slightly more recently, I remember reading an article on Digital TV. This was back when the norm for TV was an antenna on the roof, and just four channels. They mentioned how you’d be able to get hundreds of channels, and watch live sporting events and be able to choose your own camera angle. For me, someone who has always been deeply into technology, they might as well have been talking about hover-boards or Trek-style transporters. I couldn’t wait.

Then, of course, digital became the norm and what happens? We bitch about not getting every channel in HD, or occasional outages.

If you really look at this, you can see the pattern. Every day we get closer to sci-fi level technology, then we complain that it doesn’t work exactly right, all the time.

If we jump into out trusty way-back machine, and go back twenty years, we’ll see just how far we’ve come.

It’s 1987. My computer is an Acorn Electron, it has a whole 1k of memory and a 1.5 mhz processor. If you wanted software for it, you’re most likely to copy out the BASIC program from a magazine. If you’re lucky, you have a tape-deck to save it on. The internet is just a pipe-dream. If you want to talk or write to someone overseas, you either make an uber-expensive phonecall, or write an actual letter and wait around 2 weeks for a reply. Flat screen TV’s are years away and VCR’s are the height of home entertainment technology. You can also forget surround sound. If you want to listen to music, you either pull out a vinyl album or listen to a cassette. You can forget about iPods, a big, chunky walkman is the best you’re going to get. If you want to drive somewhere and don’t know the way, you pull out a map and look for roadsigns, you can forget that voice-activated in-car navigation system, only James Bond has one of those.

See what I mean?

Today we have computers that made the supercomputers of the time look like pocket calculators. Making a CD is trivial and VCR’s are now officially obsolete technology. Do we feel like we’re living in a technological paradise? No, because the battery life on an iPod sucks, and that PSP has a dead pixel on the screen.

Maybe at the grand old age of 26, I’m just getting old. I remember in the late 90’s a cousin of mine coming over to my house to use the internet to do a report for school. I sat him down in front of the computer, showed him how to use Google, and his response was:

“You mean I have to go through all these links by hand?”

Yep, the idea of actually having to click the links, read through some pages to find what he needed and press ‘print’ was way to much trouble.

That’s funny, when I was in his grade at school, I had to walk to the library, look through a card catalogue, find a book and actually read it and write it out on paper with an actual pen. Hyper-linked text, a search function and a way to copy the parts I needed without having to write would have been awesome.

The same was true of my dear old mother. She signed up for internet banking, and because we where on dial-up (broadband wasn’t around until a year or two later, unless you wanted to pay about $400 a month for the connection), it was running a little slow because she decided to do her banking during peak hours. (That was also back when if you went on the internet during peak hours, there was a very noticeable slowdown as all the bandwidth got sucked up).

Anyway, she complained and called internet banking ‘worthless’ because she was having to wait a couple minutes for each page to load.

Given that the alternative was to wait until the next day when the banks re-opened, get in the car, drive into town, pay for parking, walk to the bank, wait in line and talk to a teller…surely waiting 45 seconds for a page to load was a huge convenience.

Not to my mother.

The problem is, as a species, we can get used to pretty much anything, and as soon as we’re handed a new technology, it very quickly becomes commonplace and taken for granted. What’s worse is when we have these technological marvels in our grubby mitts, we expect them to work flawlessly all the time.

Basically, when we should just be amazed that we can have a video conference with someone anywhere else in the world, using a laptop and a broadband wireless connection…we complain because the wireless card we got from our broadband provider doesn’t have very good signal strength in some areas. You can take a picture, instantly see what it looks like on the camera’s LCD screen, then look at and edit it on your computer’s screen and print it yourself. Back in the day you’d have had to take the film to a drugstore, pay a few dollars, wait a few days and get what you were given…but the battery life on the camera sucks, and the printer is so slow.

The other big point is that it’s not exactly as if things advance so slowly, we never see a big change in a short period of time. My first ‘real’ PC back in 1995 was a Pentium 75, with 8mb of memory and a 510 gigabye hard drive. Considering my PC now is purely middle off the road, yet has 128 times more memory, a processor that runs 28 times faster and a whopping 313 times more storage space. That’s one hell of a leap forward for just over ten years.

