What is the Future of Gaming?

[zzip]

5 hours ago, Razzie.P said:

Those Power Glove 2.0 things look like they should be fun, but in that "you're a kid and you see something with a lot of buttons and you have no idea what they do but you just know there's some sort of awesomeness there" kind of way.  Reminds me of this toy I had as a kid --

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And if y'all don't see the fun in a jet powered hover mouse with a mounted scope and a spoiler, then you're already dead inside, so just carry on with the "being miserable and simply existing" thing.   😁

Never had one of these, but always wanted one,  probably because of all the buttons

 

[MrTrust]

6 minutes ago, zzip said:

Yes all this has been the trend.      But no trend lasts forever.  Counter-trends spring up and things do change.   When I was young smoking cigarettes was ubiquitous, everyone was worried about teen sex and pregnancy, there was no reason to assume that would ever change, yet here we are.  Relatively few people smoke cigarettes, people aren't having enough sex.  That's a complete reversal in my lifetime.   So there's no reason to assume current trends can't be reversed, especially since everyone seems increasingly unhappy about them.   Even addicts hit rock bottom.

 

People stopped smoking cigarettes because local and state governments made it almost de facto illegal.  They taxed the shit out of cigarettes, they prohibited them basically anywhere that can be effectively policed, and they spent millions upon millions of dollars on pressure campaigns to keep them out of the mouths of cool movie characters, etc.  People didn't just spontaneously decide they didn't want to smoke anymore; it's been a slow-rolling suppression and bullying campaign organized from the top down.  Now, there is a concerted effort being made to ban tobacco all together, and it's going to work.

 

Marijuana use, on the other hand, is going through the roof and people are using it more across the board.  Here in my state, the governor came within a hair's breadth of banning all flavored tobacco including menthol cigarettes.  Meanwhile, kids are accidentally eating massive doses of THC because they're mistaking weed cookies and gummy bears for normal kid snacks.  That's not being banned; that's being encouraged, because the people in power want you to smoke weed and they don't want you to smoke tobacco.  The trends are what the people in charge want the trends to be.  They don't just change spontaneously. 

 

We don't have a ruling elite that wants people doing things together in meat space.  They want everything to be online where it can be effectively monitored and managed and influenced with algorithms.

 

25 minutes ago, zzip said:

Even if that doesn't happen,  the future of the world belongs to those who have kids

 

The infertile don't need to have kids of their own; they have yours.  They reproduce themselves by brain draining the global hinterlands and funneling all the smart people through their universities, their internships, their HR departments, etc.  I don't know how many young people you're around these days, but I have to get an earful of them on the daily, and they've all been to college and they all have the same views about everything, the same ambitions of extended adolescence into their dotage.

There simply is not any incentive for the ruling class to do otherwise.  People with no kids make much more pliant workers.  They can afford to live on lower wages.  They have fewer demands on their time.  They have no outside loyalties that are more powerful.  They make the best consumers ever.  35, male, no kids, no girlfriend, 1-bedroom apartment?  Well, you can afford all the Funko figurines, loot boxes, and Halo-themed Mountain Dew that you want, can't you?  Why save anything?  Just report to workstation and then consume product.  Repeat until dead.  Depressing?  Have you tried the new Baha Berry weed lollipops?  Maybe some SSRIs?  Loneliness and despair are just subjective mental experiences; once we destigmatize them and treat the sensations with drugs, problem solved.

 

41 minutes ago, zzip said:

...so the future of the world will belong to those who can best resist it.

 

The future of the world will belong to those who weather the collapse the best.  When all the high-functioning Boomers and Xers die in this country, and we're being ruled over by Millennial Maddison and Zoomer Skylar, when we have President Makayla and Generals Jaden, Aiden, and Caden running the armed forces, the collapse will happen.  Intermittent blackouts.  Streaming doesn't work.  Food less plentiful.  Alcohol in shorter supply.  Creature comforts rolled back.  Then, maybe then there will be room for a real revival of folk forms and video games can be folded into that.

[zzip]

6 minutes ago, MrTrust said:

People stopped smoking cigarettes because local and state governments made it almost de facto illegal.  They taxed the shit out of cigarettes, they prohibited them basically anywhere that can be effectively policed, and they spent millions upon millions of dollars on pressure campaigns to keep them out of the mouths of cool movie characters, etc.  People didn't just spontaneously decide they didn't want to smoke anymore; it's been a slow-rolling suppression and bullying campaign organized from the top down.  Now, there is a concerted effort being made to ban tobacco all together, and it's going to work.