If we assume that computers are going to continue improving at the same rate, in another ten years, a mid-range­ computer will have a 56ghz processor, 131 gigabytes of memory and over 50,000 gigabyte hard drives. And you know what? We’ll complain about it being too slow to run the latest games.

So, looking to the future, we can pretty much guarantee that our great, great, great grandchildren will be bitching that their flying car doesn’t get good enough mileage, that the transport to the Mars colony was late again and that their personal holodeck causes glitches in far off scenery if you move too quickly.

A Little Heart

In the past I’ve written how eventually graphics will become so realistic that we’ll have to look for other areas of gaming to ‘improve’ to keep our interest.

In my last post on this topic, I suggested Artificial Intelligence was the way forward. Today I’ll discuss another very important element, namely story.

Unfortunately, a lot of the time, the story behind a video game isn’t really story at all. It’s more a brief paragraph-worth of back story to explain and justify what the player has to do in the game.

Doom, for example, had the makings of a good story. Scientists on Mars experiment in teleportation technology, then accidentally open a portal to hell and all manner of demons break loose.

Unfortunately, that was the start and end of it. Fair enough, this wasn’t a Role-Playing game, but all your character did was run around a series of environments and shoot at demons.

So Doom’s story is essentially “Demons are bad and they need killing. Here’s a gun and the demons are over there.”

Hardly compelling stuff. Half-Life had essentially the same story (just swap demons for aliens), but it was far more interesting.

When we look at the more popular games of the past few years, we see that a lot of them had deep, involving storylines. The name of the game is getting the player emotionally invested in the story, make them care what happens to the characters, and like a good book, keep the player playing because he can’t wait to see what happens next.

Let’s look at ‘Fable’.

I see Fable as more of a prototype than an actual game in that it features many ideas and concepts that, while original, weren’t truly realized. The idea that your character’s appearance changes based on your actions, the fact you age and the fact you can get married are all incredibly compelling.

However, if we look at marriage in Fable, it’s a very simple affair and has no real impact on gameplay. You find a female (or male depending on your sexual preferences) and depending on how famous you are and how well you treat your prospective spouse, you can propose marriage.

If you get married, you get a cut scene. That’s it.

Let’s take this a step further. Let’s say you’re playing an RPG and can not only get married, but can have children, and actually have a family.

Now wouldn’t that add an extra layer of depth to gameplay? In an RPG, you find your family’s home is too close to a dangerous area and is at risk of being attacked, so you rush home to move them somewhere safer. You hear the town where your family lives has fallen under attack and rush home to find if they’re safe. Your son or daughter grows up and asks if he can come with you on your next adventure, do you let them?

It’s personal involvement. It’s far easier to care about a story where you’re made to care about people and what happens to them…rather than the usual faceless villain attacking yet another generic group of villagers/colonists/downtrodden peoples.

Unfortunately, this is where ‘game-predjudice’ stops us in our tracks. Who wants to have a fake ‘relationship’ in a game? How can you actually care about what happens to a video-game character? That’s just sad! Turn of the computer and get a real life!

Well, to cast this in its proper light, you could say the same thing about any book you’ve ever read, or any movie you’ve ever seen. Who cares if Harry Potter escapes Voldemort? Who cares if Frodo manages to cast the One Ring into the fires of Mount Doom? Who cares if Peter Parker gets Mary Jane?

Basically, we have no problems getting emotionally invested in a movie or a book, despite the fact we’re observing fictional characters.

We can quite happily stand up and cheer when a guy with a red cape and his underpants on the outside steps out of the plane he just saved, into a crowded baseball stadium filled with cheering people…but feel anything when the character who’s been your mentor for 12 hours of gameplay gets killed or betrays you? That’s just silly.

The big point here is that if we don’t care for the characters, we don’t care about the story. If we don’t care if the guy gets the girl, or if the villain is vanquished, why are we bothering taking the story in at all?

When we look at it like that, the only real difference is that videogames are interactive and allow the player to make choices on how the story goes. In fact, it could be said it’s much more easy and natural to become emotionally invested in what happens to video game characters because we have an active input in the story. When a character dies in a movie, there’s nothing we can do about it. In a game, it’s up to us to avenge their death, or wonder if they still would have died had we done something different. Of course, I’m not talking about “Space Invaders” here. I’m not saying you should feel anything when one of your favorite units in Command and Conquer gets destroyed…but a well written, well acted character? Why not?