 

Marijuana use, on the other hand, is going through the roof and people are using it more across the board.  Here in my state, the governor came within a hair's breadth of banning all flavored tobacco including menthol cigarettes.  Meanwhile, kids are accidentally eating massive doses of THC because they're mistaking weed cookies and gummy bears for normal kid snacks.  That's not being banned; that's being encouraged, because the people in power want you to smoke weed and they don't want you to smoke tobacco.  The trends are what the people in charge want the trends to be.  They don't just change spontaneously. 

 

We don't have a ruling elite that wants people doing things together in meat space.  They want everything to be online where it can be effectively monitored and managed and influenced with algorithms.

The ruling elite changes over time too though.   Previous elites got everyone addicted to tobacco or opium in china.  Current elite made lots of money from big tech, and big tech has a lot of influence.   But just as an example of how things change the term "Big Tech" itself is a term of derision like "Big Tobacco" was, and it didn't really exist before 2018/2019 or so according to Google Trends.   Before that people generally had a much more positive view of tech companies.

 

17 minutes ago, MrTrust said:

The infertile don't need to have kids of their own; they have yours.  They reproduce themselves by brain draining the global hinterlands and funneling all the smart people through their universities, their internships, their HR departments, etc.  I don't know how many young people you're around these days, but I have to get an earful of them on the daily, and they've all been to college and they all have the same views about everything, the same ambitions of extended adolescence into their dotage.

Views change as you grow older and are confronted with harsh reality.   The views of other Gen-Xers I know today are nothing like the views we had when we were in college.   The younger people today are going to inherit a much harsher world than the one the Baby Boomers inhabited, so their ideals of being eternal adolescence are likely to hit a hard wall of reality.

 

37 minutes ago, MrTrust said:

The future of the world will belong to those who weather the collapse the best.  When all the high-functioning Boomers and Xers die in this country, and we're being ruled over by Millennial Maddison and Zoomer Skylar, when we have President Makayla and Generals Jaden, Aiden, and Caden running the armed forces, the collapse will happen.  Intermittent blackouts.  Streaming doesn't work.  Food less plentiful.  Alcohol in shorter supply.  Creature comforts rolled back.  Then, maybe then there will be room for a real revival of folk forms and video games can be folded into that.

Well that's kind of the same thing I'm saying.   I don't see how the current state of affairs can sustain itself and something is going to give.   As the saying goes "hard men create good times, good times creates weak men, weak men create bad times, bad times creates strong men".   If the Millenials/Zoomers start to inhabit such a world, they are going to have to toughen up real fast.

[Creamhoven]

22 hours ago, MrTrust said:

 

Because we're sedentary, fat, and anxious.  That's what being addicted means.  Heroin addicts know the dope is killing them; but they ain't going to stop.

 

 

In order to do the stuff you're talking about, you have to have IRL friends and people increasingly do not have those.  Look at the data; people have fewer close friends and fewer friends overall, they spend less time with extended family, they're not getting married, they're not having kids, they're not even having sex.   Restaurants are doing sometimes half their sales on delivery apps and cutting their hours of operation because people just don't leave their houses.  Go to a bar and shoot pool?  What bar?  They're closing left and right.  That business is never going back to pre-2020 levels.  

 

 

Correct, and I'm not convinced that this is possible for gaming because it's the only medium of the ones you reference that requires input from the audience.  This is always the problem.

 

 

There were many experiments to this effect in through the early 90s.  Kojima would be a late example.  The problem is that as technical advancements make artistic visions more realizable, publishing has become more democratized.  No longer do indie arthouse types have to get a job with an actual game company and learn their actual craft.  They can put whatever juvenalia out they come up with and get it funded through Kickstarter or put it up on Steam for $5.  There is no mechanism to refine the artist himself.

 

 

Correct.

You are correct as well.

 

13 hours ago, roots.genoa said:

I can enjoy some classical music but I prefer 1000 times recent stuff.

 

2 hours ago, zzip said:

Pop music.   The stuff that charts.    I can still find lots of good music being made, but almost none of it charts.   Pop music is more about marketing than art, and has been in a long race to the bottom.

It is deeply saddening.

[Albert]

Did I just step into the crazy conspiracy thread?

 

  ..Al

[CapitanClassic]

It isn’t a conspiracy if they are telling you what they are doing out ion the open, nor if they are the ones in power. (Definitionally speaking) 

 

Back to the topic at hand. I highly doubt that the interface between humans and video games will change much in the near future. Instead, it is much more likely that the market will fracture into much more niche genres with smaller teams and upfront costs. These AAA titles cannot keep funding these huge budgets and expect to not go bankrupt.

 

I expect more integration from ChatGPT (NPC conversation) and DeepAI (world/Art/Asset development) and other AI programs in the development and the running of online games.

[+bent_pin]

17 minutes ago, Albert said:

Did I just step into the crazy conspiracy thread?

There's just one crazy conspiracy thread?

[Creamhoven]

13 minutes ago, CapitanClassic said:

It isn’t a conspiracy if they are telling you what they are doing out ion the open, nor if they are the ones in power. (Definitionally speaking)

What if they openly tell you that it is a conspiracy?

 

[Creamhoven]

Also, please no conspiratoral type of thinking.

[MrTrust]

2 minutes ago, CapitanClassic said:

Back to the topic at hand. I highly doubt that the interface between humans and video games will change much in the near future.

 

Agreed.  I know humans are getting phased out of the automotive world, but is the interface of your car fundamentally different than the interface of your grandma's car?  Or your great grandma's for that matter?  There's such a thing as Good Enough, and the market tends to incline toward it.

 

6 minutes ago, CapitanClassic said:

Instead, it is much more likely that the market will fracture into much more niche genres with smaller teams and upfront costs. These AAA titles cannot keep funding these huge budgets and expect to not go bankrupt.

 

Also agreed.  It appears that this is already happening.  There's the fiscal problem you mentioned, and there's also just the breakdown of common culture.  Everyone doesn't watch the one TV in the house; they watch their individual screens with their individually "curated content" that caters to their particular interests.

 

Also, I think we're going to find that people get ossified in their game tastes relatively early.  I still play a lot of the same stuff I was playing in the 90s.  There seems to be a lot of new games catered in that direction as people my age move into management positions in these companies.  When the generation that had Playstation 1 or 2 as their formative machine, there will probably be another stream of "revival" games that just become a more permanent thing.  That 40k Boltgun game shows it might be starting to take place now.

 

33 minutes ago, Albert said:

Did I just step into the crazy conspiracy thread?

 

If it's a "conspiracy" to say that power exists, and it does things that shape or straight-up override the popular will, then I guess.  It's not crazy to observe patterns, though.  When I was really young in the 90s, being against smoking was kind of a nagging schoolmarm thing.  Being a nagging pain in the ass is a low social status position.  It wasn't until the end of that decade, when there was a full court press to ban it in bars, raise the legal age, even have judges consider it in custody disputes, that all of a sudden there was this mass popular sentiment that it was nasty because it had become a high-status position.

 

That's not to say that it isn't nasty, only that people's sentiment is determined by what's true, but by what is socially acceptable.  What's socially acceptable is determined by people in positions of authority; it's not a ground-up phenomenon

[MrBeefy]

I thought the future of gaming is a little footbath console? I heard someone has the data to suggest it is.

[Creamhoven]

[Albert]

37 minutes ago, bent_pin said:

There's just one crazy conspiracy thread?

Good point.

 

 ..Al

[Albert]

35 minutes ago, Creamhoven said:

What if they openly tell you that it is a conspiracy?

 

That's an amusing title to reference considering I worked on it.

 

 ..Al

[Creamhoven]

I have never understood why people would do such a thing. Coming together, working in secret togethes, not telling anyone... seems kind of  cumbersome.

[Creamhoven]

2 minutes ago, Albert said:

That's an amusing title to reference considering I worked on it.

 

 ..Al

On the conspiracy?

[Albert]

3 minutes ago, Creamhoven said:

On the conspiracy?

The game.

 

 ..Al

[Creamhoven]

3 minutes ago, Albert said:

The game.

 

 ..Al

 

[+bent_pin]

3 minutes ago, Albert said:

6 minutes ago, Creamhoven said:

On the conspiracy?

The game.

See, I would have gone the other way. 

"Yes, I worked on the conspiracy and I'm living in your walls."