Returning to ‘Fable’ lets me illustrate this point. [Spoiler Warning]

Near the end of the game, you defeat ‘Jack of Blades’ and your sister tells you that you have a choice. Kill her with the magical sword you’ve taken from the bad guy and absorb its almost unlimited power, or cast it into a vortex where it will be lost forever, where its evil can never threaten the world again.

Now from a pure gameplay standpoint, the choice is simple. Kill your sister and keep the sword. She’s not really your sister, she’s just a game character after all…and having the sword will make the rest of the game much easier. It’s a power-up, plain and simple.

However, like with a good movie, if you suspend disbelief and get into the character, it becomes a much more difficult choice.

I’d played the game as a ‘good’ character. I decided to make him a classic moral hero.

If you think about what the sister character had gone through (Kidnapped as a child from her home, had her eyes cut out by her kidnapper and left for dead in the woods), what would make a better ending to the story for me? Would my character throw away his morality, slay his sister and rule like a tyrant? Or give up his chance at ultimate power for the sake of what little is left of his family?

I threw the sword into the vortex, and I felt good about it. Yeah, I threw away a valuable in game item for the sake of a video game character…but it felt good.

In conclusion, there’s nothing wrong with games having a little heart.

Notice how in Star Wars : Episode 3, Emperor Palpatine seemed much more evil because you saw how he destroyed Anakin’s family? How he used people like puppets? How he took Anakin’s love for Padme and poisoned and twisted it to turn Anakin into Darth Vader? It made it personal and gave the movie some heart.

This is what games need.

The player needs to be given personal involvement. It’s much more satisfying and engaging when you’re fighting an enemy who has personally wronged you or someone you care about, rather than some faceless ‘uber-villain’ who destroyed a planet with a big laser.

In Fable, you defeat ‘Jack of Blades’, because he killed your father, kidnapped and tortured your mother and cut out your sister’s eyes and left her for dead. In Doom, you defeat the big demon at the end because, well, ya know, he’s a demon… and everyone knows demons are evil. Come on…look at his horns, and he’s breathing fire!

Gaming... 2027 style.

Predictions about the future of any technology are difficult to make. Bill Gate’s statement that “256k of memory is all anyone will ever need”, or Ken Olsen’s “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home” shows what a fools errand it can be.

However, there’s nothing wrong with a little conjecture, so today’s question is “Where will gaming be in 20 years?”

Of course, graphics will get an awful lot better as graphics hardware improves, but what about the game themselves? What will be the next big step? So hardware aside (such as VR Headsets, holographic displays etc), what will we be playing in 20 years?

Personally, I think the biggest step forward will be in artificial intelligence.

Half Life was a major step forward in gaming AI. for the first time, rather than just stand still and shoot, enemy characters would work together as a team, support and warn each other, and perform tactical maneuvers such as flushing you from behind cover with grenades.

The most recent major step forward was with Oblivion. What Bethesda created was a living breathing world, a world where the NPC’s (Non-player characters) would interact with each other without interference from the player.

Basically each NPC was given a set of ‘personality traits’ that governed how they act, as well as a series of wants and needs. For example, a hungry character might go and buy food, or depending on their morality rating, just steal it. If they chose to steal and got caught, the character they stole from would decide whether to run screaming for guards, or attack and kill the thief themselves.

The point is, none of that is actually scripted. Different personalities interact, and not even the programmers can predict what the outcome will be.

There are hundreds of Oblivion AI stories, but here’s one of my favorites:

During testing, the programmers discovered that on a certain quest, one of the NPC’s you needed to talk to, a ‘skooma’ dealer, (Skooma is an in-game drug) was always dead by the time the player reached him.

Doing a little investigating, they discovered that many of the town citizens where getting hooked on skooma and selling everything they had to support their habit. Eventually they ran out of money and killed the dealer in an attempt to get their ‘fix’. Again, none of this was scripted.

In the future, I see this idea becoming a lot more advanced, with game world populated by thousands of artificially intelligent characters, with randomly generated personalities. In other words, you become a single entity in a world of thousands, rather than a character on a linear, scripted quest.

This opens a lot of gaming possibilities.