[Creamhoven]

Maybe the future of gaming is that the game will end?

[Tanooki]

@Creamhoven Well the last time I did something off phone was outside of testing Gauntlet on NES up beyond the second treasure room yesterday was to do a Konami run on Monday on the NES, all I have not touched in years so I had to remember things I forgot with Double Dribble, Blades of Steel, and then what was to be lazy turned out to clearing TMNT 2 (10 lives code because time...)  Also been working on disc 3 into now most of disc 4 of Street Fighter II Victory (4 dvd) set anime series.

 

All are far less involving and easier to pick up and do than straight up sit for 2-3+ hours making slow progress in what is a great game.

 

I even with that Gauntlet game found a DOCs Fix it Kit Plus and always was curious about it so last night for an hour or so put it to the test trying to clean it up a bit with the set.  There was a set of tools for nes, gb, gg, snes, genesis.  I went through cleaning all but the game boy(forgot) but what got me was the NES.  I have no idea what strange material these third party kits use, its' like this not rough but not smooth either plastic wrapped over the plastic wand it's glued to and they hvae this ethyl alcohol mix(it's still there, wasn't sure safe, used 91% isopropyl instead) and I was shocked how much black crap came off not to much the action set I pulled out recently, but the top loader, so so much even came off on the cartridge door flap which I had to use more alcohol to clean off.  I never had an issue with the top loader, but nasty.

 

That's really about it other than doing an all day drive just because on saturday.

 

 

And yes they should dial back the hollywood mentality BS and the coining the crap out of people level of sleaze and make more worthwhile projects that are more profitable than rolling the dice in a nasty game of craps, because usually...crap is what ends up getting shoveled out.

[GoldLeader]

The Future of gaming is the Past.

 

Someday everyone will wake up and see that games were Fun in the Past,  unlike most modern games.

[GoldLeader]

1 hour ago, Creamhoven said:

Maybe the future of gaming is that the game will end?

 

I wondered where he was from!   Check it out, he lives in Capital City!  I think I saw that place on The Simpsons.

[Creamhoven]

12 minutes ago, Tanooki said:

@Creamhoven Well the last time I did something off phone was outside of testing Gauntlet on NES up beyond the second treasure room yesterday was to do a Konami run on Monday on the NES, all I have not touched in years so I had to remember things I forgot with Double Dribble, Blades of Steel, and then what was to be lazy turned out to clearing TMNT 2 (10 lives code because time...)  Also been working on disc 3 into now most of disc 4 of Street Fighter II Victory (4 dvd) set anime series.

Havent seen the anime but those a quality picks.

12 minutes ago, Tanooki said:

All are far less involving and easier to pick up and do than straight up sit for 2-3+ hours making slow progress in what is a great game.

Yes, I can't do it. Cant sink that much time into it/dont have the patience.

12 minutes ago, Tanooki said:

I even with that Gauntlet game found a DOCs Fix it Kit Plus and always was curious about it so last night for an hour or so put it to the test trying to clean it up a bit with the set.  There was a set of tools for nes, gb, gg, snes, genesis.  I went through cleaning all but the game boy(forgot) but what got me was the NES.  I have no idea what strange material these third party kits use, its' like this not rough but not smooth either plastic wrapped over the plastic wand it's glued to and they hvae this ethyl alcohol mix(it's still there, wasn't sure safe, used 91% isopropyl instead) and I was shocked how much black crap came off not to much the action set I pulled out recently, but the top loader, so so much even came off on the cartridge door flap which I had to use more alcohol to clean off.  I never had an issue with the top loader, but nasty.

Isopropyl I use as well

12 minutes ago, Tanooki said:

That's really about it other than doing an all day drive just because on saturday.

 

 

And yes they should dial back the hollywood mentality BS and the coining the crap out of people level of sleaze and make more worthwhile projects that are more profitable than rolling the dice in a nasty game of craps, because usually...crap is what ends up getting shoveled out.

Yes. I think it is a hollywood conspiracy. They want to replace all quality people of the industry with people of handicap. Then the whole thing collapses and the next thing is... Profit! (I'm guessing)

[Creamhoven]

3 minutes ago, GoldLeader said:

 

I wondered where he was from!   Check it out, he lives in Capital City!  I think I saw that place on The Simpsons.

Does anyone know what is printed above 11 sep/sep 01?