Let’s say it’s 2027, and we’re playing the latest in the Elder Scrolls series.

You’re walking through a forest, when suddenly you’re confronted by a small group of bandits. However, rather than being faced with a scripted conversation, where the bandit’s says a pre-scripted speech and you pick your responses from a list, the character talks to you by a sophisticated speech-generation program with the NPC’s conversation being generated ‘on the fly’ based on the character’s ‘personality’.

You respond through your microphone, where speech recognition technology listens to what you say, and translates it to the NPC.

Now you have endless possibilities. You could attempt to convince the bandit you’re actually a powerful mage and get him to back off, or convince him you’re the ‘bait’ in a trap, and there are actually 10 hunters hidden in the trees ready to release a storm of arrows in their direction at your signal (unless they all lie down on the ground and let you take their weapons that is.)

It gives the player total freedom. For example, in Oblivion, there is a quest where you have to visit each town and convince each ruler to send aid to Bruma (a town under siege). In the game you convince them to do this by completing a number of “fetch” quests…but with a sophisticated enough AI system, you could simply try and talk them into it, threaten, or complete a quest for them…but rather than being scripted, again, it would be generated ‘on the fly’.

There could also be the option of simply visiting a bunch of taverns, buying everyone drinks and getting them fired up enough to help you defeat your enemies.

This would also give games unlimited replay value. You could be given an overall objective, but how you achieve it would be left entirely up to you.

So, picture this. You’re playing the latest Role Playing Game. You’re given a huge world. There are politics, opposing factions, feuds and alliances. Characters are pre-set into groups, but just like in real life, these characters can be convinced, bribed, threatened or seduced. Personalities range from the fiercely loyal, to the disgruntled ‘only here because they need the money’ characters.

You can pick a side or remain neutral. Then you do whatever you like. Ask the local guard for a job and work your way up the ranks, offer your services as a spy (while also being a double agent), find a group of like minded individuals and burn down buildings of enemies of your choice.

You can choose to get your hands dirty and do things yourself, or convince, threaten or pay people to do them for you.

So, your game experience could go like this:

You’re new to the game, and walk into a local tavern and overhear someone complaining loudly that a local corrupt city guard keeps shaking them down. So you walk over and tell them to meet you somewhere later. Then, depending on your demeanor and the NPC’s personality, the NPC decides whether to meet you or not.

If they do, you offer to ‘remove’ that pesky city guard for a small fee. (Then, depending on the NPC’s morality rating, they either agree, suggest something less drastic, or are horrified and run screaming). But, let’s assume they take you up on it.

You take out the guard and collect your money. Over time, doing similar ‘jobs’, you gain a reputation as an assassin and start to make lots of cash. Then, you hire talented people to work for you. Before you know it, you’re in control of a large network of shadowy assassins, people fear you, but you also show a legitimate likeable face to the public at large.

Then, you either offer your services to the people in power, or take them out. Of course, unlike in today’s games where taking out the head of the opposing army is just an objective, in this game, you have to worry about who will take their place, or if the instability caused by the sudden removal of a world leader would be detrimental to your ‘interests’ in that area.

Of course, then you also have to worry about spies in your ranks, or an ambitious second-in-command trying to take over. Do you try to keep your employees happy? Control them through fear? Kill one out of hand as an example to the others? Or try create a situation where having you in power is preferable to removing you?

The beauty, and the “Holy Grail” of this type of gaming is the total freedom it offers. Join a local guild and become a sword for hire, join the army and work your way up the ranks, start blacksmithing and make a tidy profit selling arms, amass large amounts of wealth through fair means or foul and become a puppet-master, manipulating the world from behind closed doors…or get a job serving drinks at a bar. It’s up to you.

You could play this type of game on as big or small scale as you like. Become a major player in the local mercantile arena, or become a major player on the world stage.

“Sandbox” games are becoming more popular, the only thing holding them back is that they, at present, can only offer the illusion of freedom. Sufficiently sophisticated AI would allow the player true freedom. A game world where you’re free to choose your own path.

Of course, right now, this sounds hopelessly far-fetched and unlikely. But considering we got from ‘Pong’ to ‘Oblivion’ in 25 years, is gaming advancing to this level in another 20 years time really that unlikely?